The void where Xenak’s twin bond had been ached a fraction less.
Not filled. Not replaced. He would never insult his brother’s memory with that kind of erasure. But the hemorrhaging had slowed. The wound had company now—something golden pressed against it, not healing, but holding.
He’d done the forbidden thing. Bonded. Merged souls with someone outside his kind, outside his galaxy, outside every law his people had carved into culture before he was born. And now he could feel her dreaming against his consciousness like a second heartbeat, and the sound of it was the steadiest thing he’d known since Xenak was taken.
“What should I expect from this.”
Kaede’s voice cut through the dim quarters—low, controlled, stripped of everything except precision. Not a question. A demand shaped like one.
Ryzen considered the male across from him. The rolling disk. The unblinking stare. The absolute stillness that Ryzen had learned, over weeks of shared training and proximity, was Kaede’s version of barely contained fury.
He’d been sitting there all night. Had probably felt the moment the bond snapped into place through his own connection to Selena—the new thread weaving itself into the web that tied her to her constellation. And instead of breaking down the door, instead of driving a psydagger through Ryzen’s spine while he lay unconscious and exposed, Kaede had pulled up a chair.
Sat down.
Waited.
That restraint was more terrifying than violence would have been.
Ryzen shifted beneath Selena’s weight, careful, deliberate—easing her off his chest and onto the mattress without jarring her awake. She made a sound. Low, protesting. Her fingers tightened in his hair for a breath before relaxing, her body curling instinctively toward the warmth he’d left behind.
Through the bond, her dreaming rippled. Then settled.
He sat up. Swung his legs over the edge of the bed and stood.
Nude. Exposed. No armor, no daggers manifested, no spiritforce barrier between himself and the most lethal male he’d ever met. He stood anyway, because modesty was a luxury he’d forfeited the moment he’d let Selena climb into his lap and shatter every rule his people had ever built.
Kaede’s gaze didn’t waver. Didn’t drop. The disk kept turning between his fingers.
“We’re tied together now.” Ryzen’s voice came out rough. Raw. Like something had scraped his throat from the inside out—and maybe it had. The bonding had taken more from himthan he’d anticipated. More than the old texts had described. “Permanently.”
“How.”
“Spiritforce merging. My people called it soul-braiding before they outlawed it.” He met Kaede’s eyes without flinching. Owed him that much. “Her spiritforce is threaded through mine. Mine through hers. The bond is wider than what she shares with her mates—different in nature. I can feel her thoughts. She’ll feel mine, once she learns to manage the connection.”
Silence. The disk turned.
“And the daggers.”
“She can absorb them now. Any I give her, she can take into herself—store them the way I store them, in the runes. In her case...” He paused, searching for the right framework. “In her spots. They’ll respond to her spiritforce as if they were her own.”
“Summon them.”
“Yes. Call them. Wield them. Dismiss them. The spiritforce bond gives her access to everything a soul-braided partner would share among my kind.” His jaw tightened. “It’s why the Verya outlawed the practice. Shared spiritforce is shared power. Shared vulnerability. A bonded pair is stronger together but devastating to each other if the bond is severed.”
Something shifted behind Kaede’s eyes. The first crack in the mask—not anger, not jealousy. Calculation. The tactical mind behind those slitted pupils was already running scenarios. Already mapping how spirit daggers in Selena’s hands changed the defensive calculus for the CEG station.
“So she got what she wanted.” Flat. Quiet.
“She got what sheaskedfor. Whether it’s what she wanted...” Ryzen let the sentence hang. Because the truth was more complicated than a weapon. He could feel it even now—the bond humming between them, alive and restless, threaded with undercurrents neither of them had bargained for.
Kaede uncrossed his legs. Leaned forward. The disk stopped turning.
“Then why.”
Two words. But Ryzen heard every question buried beneath them. Why her. Why now. Why this instead of a simpler arrangement—training, proximity, protection without the permanent entanglement of merged souls.
He’d asked himself the same questions in the seconds before the bond sealed. Had found answers that weren’t clean, weren’t simple, weren’t the kind of thing a warrior who’d spent three centuries avoiding exactly this could justify with logic alone.
