The sun touched the villa’s western wall when they stopped.
No signal. Just the moment when all three of them arrived at the same conclusion simultaneously and let their weapons fall to neutral.
Kaede stood still and let his lungs return to something reasonable. His shoulder ached. His knees had accumulated the specific exhaustion of hours of adjusted stance. Both filed: minor. Both acceptable.
He looked at the two males beside him.
Ryzen, watching the horizon with his daggers resting quiet in their orbit. The wound-tight stillness he’d arrived with was gone—spent, used for something. He looked like someone who’d found a direction to push and pushed hard. A former enforcer who’d defected because they’d crossed a line they couldn’t walk back from and ended up bound to a cause that wasn’t his species’ war to fight.
And Zyxel, sitting on the ground with his back against the yard’s low wall, long black hair damp at the temples, chartreuse eyes still surveying the yard the way they cataloged everything. The demi-human form looked less wrong on him than it had at the start of the afternoon. More inhabited. Like he’d finally stopped arguing with it and let it be useful.
There was movement at the villa’s upper terrace.
Kaede caught it in his peripheral and looked up.
Selena stood at the railing. Silver hair catching late light, spots quiet and warm along her arms. The cubs clustered around her—Meti pressed against her side, Nocrez and Neazzos perched at the railing barrier with the absorbed focus of young predators trying to work out what they’d just witnessed. Selena’s hand rested on Meti’s head, easy and grounding.
Her gaze was on the yard.
On them.
He held it. Let her see him look back. Through their bond she was steady and warm, lit with something he recognized even across the distance—that particular quality she carried when the people she loved were doing something that made her breathe easier. When the shape of her protection looked more solid than it had before.
We weren’t friends—not yet—but we’re Selena’s in some form or another.He let the thought settle, clean and clear.Might never be close. But we were something more useful: a weapon forged for a single purpose. Selena’s safety. The Verya could scheme and manipulate sending their voices across the dark—threading offers through the gaps between stars—and offer their poisoned peace.
They’d find us ready. They’d find us unbreakable.
19
Selena
I’d been dreading this conversation for two days.
Every time one of them had opened their mouth in the last fifty-two hours—a question starting to form, a pause before words—I’d redirected. Changed the subject. Found something that needed doing in another room. I was good at it. I’d had a lot of practice keeping people in the dark for their own protection—to prevent any hurt feelings—and the skills translated, even if using them on my own children felt being sliced by a psydagger all over again.
But the terrace had been my idea. I’d suggested it when Neazzos had asked, again, if they could please go somewhere they weren’t being watched by the household staff and the security drones, somewhere they could just sit and be without someone hovering.
Unfortunately for them, they would always be watched. Just like me. Not only by curious bystanders, but from their clanfather Kaede’s security to make sure we were safe and protected.
The training yard had started a new session below. The light was good. The shade here was real and deep, and the low stone railing gave them something to grip.
Practical reasons. Good ones. I’d stacked them up in my head like a wall.
None of them were why I’d said yes.
The real reason was that I couldn’t avoid this conversation much longer, and I’d rather have it out here, in the open air, where the training below gave us something to look at when the silence got too heavy. Where the amber afternoon light made everything feel less like a closed room.
Where I could pretend, for a few more minutes, that I hadn’t already mapped out every version of how this went.
Neazzos had both forearms hooked over the railing, body pitched forward so far he was basically horizontal, tail flicking behind him in tight, rapid arcs that betrayed excitement he didn’t bother hiding. Every collision in the yard below—every time blade caught blade or a body shifted hard to cover a gap—he made a sound. Small, involuntary. A sharp inhale, or a soft chirp lodged somewhere between approval and delight. He’d been practically vibrating since we sat down. Tracking every movement with the fixed focus of a predator assessing something it wanted to understand completely so it could eventually imitate it.
Nocrez had both arms wrapped around mine from the moment we settled on the bench, and he hadn’t moved. He was pressed to my side—warm and solid and quietly radiating the kind of tension that had nowhere obvious to go—enormous deep blue-green eyes wide and blinking at every strike. He watched like someone bracing for impact that hadn’t arrived yet. Every time the blades connected with a sound that was too real, too sharp, I felt his grip tighten. Not fear, exactly. Something adjacent. An awareness that the people he loved were doingsomething that could go wrong, and no one had told him what to do with that.
And Meti—
Meti had simply folded herself into my lap.
No preamble. No asking. She’d climbed up with the practiced ease of a cub who’d been doing this since she was small enough to be carried in one arm, pressed her back to my chest, and gone still. Not restless still. Not the frozen quality of someone trying very hard not to react. The other kind—the kind I’d never quite found words for, the kind that made the back of my neck prickle every time I saw it, because Meti went still the way deep water went still.
