“No one,” he cut in, low and final, “is more important than you. Not to me. Not to this clan. Not to this galaxy.” His hand found her face—palm cradling her jaw, fingers threading into her hair, holding her the way he held everything that mattered: deliberately, with full awareness of what it would cost to let go. “But I’m not going to make you choose, Selena. Because I’m not going to let it come tothat.”
Her lips parted. He watched the argument form and dissolve, watched her read the oath carved into every line of his body and recognize it for what it was—not defiance. Certainty.
“I will keep you both safe.” Each word placed like a weapon in a formation. Precise. Immovable. “There will be no choice. I will burn the space station to the ground before anyone forces that choice on us. Do you hear me?”
A tear escaped down her cheek. He caught it with his thumb.
“You can’t promise that.”
“Watch me.”
She kissed him.
Not gently. Not the careful, measured kisses they traded in the nestbed with their clanbrothers sleeping around them—considerate, restrained, mindful of shared space and shared bonds. This was different. This was the kiss of a woman who’d just handed him an impossible question and received an impossible answer and needed to feel the truth of it against her skin.
Kaede’s hand tightened at the back of her neck. His other arm circled her waist, pulling her flush against him until the curve of her belly pressed warm and solid between them—a reminder, an anchor, the physical proof of what they’d made together. She tasted like salt and sleep and the mineral tang of the ocean air, and beneath it all, the heat that had always lived between them—smoldering, waiting for the moments when the masks came off and there was nothing left but skin and breath and the relentless pull of two people who’d found each other in a universe designed to keep them apart.
Her fingers dragged through his hair, loosening the tie that held it back, and the long dark strands fell across his shoulders. She gripped the roots—hard, possessive, the gesture of a woman staking a claim she didn’t need to name. Through their thread, her emotions crashed into him: fear and fury and love so fierce it felt like a weapon in its own right, something that could cut through walls and treaties and the cold calculus of war.
He let it in. All of it. Dropped every shield he carried and let her feel what lived on the other side—the jagged, terrifying devotion that didn’t fit inside words. The promise his mouth couldn’t make but his body knew how to keep. Every touch was a vow. His palm pressing against the small of her back. His mouth tracing the line of her jaw, her throat, the sensitive spot of his mark on the juncture of her neck where her pulse racedagainst his lips. His thumb stroking the curve of her belly with a reverence that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the impossible fact that this life—their life—existed because the Stars had looked at a weapon and decided he deserved to become a father.
She arched into him. A sound escaped her—low, private, the kind of sound she only made when she forgot to be careful—and it unraveled the last of his composure. He pressed her against the balcony railing, one arm braced behind her for support, his body curving over hers in the instinctive posture of a male shielding what he’d claimed. The pre-dawn chill pressed against his back. She was fire against his front. The contrast sharpened everything—every point of contact, every place where her warmth bled through the barrier of clothing and living suit and found the skin beneath.
He kissed her like a man marking territory. Like a promise and an apology and a declaration all at once. Slow, thorough, devastating—the kind of kiss that rewrote the terms of what the next twenty-four hours could take from them. Her hands bracketed his face, thumbs tracing the hard line of his cheekbones, and she held him there—steady, fierce—while the bond between them blazed bright enough to drown out the dark.
When they broke apart, both breathing hard, their foreheads stayed pressed together. Her eyes found his in the dying starlight. Wide and wet and burning with a ferocity that had nothing to do with tears.
“Come back to me,” she whispered. “Whatever happens at that station. Whatever the galaxy throws at us. You come back to me, Kaede. All of you.”
“Always.” No hesitation. The one promise he could make without qualification, without contingency, without the strategist’s habitual asterisks. “Always.”
The first light crept over Destima’s horizon, dawn broke soft and gold across the water. Selena’s spots shifted to the warm pink that meant she was exactly where she needed to be. Her hand tightened in his.
She asked him to choose.
He chose instead to make sure the choice never came.
Whatever it takes.
25
Selena
Islipped away while no one was watching.
Or while everyone was watching and pretending not to—which, in this family, amounted to the same thing. V’dim had the kitchen in a state of controlled siege, four tentacles conducting the household staff through the evening meal preparations while two more kept Nocrez from climbing into the spice stores. Z’fir had disappeared toward the greenhouse an hour ago, carrying pruning shears and the particular silence he wore when he was saying goodbye to things that grew. Kaede was running a final perimeter check with Eshe—his third of the day, which told me everything about how little he trusted tomorrow’s departure plan, even if he’d been the one to design it. Xylo was sorting medical supplies again. Odelm was playing something low and repetitive in his music room, the sound drifting through the villa, his velishra carrying a melody I didn’t recognize but felt in my sternum.
Everyone busy. Everyone bracing. The villa hummed with the energy of a family preparing to fracture, and every room I entered held someone who needed me to be steadier than I was.
So I went where none of them would follow. Not immediately.
The northern balcony caught the sunset full in the face. It was the one part of the villa I hadn’t shared with anyone during these last three days on Destima—not V’dim’s observation deck, not Z’fir’s greenhouse, not the eastern balcony where Kaede and I had stood in the pre-dawn dark and made promises neither of us could guarantee.
I leaned against the railing and let the warmth hit me.
Destima’s sun hung low, swollen and amber, bleeding copper light across the ocean. The salt air moved against my skin with a gentleness that felt deliberate—as if the moon itself knew what tomorrow held and was offering what comfort it could. Below, the villa grounds stretched in long shadows. The training yard stood empty. The gardens Z’fir had coaxed into abundance glowed in the dying light.
One more night.
