She was watching.
He didn’t know how long she’d been there—somewhere at the edge of the training yard, maybe, or perhaps just reaching through their connection to check on him. But he felt her presence settle against his consciousness like a hand pressed to his cheek. Pride. Concern. Love.
So much love it made his chest ache.
For her—for hisenax—he would fight until his body gave out. He would learn to move in this unfamiliar skin. He would become the weapon she needed, the protector she deserved, the mate who stood beside his clanbrothers and formed a wall no enemy could breach.
For her, he would become something more than the scholar who hid from the universe.
“One more round,” he said.
His muscles screamed their protest. His lungs burned with exhaustion. Every instinct demanded rest, demanded he shift back to his natural form where movement felt right and balance felt true.
He ignored all of it.
Kaede studied him for a long moment, those cold deadly eyes reading something in Zyxel’s face that he couldn’t name. Then the assassin reactivated his psydaggers, violet-blue light blooming against the darkening sky.
“One more round,” Kaede agreed. “Ready?”
14
Selena
The clash of weapons rang across the training yard like a song written in violence.
I stood at the railing’s edge, one hand pressed to the swell of my belly, the other gripping weathered stone. My spots flickered in rhythm with each strike—brown, green, orange—betraying emotions I couldn’t name. Pride. Fear. Longing. The bioluminescence beneath my skin had never been good at keeping secrets.
Three males moved across the yard below.
Kaede was shadow given form—feral, lethal, every motion calculated for maximum damage with minimum effort. His psydagger hummed violet-blue as he drove Zyxel back, correcting angles with blows rather than words. Training through impact. Teaching the way predators taught: survival or surrender.
Ryzen was storm. Eight spirit daggers wove through the air around him, emerald light tracing patterns that seemed random but weren’t. They danced like the wind blowing fallen leaves.Each blade moved with independent purpose while remaining part of a greater whole—nine minds functioning as one.
Where Kaede was certainty, Ryzen was adaptation.
And Zyxel…
My newest mate stumbled, caught himself, adjusted. His demi-human form moved wrong—I could see it even from here. The tension in his shoulders as muscles worked too hard. The way his weight kept shifting, searching for a center of gravity that no longer existed. Where his powerful serpent tail should have been, two unfamiliar legs carried a body still learning to be bipedal.
But he wasn’t giving up.
The crimson thread that bound us pulsed with his determination, and I felt his discomfort as clearly as if it were my own. The phantom ache of a missing limb. The wrongness of wearing skin that didn’t fit. He’d done this for me—transformed into something uncomfortable, something foreign, probably because Kaede had told him to. Because I needed protectors who could blend into the CEG station without drawing attention.
Because my safety mattered more to him than his comfort.
My chest tightened.
He looked different in this form. Still Zyxel—the curved black horns sweeping back from his crown, the angular face with sharp cheekbones, the chartreuse eyes that tracked everything with scholarly intensity. But the sleek armor of his scales had softened into warm brown skin. Long black hair spilled over broad shoulders. When his lips parted with exertion, I caught the flash of fangs, the flicker of a forked tongue.
Mine.
The thought rose unbidden, fierce and possessive. The same way I’d felt about Kaede from the moment our bond snapped into place. The same way I felt about all of them—these dangerous, devoted males who had somehow become my constellation.
Golden warmth spread through my consciousness.
“You’re staring.”
Vowels. My Oetsae symbiont, manifesting as a voice in my mind rather than his usual projected form. His presence felt like sunlight filtering through clouds—gentle, persistent, impossible to ignore.
