Two days. She’d been aboard theAbyssfor two days, and she’d taken another mate. Bonded souls with the warrior she’d barely known, in a ritual his own species considered so dangerous they’d outlawed it generations ago.
Her living suit disk was warm in his hand because he’d been holding it since he walked in and found them like this. Because she’d need it when she woke, and he’d be the one to give it to her, because that was his job. That was always his job. Hold the pieces. Stand ready. Be the one still upright when everyone else had burned themselves down to embers.
The disk turned between his fingers. Smooth. Warm. Steady.
He didn’t feel steady.
Golden light gathered at the edge of his vision.
Euouae materialized from Selena’s sleeping form like smoke rising from a banked fire—a golden, translucent figure pulling free of her body and solidifying into the shape the ancient Oetsae preferred. Long hair swept up in a high ponytail, a sleeveless vest hanging open over a bare chest that flickered with internal light, baggy pants cinched at the ankles. Ethereal. Ghost-like. A being of pure spiritforce wearing the silhouette of something human, his edges soft and luminous against the dim quarters.
He drifted to a stop beside the chair, his golden form casting no shadows. His ancient eyes found Kaede’s, and whatever he read there made him pause.
“She is safe,” Euouae said. His voice carried that particular resonance—felt more than heard, settling into the bones. “The bond is stable. She’s merely exhausted.”
“Merely.” Kaede didn’t look at him. His gaze stayed on the bed. On Selena’s bare back, the constellation of bioluminescent spots dimmed to dark blue along her spine. On Ryzen’s arms locked around her like she’d dissolve if he let go. “Explain to me what happened.”
Not a request.
Euouae’s ponytail swayed as he tilted his head. The gesture was almost human—a scholar considering how much truth a student could handle.
“She asked about spirit weapons,” the Oetsae began. “This morning when everyone was still asleep. She wanted to know if it was possible for her to wield one independently—without a Verya actively channeling it to her.”
Kaede’s thumb stilled on the disk.
“I told her the truth,” Euouae continued. “That the only way to wield Verya spirit weapons was through a spiritforce bond. A permanent merging of souls.” His golden form flickered, something almost apologetic in the ripple. “She asked Ryzen. He offered.”
“Just like that.” Flat. Controlled. The voice Kaede used when he was three decisions away from violence and needed all of them to be the right ones.
“She wanted to protect herself.” Euouae’s projection drifted closer, his translucent form hovering near the foot of the bed. “The gap between an attack and her mates reaching her—she’s calculated it. Obsessively. She knows exactly how many seconds she’d be defenseless if someone got past you, past Zyxel, past the guards—and ultimately, before I could take control.”
Of course she had. Selena’s mind ran on threat assessment the way other people’s ran on oxygen. She cataloged vulnerabilities like a targeting system, and the one she couldn’t solve—the window where she was unarmed and her mates were too far—would have gnawed at her until she found an answer.
This was her answer.
If she was built under the same program as his sisters, the Fab Five, and himself, she would’ve fit in perfectly.
“She could have told me.” The words came out quieter than he intended. Rougher. “Discussed it. Let me weigh the tactical implications before she—”
“Before she made a decision about her own body and her own soul?” Euouae’s voice held no judgment. That was worse than judgment. “You told me yourself, Kaede. Her choices are sacred.”
His own words. Thrown back at him with perfect precision.
Kaede exhaled through his teeth.
He understood.
That was the part that ground against his ribs like Aldawi’s claws—heunderstood. Selena wasn’t impulsive. She was practical, strategic, brutally clear-eyed about the math of survival in ways that most people couldn’t stomach. Every decision she made passed through the same calculus:What keeps my people and those I love alive? What gives us the best odds?
Bonding with Ryzen was a tactical decision dressed in the language of fate. A weapon acquired. A vulnerability eliminated. She’d looked at the gap in her defenses, identified the solution, and executed. Clean. Efficient. The kind of operational thinking Kaede had trained into her himself.
He should be proud.
He wanted to put his fist through the bulkhead.
Not because of Ryzen. The male was broken in ways Kaede recognized—the hollow space where a twin bond had been ripped away, the careful distance of someone who’d lost everything and couldn’t afford to want again. Kaede had no quarrel with grief. Grief was honest.
What he hated—what sat like acid in his chest and corroded every rational thought he tried to layer over it—was that she’d feltforced. That the galaxy had narrowed her options until bonding her soul to another male was the most logical choice.That his nestqueen, carrying his daughter, walking into hostile territory surrounded by enemies who wanted her dead or controlled, had looked at her situation and decided she needed aweaponmore than she needed another lover.
