Pleasure crashed through me like a solar flare—blinding, boundless, obliterating every thought exceptthis, this, this.The orgasm ripped through both of us simultaneously, and I heard him cry out beneath me—a sound that was all wonder and no shame.
The emerald bond blazed so bright I couldn’t see.
Couldn’t think.
Couldn’t do anything but hold on as wave after wave of spiritforce surged through us both—braiding, merging, becoming something new. Something permanent. Something that would live inside me for the rest of my life.
Two flames. One hearth.
His.
Mine.
Ours.
And then there was only light.
33
Ryzen
Her golden strand blazed inside his mind like a signal fire—bright enough to blind, warm enough to burn.
Ryzen seized it.
His spiritforce moved on instinct older than thought, older than the centuries of discipline the Verya had hammered into every warrior born under their rule. His emerald thread coiled around her golden one andpulled—wrapping, braiding, locking tight with a hunger that should have terrified him.
It didn’t.
Her mind opened.
Not slowly. Not carefully. Selena threw her shields wide with the same reckless bravery she brought to everything else, and his spiritforce flooded through the gap like water finding a dry riverbed. Too bright. Too warm. Tooright. The sensation staggered him—a rush of belonging that had no comparison in his centuries of existence.
He’d carried Xenak’s twin bond from birth. That connection had been constant and effortless—two halves of the sameconsciousness, always there, always humming beneath the surface of every thought. When the Verya severed it, they’d ripped a hole in his soul that still bled.
This was different.
This was someonechoosingto let him in. A new home…
Her mental voice had always been loud. He’d noticed it during their training sessions—the way her consciousness reached for his even when she didn’t realize it, golden tendrils of thought brushing his shields like curious fingers. He’d kept his distance then. Maintained the walls his people demanded.
Now those walls lay in rubble at his feet, and she waseverywhere.
Inside his mind. On his bed. In his arms. Her weight settled across his lap, her heat burning through every point of contact, and Ryzen could feel her spiritforce weaving through the architecture of his consciousness—filling cracks he’d stopped noticing, shoring up places that had crumbled when Xenak was taken.
He could bathe in her presence. Strengthen himself through it. Drown.
Through the open bond, her thoughts bled into his. Not words—impressions. Fragments of intention and desire that hit him like body blows.
More.
Closer.
Don’t stop.
He could feel her directions. What she needed. Where she wanted him. And instinctively—with a certainty that bypassed every learned behavior, every century of isolation—he followed.
Her mouth found his neck.
