Something in his chest turned over. Hard.
It’s not love, he told himself. It was too soon for that. Too raw. Too undefined. But it was something. Something warm. Something worth carrying.
Her gaze shifted. Past him. To the chair.
“I knew you’d be here.”
Kaede’s expression didn’t crack. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.”
She stretched again—slow, unconcerned, the sheets pooling at her waist—and the bond pulsed with affection so fierce it nearly knocked Ryzen sideways a second time. Not directed at him. At Kaede. A love so deeply rooted and thoroughly certain that feeling even the edges of it through the soul-braid made Ryzen’s breath catch.
That was what she had with her mates. That impossible, gravitational certainty.
He wasn’t jealous. He was awed.
“Love me,” Selena said.
Two words. Simple as breathing. Said with the quiet confidence of a woman who already knew the answer and asked anyway because she liked hearing the silence that followed—the silence where Kaede’s entire body said what his mouth refused to.
The disk stopped turning.
Ryzen looked away. Gave them the moment. Found his pants folded on the desk—Kaede’s doing, probably, because Ryzen certainly hadn’t folded them—and pulled them on while the quiet between mates filled the room with something too intimate for a third party to witness.
Through the bond, Selena’s consciousness brushed his. Light. Deliberate this time.
Gratitude. And something that felt like welcome.
He let it settle. Didn’t name it. Didn’t chase it.
One day left until the CEG. One day to figure out what they’d built last night, and whether it would be enough to survive what was coming. This evening, they would arrive.
The bond pulsed between them. Emerald and gold. Steady. New.
He’d carry her light. She’d carry his.
Whatever came next, they wouldn’t face it alone.
36
Selena
Something was different.
I sat up slowly, sheets pooling at my waist, and reached inward before I reached for anything else. Habit. Instinct. The same way I’d taken stock of my bonds every morning since Xylo first wove his thread through my consciousness—check the web, feel for damage, count the lights.
All present. All steady. Neon-green for Kaede, bright and burning near. Crimson for Zyxel, warm and watchful somewhere deeper in the ship. The distant threads stretched thin across the galaxy—teal, pale green, jade, and turquoise—my Circuli mates, each one a faint pulse that said still alive.
And then the new one.
Emerald.
Ryzen’s thread wasn’t like the others. My mates’ bonds sat in my mental architecture like windows with doors—openings I could widen or narrow, shutters I could close when I needed quiet. Manageable. Familiar. I’d learned to live with them theway you learn to live with extra rooms in a house you’re still furnishing.
His was a wall knocked out entirely.
Not a window. Not a door. A structural change—wider, thicker, reinforced at the edges with something that felt less like thread and more like root system. Emerald light burned against my mental shields brighter than anything else in the web, and when I focused on it, the connection hummed with a depth that made my breath catch.
Soul-braid. That’s what he’d called it. I was starting to understand why his people feared it.
