Now I just had to figure out how to use it—before the Verya used me.
37
Zyxel
The mess hall smelled like recycled air and something vaguely grain-based that theAbyss’sfood systems insisted was nutritious.
Zyxel registered it automatically—the metallic undertone of processed ventilation, the faint sweetness of whatever fruit-adjacent compound Selena had been eating, and beneath it all, the sharp mineral note of his own medical tea steeping in the secondary prep station. Three minutes left on the infusion. He’d timed it to coincide with her second plate, because she always ate in waves—ravenous first, measured second—and the gap between them was the precise window where the tea’s thermal compounds would be most effective for nutrient absorption.
He’d been tracking her meals since Destima. Quietly. The way he tracked everything that mattered—with data, attention, and the particular brand of devotion he’d once reserved for endangered xenolinguistic databases.
Kaede had risen from the table moments ago, the commander surfacing through the mate with an efficiencythat still impressed Zyxel despite himself. A brief exchange with Selena—low voices, the weight of unfinished conversations shelved for later—and then he was gone. Back to the bridge. Back to the war that followed them like a shadow with teeth.
Which left Zyxel to do what he did best.
He crossed the mess hall on legs that still felt borrowed. Less than a week in demi-human form, and the disconnect between intention and execution had narrowed but not vanished. His knees bent at angles his body kept trying to correct. His center of gravity sat too high—a persistent wrongness, like standing on the edge of a platform that never quite steadied. But his hands worked. His hands had always worked, regardless of configuration.
He reached Selena’s table and lifted her empty plate before she could push back from the surface.
She blinked up at him. Those dark eyes—assessing, warm, edged with the particular alertness of a woman who’d been calculating galactic strategy between bites of breakfast. Her spots pulsed faintly along her collarbones. Blue. Pink. Soft.
And thinly around them, threaded through her like a new vein—gold. Bright. Unmistakable.
He set the plate on the return station and came back with the tea.
The cup was ceramic—one of the few non-synthetic pieces aboard. He’d found it in the galley’s storage during their first day and claimed it without asking, because the bioactive compounds in his blend reacted poorly with the ship’s standard polymer drinkware. Small details. The kind most people dismissed.
Zyxel didn’t dismiss anything.
He placed the cup in front of her. Steam curled upward, carrying the delicate floral notes he’d calibrated specifically for her—mild enough not to trigger nausea, warm enough to soothe the low-grade inflammation that pregnancy compounded. He’dbeen adjusting the formula since Destima, cross-referencing Xylo’s nutritional data with his own research on demihuman gestation.
She hadn’t asked him to.
She didn’t need to.
“Thank you.” Selena wrapped both hands around the cup, and the simple gesture did something inconvenient to the center of his chest. “You know you don’t have to keep making this.”
He sat across from her. The bench was too narrow for his frame—his shoulders exceeded the design specifications by a margin—but he’d adapted. “Your iron levels have stabilized since you started drinking it regularly. Your cortisol markers are lower. And the baby’s growth metrics have remained consistent despite the stress of travel.” Raising an eyebrow, he gave her a pointed look. “So yes. I do.”
Something shifted in her expression. Not the exasperation he expected—the fond, tolerant look she wore when her mates fussed—but something quieter. She took a sip and held his gaze over the rim.
“I figured you felt what happened.”
The words landed precisely where she intended them.
Zyxel’s jaw tightened. Not from anger—he was specific about these distinctions, the way he was specific about everything. The reaction was involuntary. A muscle memory of the sensation that had torn him from sleep hours ago with the subtlety of a hull breach.
He’d been in the secondary quarters Kaede had assigned him—a sparse compartment adjacent to the royal suite, close enough to respond to threats, far enough to maintain the boundaries they were all still negotiating even though she hadn’t unwelcomed him to her nestbed. Sleep had come slowly, the way it always did in this form. His body needed rest but didn’t knowhow to find it without the comforting weight of a coil, without the grounding pressure of scales pressed against stone.
And then the bond had detonated.
Not pain. Not alarm. Something far worse.
Arousal—white-hot, cascading, utterly foreign in its intensity—had slammed through the crimson thread like a current through unshielded wiring. His body had responded before his mind could process the source. Heat flooded through him, pooling low and urgent, and his newly configured anatomy had reacted with a specificity that his scholarly mind found deeply mortifying.
He’d spilled his own essence into the sheets before he’d fully woken. An involuntary response to the flood of sensation pouring through the bond—her pleasure, her need, her body opening to something vast and consuming and not him.
Three hundred years of disciplined restraint. Undone in seconds by a psychic bond and someone else’s lovemaking to hisenax.
