Selena said nothing. She crossed the room without hurry, bare feet silent on the cool tile floor, and lowered herself onto the bench beside him. Close enough that their arms touched. Close enough that the warmth of her seeped through fabric and skin and settled against the cold thing coiling in his chest.
She didn’t ask.
She just sat there. Waiting. The way still water waited for whatever was beneath the surface to rise.
The silence stretched. Not uncomfortable—she’d learned that from over a year of loving Circuli males. Learned that sometimes presence was louder than words. That sitting beside someone while they fought not to break was its own kind of language, spoken in warmth and patience and the steady rhythm of shared breathing.
He could hold it. Hewouldhold it. She was the one leaving. She was the one walking into danger, carrying their unborn daughter inside her, facing political adversaries who wanted touse her or destroy her. She needed him steady. She needed him to be the male she’d chosen—supportive, strong, the musician who played through pain because the alternative was drowning in it.
He could be that. Hehadto be that.
“Odelm.” Her voice was quiet. No demand. Just his name, shaped with the particular tenderness she reserved for the moments when she could feel exactly how much he was hiding. “Talk to me.”
“You have enough to carry.” The words came out rougher than he intended. He kept his gaze fixed on the velishra beside them, on the faint gleam of its strings in the dark. “You don’t need my—”
“Finish that sentence and I’ll be furious with you.”
No heat in her tone. Just certainty. The kind of certainty that Selena wielded like Kaede wielded his psydaggers—precise, unwavering, impossible to deflect.
Odelm closed his eyes.
“I’m supposed to be strong for you. That’s what a nestmate does. You’re about to leave, and I should be the one holding everything together while you’re gone, not the one falling apart before you’ve even—”
“I don’t need you to perform strength.” Her hand found his knee. Warm. Grounding. The touch of someone who refused to let him retreat. “I need you honest.”
The wordhonestcracked something.
Not the way glass cracked—clean, sharp, one decisive line. This was slower. Like watching ice give way under sustained pressure, fissures branching outward until the whole surface was webbed with fractures and there was no longer anywhere solid to stand.
“The last time you left—”
His voice broke. He tried again.
“The last time I couldn’t feel you—”
Gone. The words dissolved. His throat sealed shut around the memories clawing their way up—that dreaded day that changed their clan’s lives forever.
Days of searching. Weeks of silence. The bond going dark. Not fading, not dimming.Dark.As if someone had snuffed out the sun and forgotten to tell the planets they were supposed to stop orbiting.
He pressed his palm over his chest. The gesture was involuntary—an empath’s reflex, covering the place where the thread lived, as if he could protect it with flesh and bone.
“I almost died.”
The confession fell into the silence like a stone into deep water.
“When you disappeared, when the thread went silent…” He swallowed hard. “My body started shutting down. All of us—every Circuli mate in the clan. Xylo. Me. Then V’dim and Z’fir, since they weren’t the ones injured. The bond’s absence was killing us, one system at a time. Our bodies weren’t built for that kind of severance.”
Selena’s hand tightened on his knee. Her spots had gone pale—almost white, the color drained from them the way blood drained from a wound.
“Oeta saved us.” His voice dropped to something barely above breath. “She recognized what was happening before we were too far gone. Put all of us—every Circuli in the clan—into medical stasis. Suspended between living and dying. Months, Selena. Months in the dark, not knowing if you were alive or dead or somewhere so far beyond our reach that the bond would never light up again.”
He opened his eyes. The music room was blurred, the edges of the velishra smeared by the wet heat building behind his lashes. “I didn’t dream. Didn’t think. Just… nothing. A voidwhere you should have been, and the knowledge—somewhere deep, beneath the stasis, beneath everything Oeta did to keep us alive—that if you didn’t come back, the nothing would become permanent.”
The tremor had spread from his hands to his shoulders. His whole body vibrated with it now—the effort of holding himself together while the memories tore through every wall he’d built.
“I didn’t know.” Her voice sounded wrong. Stricken. Wrecked in a way that made him want to take it all back, shove the words down where they’d been rotting and seal the lid. “Odelm, I didn’t know it was that bad… Only brief mentions and witnessing the aftereffects of what happened.”
“I didn’t tell you.” He turned to face her. Tears fell from her ocean deep gaze. “You came back and you had enough to carry. You were healing too. The clan needed you. The cubs missed you. I wasn’t going to stack my damage on top of everything else.”
