He saw me coming and his composure—that beautiful, brittle structure he’d been maintaining for the cubs, for the clan, for everyone who needed him to be steady—trembled. I crossed the pad, and his tentacles reached for me before I was close enough to touch. They wrapped around my waist, my shoulders, the curve of my belly—drawing me in until I was surrounded by him, enclosed in the particular warmth that was purely V’dim. Spice and salt air and the subtle electrical hum of Circuli skin against mine.
“Every night.” His voice broke on the first word. He pressed his forehead to mine, tentacles tightening until I could feel the force of his restraint—how badly he wanted to pull me onto the ship, carry me with him, refuse the separation entirely. “Reach for me every night, Selena. Let me feel you.”
“Every night.” My throat ached. “I promise.”
“And if you need me—”
“You’ll come. I know.” I held his face—this ridiculous, beautiful Ulax who’d orchestrated a dinner and gathered a family into a nestbed and made a moon feel like home while the galaxy burned around us. “Go guard our territory. Guard Destima. Keep our family safe out there.” I kissed him—soft, slow, tasting the salt of tears that might have been his or mine or both. “Come back to me, V’dim.”
His tentacles released me one at a time. Each one a separate act of willpower. Each one leaving a cold absence against my skin that the morning air rushed to fill.
Z’fir.
My Wudox. My quiet, steady, impossible mate who loved in silences and growing things and the patient weight of his hand against my ankle in the dark.
He didn’t reach for me. He waited—feet planted, vines still, hands at his sides—and let me come to him. That was Z’fir. Henever grabbed. Never demanded. He was the earth that held steady while everything else moved, and when I pressed my forehead to his chest and breathed him in—green and mineral, the deep-soil scent of growth and patience—his arms came up around me with the slow certainty of roots finding water.
I held his face in my hands. Jade-green eyes met mine, and in them I found everything he couldn’t say aloud—wouldn’t say, because Z’fir’s love lived in action, not declaration. In pruned gardens and late-night silences and the way his vines found my skin across the nestbed, grounding me when dreams turned dark.
“I know you can’t say it.” My thumbs traced his cheekbones. “You don’t have to.”
His jaw tightened. A vine curled around my wrist—the smallest, most delicate one—and held on.
“What I feel,” he said, so low the words barely existed, “does not require language.”
I kissed him. Not soft, not careful—fierce, claiming, the kind of kiss that branded itself into memory because it had to. Because memory might be all we’d have for a while. His hand cupped the back of my head. His vine pulled my wrist closer. And for three heartbeats, the landing pad disappeared—the ship, the crew, the dawn, the war—and there was only this. Only us. Only the particular alchemy of his stillness meeting my storm and creating something neither of us could make alone.
Then he pulled back. Pressed his lips to my forehead—a benediction, a seal, a goodbye. Let go.
The vine around my wrist was the last thing to release, sliding free with a gentleness that cracked something open in my chest.
They boarded without looking back.
That was the agreement, the unspoken understanding between warriors and the people who loved them—don’t lookback, because looking back makes leaving impossible. V’dim’s tentacles gripped the ramp rails as he ascended. Z’fir ducked through the hatch with his kit in hand, spine straight, moving with the contained purpose of a male who had locked his grief in a box and would deal with it once the engines were firing and the bonds were singing with distance.
The hatch sealed. The engines cycled—a low, building hum that vibrated through the landing pad and up through my feet and into my bones. I stepped back, one hand on my belly, the other clenched at my side.
The engines fired.
Heat washed across the pad. My hair whipped back. Eshe stepped forward—instinctive, shielding—and Kaede materialized at my side without a word, his body blocking the worst of the thruster wash. The vessel lifted. Slow at first, then faster, the dark hull catching the dawn light as it climbed toward a sky that was shifting from indigo to gold.
I reached through the bonds.
V’dim’s turquoise thread stretched—butheld.The grief slammed into me, raw and enormous, the emotion he’d dammed for the last hour finally breaking free. I absorbed it, held it, sent warmth back down the thread the way he’d taught me. Beside it, Z’fir’s thread sang with a different frequency—quieter, deeper, the ache of roots torn from familiar ground. But beneath both, steady as bedrock: love. Not the desperate, grasping kind. The kind that settled in and stayed. The kind that saidI’m hereeven as distance ate the space between us.
The vessel shrank against the brightening sky. A dark point against the morning gold. A speck. Then nothing but the fading trail of thruster wash dissolving into Destima’s atmosphere.
But the bonds held. I would make sure that they remained so.
27
Selena
The sky didn’t look any different without them in it.
That was the cruelest part. The same gold-washed morning, the same salt breeze pushing warm across the landing pad, the same ocean folding against Destima’s shore as if two of my mates hadn’t just torn themselves from my orbit and vanished into the void. Scorch marks still darkened the stone where thruster wash had kissed it. The heat hadn’t faded from beneath my feet.
But the bonds held.
