“She needs a bed,” Zyxel said. “And she needs her mates.”
The word came out naturally.Her mates.Plural. A constellation of males scattered across the galaxy, most of them too far to do anything but worry—but two of them right here, kneeling on the cold deck of a warship, holding the woman who held them all together.
Ryzen nodded once. “Kaede.”
“Kaede.”
The pulse Zyxel sent through the bond was sharp and deliberate—not a request, not a question. An alarm.
Kaede materialized in the lounge three seconds later.
Zyxel recorded the response time with the part of his brain that never stopped measuring. Three seconds from alert toarrival, which meant Kaede had been deep in theAbyss’s tactical systems when the call came—pulling him out of what he was doing instantly as soon as it registered thatSelena is in danger.
Kaede’s eyes found her immediately.
Not the room. Not the tactical layout. Not the exits or the potential threats or the defensive positions he normally swept in the first breath of any new environment. His gaze went straight to Selena—limp in Ryzen’s arms, spots shifting between brown and black, silver hair trailing over the Verya male’s forearm.
Something crossed Kaede’s face.
It was fast. Controlled. The kind of micro-expression that most beings would miss entirely, but Zyxel had spent decades reading the subtle language of bodies, and Kaede’s body spoke volumes in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
Possessiveness. Raw and involuntary—another male holding his mate,his star, unconscious and vulnerable. The predator beneath the strategist baring its teeth at the sight.
Then discipline crushed it flat.
“What happened?” The voice was ice. Operational.
“Exhaustion.” Zyxel rose to his feet—his demi-human knees protesting the shift with a stiffness his Ezzaska joints never carried. “She hasn’t slept. Hasn’t eaten properly. She’s been maintaining every bond in her web since departure—stretching herself across light-years to keep the connections alive.”
Kaede’s jaw tightened.
Zyxel caught it—the particular tension of a male who’d seen this coming and failed to prevent it. Kaede had known. The shadows beneath Selena’s eyes, the barely touched food, the three-hour vigil at the viewport. He’d watched the same signs Zyxel had observed and arrived at the same conclusion.
And he hadn’t intervened. Because Selena didn’t respond to intervention—she responded to need. Her own never qualified.
It was the one flaw in her otherwise extraordinary architecture. The female who could hold an entire galaxy’s worth of bonds, who could reach across light-years and touch a mate’s sleeping mind, who could stand before the most powerful Assembly in the known universe and demand they see her as a person rather than a specimen—that same female could not, would not, admit that she was running dry.
Zyxel had seen it in his research. The data on demi-human physiology was sparse—most of it classified, much of it destroyed during the Yarrkins purge—but what remained painted a clear picture. Adaptive biology demanded fuel. Mental projection demanded more. And pregnancy on top of both created a metabolic demand that could strip a body to the bone if left unchecked.
He’d told Xylo. Xylo had packed the medical kit accordingly. But kits didn’t help if the patient refused to stop.
“The baby?” Kaede crossed the remaining distance in three precise strides, his hand finding Selena’s belly before his eyes left her face.
“Healthy.” Euouae materialized before them. “The pregnancy is stable. She’s depleted, not damaged. But if she keeps spending herself at this rate—”
“She won’t.” Flat. Final.
Kaede straightened. Turned to Ryzen, and something passed between them—not warmth, not even tolerance, but the cold mutual respect of two predators who’d found themselves protecting the same territory.
“I’ll take her.”
Ryzen didn’t hesitate. He shifted Selena’s weight with careful precision, and Kaede gathered her against his chest in a single fluid motion—one arm beneath her knees, the other supporting her shoulders, her head settling into the hollow of his throat like it had been designed to fit there. The transfer was seamless.Practiced. The choreography of males who’d both learned how to hold her without waking her.
Her spots flickered at the contact. Warm blue pulsing once against Kaede’s living suit before dimming again.
Even unconscious, she knew him.
Zyxel catalogued that too. The way her biology responded to Kaede’s proximity like a compass finding north—automatic, cellular, beyond conscious decision. Their bond was the strangest among her living connections, forged in the desperate days of her rescue during his heat cycle, tempered through trials and near-deaths and a love so fierce it had terrified everyone who witnessed it.
