Odelm
The velishra sat across his lap like a body he’d forgotten how to hold.
Odelm stretched his regenerating tendrils. They shook. Not the fine tremor of exertion or the pleasant buzz that followed hours of playing—this was something deeper. Something rooted in the marrow of him, dragged up from a place he’d spent months trying to brick shut.
They were growing. Still painfully slow, but the progress was there. He hoped his bondbrother and Zyxel were right—that by the time their nestqueen, Selena gave birth to their daughter, he would have functional tentacles once again.
Tomorrow, V’dim and Z’fir would leave to take up position within the sol system, guarding Destima’s perimeter. The same morning, Selena would board theAbysswith Kaede, Ryzen, Zyxel, and the Royal Guard. The constellation would fracture—splitting in three directions, scattering the pieces of this family across the dark.
And he would be here.
In this room. In this villa. With Xylo and three cubs and the vast, yawning silence of a home built for a clan’s full constellation that was about to lose its center.Again.
His tendrils spasmed. A discordant note rang out, sharp and ugly in the pre-dawn quiet, and Odelm pulled his hands away from the instrument like it had burned him.
Music had always been refuge. The one constant in a life defined by loss—severed bonds, severed limbs, severed from everything that gave a Circuli male meaning. When words failed, when his body failed, when the universe stripped him down to nothing, the velishra had always answered.
Now his fingers refused.
They remembered.
The Quaww’s capture. Ryzen’s brother dragging Selena to an asteroid base in another galaxy, ripped from them without warning, without reason, without mercy. The bond going dark. Not fading the way distance dimmed a thread—not the gentle attenuation of light years stretching their connection thin. The void. Pure, absolute emptiness where Selena should have been, as if someone had carved out the center of his chest and left the wound open to the vacuum of space.
He’d stopped eating first. Then sleeping. Then caring whether the difference between the two mattered.
Now he knew that horrible feeling fell upon him and his nestbrothers because she was unconscious in another galaxy. He prayed to the Stars that he wouldn’t have to ever experience it ever again.
Odelm set the velishra on the bench beside him and stared at his trembling hands. The new tendrils were still too short, still aching with growth, the delicate nerve endings oversensitive to every stimulus. They’d been regrowing for months—slowly, painfully—and every twinge was a reminder of what he’d already survived.
What he wasn’t sure he could surviveagain.
The music room was dark. He’d come before the household stirred, before Xylo’s careful footsteps in the corridor, before the cubs’ voices echoed through the villa’s open spaces. Before anyone could look at him and see what was happening beneath the surface.
Through the bond, the villa breathed around him. Xylo slept—his bondbrother’s teal thread steady and calm, the rhythm of a healer who’d disciplined himself into resting even when his mind cataloged every unfinished task. The cubs slept, their small presences like embers banked for the night would soon burn brightly when they woke, ready for the day. And Selena’s golden thread pulsed warm from her wing of the villa—alive, close, safe.
For now.
He’d promised himself he wouldn’t do this. Sworn it to Xylo when his bondbrother had found him staring at the ceiling last night, heart racing, the phantom silence of the void pressing in from all sides. Sworn it silently to Selena every time she’d smiled at him through their connection over the past days, that fierce bright warmth that said she was here, she was staying, she was real.
Not clingy. Not desperate. Not the male who couldn’t breathe without her.
And yet here he sat, three hours before dawn, unable to play a single clean chord because his hands remembered the void better than his mind remembered how to forget it.
Odelm curled his aching tendrils and pressed them against his back. The velishra waited on the bench beside him, patient as it had always been. Patient as music had always been, while the musician fell apart.
She found him anyway.
He didn’t hear her approach—the bond told him first. A shift in her thread, the particular quality of attention that meant she’dfelt something through their connection and was already moving toward the source. His distress must have pulled her from sleep like a hand on her shoulder.
The door opened. Soft light from the corridor carved a line across the floor, and then she was there.
Selena stood in the doorway, hair loose and silver in the dimness, spots flickering between muted brown and the concerned orange that meant she was reading him. Her belly curved gently beneath the loose sleep shift—Kaede’s daughter, growing, another miracle he’d never take for granted. Even half-asleep, barefoot, blinking against the dark, she looked like the center of every orbit he’d ever known.
Odelm straightened. Forced the tremor from his hands by pressing them flat against his thighs. Smiled.
“Just practicing early.”
His voice cracked on the second word.
