Tomorrow, they would fracture.
But today, the velishra sang. And his hands were steady.
24
Kaede
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.
Sleep came in fragments. Thin, brittle pieces that shattered the moment Kaede’s subconscious registered a shift in the nestbed’s weight.
Odelm.
The Ulax slid from the bedding with the careful slowness of someone trying not to disturb the bodies around him—and failing. The whisper of fabric, the slight redistribution of warmth, the faint tremor in his tendrils as he steadied himself on the edge of the nest—all of it threaded through Kaede’s awareness like a proximity alarm tripped at low volume. He tracked Odelm’s retreat through half-closed eyes. Odelm’ssilhouette disappearing, most likely toward his music room, the door clicking shut with the deliberate care of a male who didn’t want anyone to follow.
Kaede let him go.
Not because he didn’t notice. Because he recognized the particular quality of that departure—the rigid set of Odelm’s shoulders, the way his new tendrils—the beginnings of his tentacles—curled tight against his back like small fists. A male going to fight something he didn’t want witnesses for. Kaede had made that walk himself, more times than he’d admit, down different corridors in different years with the same suffocating weight pressing against the inside of his ribs.
The nestbed still breathed around him. Xylo’s steady rhythm. V’dim curled on Selena’s far side, one appendage thrown protectively across her hip. Z’fir on the outer edge, sleep-still but coiled with the readiness of a male who’d spent his whole life waking to threats. And Selena—
He let his gaze rest on her.
The gentle curve of her belly beneath the sleep shift. Their daughter. Growing, developing, becoming more real with every passing day. Selena’s silver hair fanned across the pillow, her spots dimmed to a soft, dreamless gray, her face slack with the kind of deep rest she rarely achieved. Through their thread, her presence pulsed warm and steady—alive, unguarded, trusting.
Trusting him to stand between her and everything that wanted to take this from them.
Sleep wasn’t coming back. He’d managed three hours, maybe four—enough for his body but not enough to quiet the engine of his mind. It had been running since his conversation with Eshe the night before, turning over contingencies and countermeasures like a machine that didn’t know how to idle.
Eshe had been thorough. He’d give her that. She’d mapped every entry point to the CEG Space Station that her shadowabilities could exploit—extraction corridors, blind spots in the surveillance grid, choke points where a small team could hold if they needed to buy time. Her defensive instincts were sharp, her knowledge of the station’s architecture surprisingly detailed for someone who’d spent the bulk of her career on Liskta. When she’d laid out her protection formations, Kaede had found less to correct than he’d expected.
Less. Not nothing.
She was defensive. Kaede needed someone who could shift offensive in a half-second if a defensive posture stopped being viable. He’d made adjustments. Quietly, without undermining her in front of the guards she commanded. Repositioned two members of her formation to cover angles she’d left thin, added contingencies for scenarios she hadn’t considered—not because she was incompetent, but because her instincts bent toward retreat when his bent toward annihilation.
Different tools. Different functions. Both necessary.
But the variable that kept his mind churning had nothing to do with Eshe’s shadow tactics or the station’s floor plan or the forty-seven scenarios he’d war-gamed with Ryzen over the past two days.
His daughter.
He’d made peace with sacrifice a long time ago, carved it into the part of himself that could carry weight without buckling.
This was different.
This was his blood growing inside the one person he couldn’t afford to lose. Every contingency plan, every formation, every weapon in his arsenal existed to protect Selena—and none of them accounted for protecting her from the inside out. From the fragile, impossible miracle that made her both stronger and more vulnerable than she’d ever been.
Kaede sat up. Slowly, so as not to disturb the others. He dressed in the dark—living suit responding to his will, the sleekmaterial crawling up from his collar without sound—and slipped from the nest with the silence of someone who’d been leaving rooms undetected.
Kaede pressed two fingers to the side of his neck—a subtle gesture, almost absently—and felt the familiar hum of his neural link syncing with the drone network. With one last glance at his sleeping star and the rest of their remaining clan, he teleported.
The villa’s salt-laced air vanished. Replaced by recycled atmosphere, the sterile hum of dormant systems, and the faint metallic taste of a ship waiting to be woken. TheAbysssat on the landing pad like a sleeping predator—dark hull absorbing what little moonlight filtered through the waterfall, every weapon system and engine cold but primed for ignition at his command.
Kaede materialized in the armory.
The space was vast, efficient, right in the underbelly of theAbyss—designed by him, organized by him, every rack and compartment calibrated to the precise dimensions of the weapons they held. Psydagger housings. Drone charging cradles. The auxiliary combat kit he’d assembled for Zyxel’s demi-human form, still untested in real engagement.
