The silence stretched between them. The ocean murmured below. Through their thread, he felt the collision of her instincts—the part of her that understood what he was asking and the part that recoiled from anything that tasted like submission.
“You’re asking me to surrender my judgment.”
“I’m asking you to trustmine.” A distinction that mattered. “You are the Beacon. You lead. You speak. You command rooms full of people who’d sooner see you fail than kneel. I would never take that from you. But if the situation turns—”
“If the situation turns, I become a liability if I don’t follow your lead.” She finished it for him. No anger. Something harder—the clinical honesty of a woman who’d learned to separate emotion from assessment because the alternative got people killed—or her mates injured.
“Youaremy priority,” he corrected, quiet and absolute. “You and her. And I can’t protect you if you’re fighting me while I’m fighting everyone else.”
Selena looked away. Toward the ocean, the fading stars, the vast dark that held everything they were about to fly into. He watched the war play out across her features—pride against pragmatism, independence against the cold truth that she carried something more important than ego inside her body.
“If things turn sour,” she said slowly, “I will listen. I won’t fight you.”
Relief hit him like a decompression wave—sudden and disorienting. He hadn’t realized how much tension he’d been carrying in his shoulders until it released.
“Thank you.”
“I’m not done.” She turned back to him, and the look on her face made the relief evaporate. “My turn.”
He knew what was coming before she said it. Felt it through the thread—the particular resonance of a fear she’d been carrying since the moment Xylo confirmed the pregnancy. Since the moment their daughter became real enough to lose.
“Promise me something.”
“Anything.”
“If it comes to a choice—” Her voice didn’t waver. Her eyes did. “Me or her. You choose her.”
The words hit the center of his chest like a spirit dagger thrown at close range.
He didn’t answer.
Couldn’t.
The balcony suddenly felt too small, the air too thin, the stars too close. His jaw locked with a force that sent pain radiating through his molars and up into his temples, and he tasted the phantom bite of his own venom at the back of his throat—the involuntary response of a body that registered the threat in her words even before his mind could process it.
Choose. As if either option left him with something worth surviving.
“Kaede.” Quiet. Unrelenting. The voice of the Beacon, but underneath it—deeper, rawer—the voice of a mother. “Promise me.”
He stared at the horizon. The constellation was fracturing across the galaxy, and every piece of it trusted him to keep the center from collapsing.
She was the center.
Their daughter was the future.
And she was asking him to choose between the two things that made everything else matter.
“I hear you,” he said.
NotI promise.She noticed. He felt it through the thread—the flicker of frustration, the tightening of her grip on the railing.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have.” He turned to her, and whatever she saw in his face made her breath catch. “You want me to promise I’ll let you die.Lookat me and tell me that’s a promise any male in this clan could make and keep.”
Her eyes shone. Salt and starlight.
“She’s more important than—”
