She would wake. She would look at him with those eyes—defiant and guilty and brave and exhausted and soishingbeautiful it still caught him off guard after all this time. She would brace for his anger. His disappointment. His lecture about tactical communication and operational security and the hundred other things he could say to make her feel small.
He wouldn’t say any of them.
He’d hand her the suit disk. Help her dress. Walk her to food. And somewhere between the mess hall and whatever came next, he’d find the words for what he actually felt, buried beneath thefrustration and the fear and the bone-deep exhaustion of loving someone who treated her own survival like an afterthought.
She was his star. His catastrophe. The axis his entire universe turned on.
He’d protect her from everything except herself. And apparently, that was the one threat he couldn’t counter.
The disk turned in his hand.
Kaede waited.
35
Ryzen
Ryzen surfaced from sleep the way he’d surfaced from every unconscious moment for three hundred years—spiritforce reaching outward before his eyes opened, scanning for threats with the autonomic efficiency of a warrior who’d survived too many ambushes to wake gently.
His daggers answered first.
All eight erupted from their discarded position on the floor in a silent detonation of emerald light, snapping into attack formation before his conscious mind had finished registering the room. They fanned outward in a lethal corona—blades orienting, edges brightening, spiritforce humming through each one with the focused aggression of weapons that had been dormant too long.
They found the threat immediately.
A figure in the chair. Close. Too close. Sitting in the dark with the coiled stillness of a predator who’d been watching for hours, and every spirit dagger locked onto the silhouette with killing precision—eight points of emerald light converging onthe male’s throat, chest, and temples in a pattern designed to end a fight before it began.
Kaede didn’t move.
Slitted neon-green eyes stared back at him through the ring of blades, utterly unimpressed. One leg crossed over the other. Arms folded. Something small and round turning between his fingers—Selena’s living suit disk, Ryzen realized. Rolling it across his knuckles with the absent precision of a male who’d been sitting in that chair long enough to develop a habit.
Not a threat. Selena’s most dangerous mate, yes. Her most protective. The male who would gut him with a psydagger and feel nothing but mild satisfaction if Ryzen gave him sufficient reason.
But not a threat. Not right now.
Ryzen exhaled and pulled his spiritforce inward.
The daggers responded—not reluctantly, not with the chaotic delay they’d shown last night when the bond had scattered them across the floor like spent ammunition. They retracted cleanly, edges dimming, blades dissolving back into the runes mapped across his skin one by one until the room’s only light was the faint emerald pulse of his own markings and the steady green glow of Kaede’s eyes.
No threats. No fight. And the last thing he needed was to accidentally start a war with the assassin who’d claimed Selena first and hardest.
The room settled.
And then Ryzen felt it.
Weight on his chest. Warmth pressed against his bare skin from collar to hip—a body curled into him with the boneless trust of someone who’d fallen asleep mid-collapse and hadn’t moved since. Fingers tangled loosely in his hair. A heartbeat tapping against his ribs in a rhythm that wasn’t his own.
Selena.
Still naked. Still draped over him, her cheek pressed to the flat of his chest, her breath warm and even against the rune above his heart. Her glowing spots had dimmed to a faint pulse—blue, pink, violet—cycling with her sleep like bioluminescence at low tide.
And inside his mind—
Stars.
She was everywhere.
Her spiritforce threaded through his consciousness like roots through ancient stone—golden, warm, impossibly present. He could feel her dreaming. Not the content, but the texture of it—something soft and unhurried, edged with the particular peace of a mind that had finally stopped running. Her thoughts brushed his in her sleep, absent and familiar, as if they’d always been there. As if this was how his mind had always been meant to feel.
