The darkness of the ruined city pressed in around me, ancient and heavy with history. Somewhere above, the first stars were appearing, pinpricks of light in the deepening purple of the sky. The temperature was dropping, the cool evening air carrying the scent of dust and old stone.
I rose from my hiding spot and moved toward the building.
I had found her. Now I just had to get her out.
The ruins of my ancestors surrounded me as I approached, their broken forms silent witnesses to what was about to happen. Whatever awaited inside that building, whoever had taken Iris and thought they could keep her from those who cared about her, they were about to learn that they had made a serious mistake.
I was a communications specialist by training. A diplomat by choice. A wanderer by nature.
But tonight, I was a warrior who was not leaving without his mate.
CHAPTER 14
IRIS
Iknew he was here. Don’t ask me how, but I knew. It was something I sensed, like pricked intuition in a bad situation. Like the innate knowledge when you sense someone is watching you. Baleck was nearby. He’d come for me. Lots of feelings hit me as I sat on the cold hard floor, and none of them made a lot of sense.
My training told me to focus on escape plans, exit strategies, the layout of this room. But my mind kept circling back to the certainty that Baleck was out there, somewhere in these ruins, looking for me.
I’d never had this before. This sense of another person. Like a compass needle swinging toward magnetic north, I could feel him getting closer. It should have terrified me. Instead, it settled something restless in my chest.
I shifted against the rough stone wall, testing the ropes around my wrists for the hundredth time. Vax had retied them after dragging me to relieve myself in another crumbling room. The bastard had made them tighter than before, clearly annoyed that I’d nearly worked free of the original knots. My fingers were going numb.
But that wasn’t what occupied my thoughts.
Baleck was coming for me. I’d never had someone rescue me before. Not like this, anyway. In my line of work, if you got captured and you couldn’t extract yourself, a team came. Rescue missions were risky and costly, but operatives were not abandoned. This was not that kind of rescue mission. Baleck wasn’t here because he was ordered to be. He was here because…
Because he needed to save me. Me. The thought made my throat tight.
I’d spent my entire adult life alone. Not lonely, just alone. There was a difference. I didn’t make friends because friends became liabilities. I didn’t form attachments because attachments got you killed or, worse, got them killed. I ate in institutional cafeterias, slept in barracks or safe houses, and kept every interaction professional and brief.
It had worked for me. It kept me sharp, focused, alive.
But Baleck made me want something different. Something I didn’t have words for.
I thought about that night at the communal eating hall. The way he’d listened when I talked about being sorted at six years old. How he hadn’t pitied me or tried to fix it. He’d just heard me. And when I’d warned him I wasn’t relationship material, he’d pushed back gently but firmly. Like he saw through my walls and wasn’t intimidated by them.
I don’t plan to stop pursuing you. Unless you tell me flat out not to.
I hadn’t told him to stop. Couldn’t bring myself to say the words even though it would have been safer. Easier.
But nothing about Baleck felt easy. He made me feel exposed in a way that had nothing to do with combat or danger. He looked at me and I swear he could see everything I’d buried deep. The scared kid from the mining colony. The girl who’d lost everyone. The woman who convinced herself she didn’t need anyone.
Except I did need him. That was the terrifying part.
I needed his warmth on cold mountain ridges. His easy humor that made me almost smile. The way his skin shifted colors with his emotions, broadcasting everything he felt without shame or hesitation. He was so open, so genuine, and it made me want to be the same.
More than that, I felt safe with him. Which was absurd because I was the one with extensive combat training and assassination skills. I was supposed to be the dangerous one. But when I was with Baleck, something in me relaxed. Like I could stop scanning for threats for just a moment. Like I could breathe.
It scared the hell out of me. But it also felt freeing, like something completely out of my control. Like gravity or the pull of a planet’s orbit.
I thought about Cleo and Rezor. The D’tran leader had had that haunted, lost look every time I’d seen him since Cleo left. The male was clearly miserable, wandering around his settlement like a ghost. And Cleo had pushed back against their bond, gotten scared, and left with Mierva and Zara.
For what? To prove she had a choice? To maintain control?
I understood the impulse. I really did, and in fairness, I didn’t have the whole story of what went down between them. But looking at Rezor’s devastated face, I couldn’t see the point of denying a mate bond if that’s what was happening between Baleck and me. Life was short and brutal enough without rejecting the one good thing the universe decided to throw your way.
If Baleck was my mate, if this pull I felt was real and not just attraction or proximity or some trauma response to being kidnapped, then I wasn’t going to run from it. I’d faced down hostile forces, completed black ops missions, survived situationsthat should have killed me. I could handle falling for a color-shifting alien with kind eyes and a smart mouth.
