He’d just broken every one of those rules with a human female who collected warriors like stray stars and somehow made them all burn brighter for it.
He lowered them both to the mattress. Careful. Slow. Keeping her against his chest, keeping himself inside her, unwilling to sever the physical connection while the spiritual one was still settling into place.
She murmured something against his collarbone. Too quiet to catch. Her breath evened out, and through the bond he felt her thoughts dissolve into the formless warmth of deep sleep.
His spirit daggers—all eight—had fallen from their orbits the moment the bond sealed. They lay scattered across the floor of his quarters, dark and inert, their emerald edges extinguished. He’d never lost control of them before. Not once in three hundred years.
He’d lost control of everything tonight.
And lying here in the dim light of his sparse quarters, with theAbysshumming around them and Selena’s breath warm against his skin and her spiritforce threaded through his soul like it had always belonged there—
He couldn’t bring himself to regret it.
The bond pulsed. Emerald and gold. Steady. Permanent.
Ryzen pressed his lips to the crown of her head and held her as the emerald fire faded to warmth. As they drifted into darkness together.
Bonded.
Complete.
34
Kaede
The living suit disk was warm in his palm. Smooth, no larger than a coin, humming faintly with the bio-signature Kaede had programmed himself. He rolled it between his thumb and forefinger—a slow, deliberate motion that kept his hands from doing something less productive. Like breaking things.
He sat in the only chair in Ryzen’s quarters. A rigid, utilitarian thing bolted to the deck—he made sure the furnishings were built for safety even though it lacked comfort. The room was sparse. Gray walls, gray floor, a single viewport showing stars he wasn’t watching.
His spirit daggers were scattered haphazardly across the floor. Eight emerald blades, dark and inert, strewn in a wide arc around the bed like shrapnel from an explosion only he’d missed.
On the bed, Selena lay collapsed across Ryzen’s chest.
Still tangled. Still naked. Still dead to the world in the particular way that told Kaede through their bond that she wasn’t just sleeping—she wasgone. Burned through everyreserve she’d been hoarding and cratered into unconsciousness so deep that her mental presence was barely a flicker against his shields.
The Verya male hadn’t moved either. His arms locked around her, face buried in her hair, the emerald runes across his golden skin pulsing in a steady rhythm that matched Selena’s heartbeat. Entangled. Merged. Whatever the fuck they’d done to each other, their bodies hadn’t gotten the message that it was over.
Kaede rolled the disk again.
He’d felt the moment it happened. Halfway through a tactical review with Eshe on the bridge, REI mid-sentence about docking protocols, and something haddetonatedthrough his bond with Selena. Not pain. Not fear. Something hotter and brighter and more consuming than anything he’d ever felt from her—a cascade of pleasure and spiritforce andcompletionthat had slammed into him like a shockwave and left him gripping the edge of the command console with white knuckles.
Eshe had noticed. Of course she had. She’d been trained by people who noticed things for a living.
“Commander?”
“Stand down. I need a moment.”
A moment. He’d needed anishingmoment because his nestqueen had just bonded with the Verya grief case and her orgasm had hit him like weapons fire.
Through the bond, even now, her thoughts bled through. Loud. Louder than usual, which was saying something because Selena’s mental voice had never learned the meaning ofquiet. Fragments of satisfaction hummed against his shields like heat shimmer off the tarmac.
Complete.
The last star.
My constellation.
Kaede’s jaw tightened.
