Not gently. Not with the reverence he usually brought to her—the careful, worshipful touches of a male who still couldn’t believe the Stars had given him this. This kiss was desperate. Graceless. His mouth found hers and the sound that escaped him was raw and starving, and he didn’t try to shape it into something more controlled.
She kissed him back.
Her hands slid from his face to the back of his neck, fingers curling into the sensitive skin at his nape where Circuli nerve endings clustered dense and reactive, and she pulled him closer with a fierceness that matched his own. No hesitation.No careful handling. She kissed him like she was sealing the promise with her body, pressing the vow into his skin where words couldn’t reach.
His hands found her waist—the Circuli reflex to anchor, to tether, to hold what mattered against the current of a universe that kept trying to tear it away. The nerve endings in his new growth flared wanting to touch what was theirs—too sensitive, almost painful—and he didn’t care. Pain meant alive. Pain meant she was close enough to touch.
Salt. He tasted salt—hers—she cried for him, for them. The distinction between the two had stopped mattering somewhere between the first kiss and the second. Through the bond, her emotions crashed into his: grief for the months he’d lost, fury at everyone that had a hand on that dreaded day for what they’d taken, fierce protective love that burned golden through the broken places inside him and filled them with something warm.
She shifted closer on the bench, and his hands steadied.
The trembling stopped. Not gradually—all at once, as if his body had found the anchor it had been searching for and every nerve ending recognized the signal. His palms flattened against the small of her back, pressing her closer, careful of the swell of her belly between them, and the heat of her seeped into his bones like sunlight into stone after a long freeze.
He kissed the corner of her mouth. Her jaw. The soft place beneath her ear where her pulse beat steady and sure. She tilted her head to give him access, a quiet sound escaping her that vibrated against his lips, and it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever heard.
Better than music.
Her spots shifted. Deep violet bled into warm pink, the bioluminescence mapping her emotions in the private language only her mates could fully read—desire and tenderness and the specific shade of purple that meant she was exactly where shewanted to be. With him. In this dark room, in this stolen hour before the world demanded them back.
His hands tightened around her waist once again. Gentle but certain. A musician’s grip—precise, deliberate, holding the instrument that made everything else make sense.
He memorized this. Her warmth against him in the dark. The bond humming between them like a sustained note. Steady hands where shaking ones had been. He filed it in the place where the void had lived—not to erase the memory, but to build something over it. Something the darkness couldn’t swallow.
When they finally pulled apart, breathing hard, foreheads touching, she smiled.
Not the bright, public smile she wore for the clan. The quiet one. The one that was only his in moments like this—private, unhurried, as intimate as the kiss itself.
“Still shaking?” she whispered.
He held up his hands between them. Steady. Perfectly, impossibly steady.
“No.”
He reached for the velishra.
The instrument settled against him the way it always had—familiar, patient, an old companion that had waited through every silence for him to come back. His fingers found the strings, and this time they didn’t tremble.
The first note emerged soft. Not the raw grief of the piece he’d played at dinner—that music had been for the clan, for all of them, for the collective weight of what they carried. This was different.
This was for her.
A melody that started quiet and built like breath returning after a long dive. Something warm threaded through with a gentle ache—not pain, but the kind of tenderness that lived on the other side of it. The sound of someone who’d been brokenand was learning the shape of whole again. Not there yet. Maybe not for a long time. But moving toward it, one note at a time.
Selena stayed.
She curled beside him on the bench, head resting against his shoulder, and let the music wash over them both. Through their bond, he felt her settle—the tension draining from her body, the constant pressure of being the Beacon and the Destima’s Circuli Queen and the woman the galaxy needed easing just enough for her to simply be Selena. The female who’d chosen him when she didn’t have to. Who chose him still.
She closed her eyes.
Through the bond, her voice came soft and sure. “This. Play this every night. I’ll hear it wherever I am.”
His fingers moved across the strings with renewed certainty. The melody swelled—still quiet, still theirs, but threaded now with something that hadn’t been there before the promise. Before the breaking. Before she’d sat beside him in the dark and refused to let him drown.
Not hope. Hope was too fragile a word for what lived between them now.
Faith.
He played until the first light crept through the window and painted her silver hair in shades of gold as she slept leaned against him. Played until the villa stirred around them and the distant sound of cubs waking drifted down the corridor like a promise of its own. Played until the music became what it had always been meant to be—not an escape from pain, but a bridge across it. A tether that distance couldn’t snap and silence couldn’t smother.
