“Your damage—”
“Isn’t yours to fix. I know.” A sound escaped him—half laugh, half something broken. “Xylo tells me that every week. But the thing about almost dying from someone’s absence is that it makes their presence feel like oxygen. And being told to breathe normally when you’ve been suffocating—”
He couldn’t finish.
The dam didn’t break with a single catastrophic failure. It just… gave. The way exhaustion gave. The way a body that had been clenched for too long simply couldn’t maintain the tension anymore and surrendered to what it had been fighting.
Odelm dropped his head into his hands and sighed, wishing things could go back to what it was before that dreaded day.
She didn’t try to stop him.
That was the thing about Selena—the thing his clanbrothers sometimes struggled with, the instinct to shield, to solve, tomake the pain stop. She didn’t flinch from it. Didn’t rush to fill the silence with reassurances that would have bounced off the surface of his grief without reaching what lived beneath.
She wrapped her arms around him and held on.
His head found the curve of her shoulder. Her fingers threaded through his hair—slow, steady, the rhythm of someone who understood that sometimes the only way through was through. Her other hand pressed flat against his back, right between his growing tentacles, right over his spine, where the bond lived in his nervous system like a second heartbeat. Heat radiated from her palm. Warm and alive and present in a way that made the void in his memory recoil like shadow from flame.
He shook against her. Ugly, graceless shaking. Circuli didn’t cry—didn’t produce teardrops from the corners of their eyes—but in this moment, he felt like he could.
His body shook in the way he’d never let anyone see. Not Xylo, not V’dim, not even the darkness of three in the morning when the nightmares woke him and the bond was the only thing between consciousness and free fall. He’d been so careful. So controlled. Months of smiling through the terror, of playing music that said everything his mouth refused to, of being the version of himself that the clan needed instead of the version he actually was.
She held him through all of it.
Through the hitching breaths and the muffled sounds he buried against her skin. Through the tremors that worked their way from his core outward in waves. Through the shame of falling apart in front of the one person he wanted most to be whole for. She didn’t shush him. Didn’t rock him like a child—like she did whenever she’d comforted her cubs. Just held steady—a fixed point in the chaos, the gravity that kept him from spinning into the dark.
When the worst of it passed—when his breathing roughened into something approaching rhythm and his grip on her loosened from desperate to merely tight—she spoke.
“It’s different now.”
Not dismissal. Not minimizing. She said it the way she said battle plans—direct, factual, as if the universe would rearrange itself to match her words because it understood the consequences of defying her.
“I trained with Ryzen. The bond is stronger than it was—stronger than it’s ever been. I can reach Zirene at the front lines from light years away. I can reach through the void now, Odelm. What happened before—that silence—it won’t happen again. I won’t allow it.”
She pulled back enough to frame his face with her hands. Her thumbs traced his cheeks, wiping them with a care that made his chest ache in an entirely different way. Her eyes—those impossible ocean-deep eyes that had seen him at his worst and his weakest and had never once looked away—held his with a ferocity that left no room for doubt.
“I will reach you. Every single day.”
His throat worked. “Promise me.”
Two words. They came out wrecked and raw, stripped of every defense he’d ever built, and he didn’t care. He was done pretending. Done performing the version of himself that didn’t need this, didn’t ache for this, could survive another absence with something resembling grace.
He needed the promise the way the velishra needed strings.
“Every morning when you wake, you’ll feel me.” Her voice dropped low, fierce. The cadence of a vow spoken between two people who understood exactly what it cost and what it was worth. “Every night before you sleep, I’ll be there. Through the bond, across every light year between us. You won’t have silence again, Odelm.”
Her forehead pressed against his.
“I won’t leave you.”
The words sank into him. Past the walls, past the scar tissue of months in the void, past the memory of waking from stasis and not knowing if his nestqueen still breathed. They settled in the same place the bond lived—deep, woven, impossible to sever without killing the host.
Through their thread, her certainty flooded him. Not hope—hope was fragile, conditional, something that could be taken. This was bedrock. The immovable foundation of a Queen who had learned to stretch her reach across the galaxy and who would not, under any circumstance, let the dark swallow him again.
She meant it. He couldfeelthat she meant it.
Something in his chest that had been clenched for months—longer, since before she came back, since the first moment of void—loosened. Not all the way. The damage was too deep, the fear too well-rooted, for one promise to dissolve it entirely. But the vise around his ribs eased enough for him to draw a full breath for the first time since he’d sat down with the velishra and felt his hands begin to shake.
He kissed her.
