“I know what I could have lost.” I step closer. The distance between us shrinks to nothing. “And I calculated the variables. Every single one. The way I calculate every system on this station. And the math was clear.”
“What math?”
“That losing you would be worse than losing anything else.”
Her composure breaks. Not slowly—all at once, like atmospheric shielding failing in a Cat-5 storm. She crashes into me, hands fisting in my shirt, face pressed against my chest, and she’s shaking and laughing and possibly crying and the sounds she makes are wrecked and raw and mine.
I catch her. Pull her tight against me, and the contact after hours of forced distance detonates every claiming instinct I’ve been holding back since that ship appeared on sensors.
My markings flare. Not danger-bright. Claiming-bright. Deep gold patterns that pulse in rhythms older than language, broadcasting possession and protection andmine, mine, mineto every cell in my body.
“Cetus.” She pulls back enough to look at my face. Her eyes are wet and blazing. “Don’t you ever risk everything for me like that again.”
“That’s not a promise I can make.”
“Cetus—”
I kiss her.
Not careful. Not gentle. Not the measured approach of a scientist managing variables. This is the adrenaline dump finding its target, days of pent-up need converting into something primal and uncontrolled. My hands grip her waist and haul her against me, and she gasps into my mouth—that sound, the one I’ve been imagining since the night I scored grooves in my shower tiles—and the reality of it obliterates whatever restraint I had left.
She kisses me back with matching desperation. Her fingers rake through my hair, across the markings on my neck, and when her nails drag over the bioluminescent patterns the sensation rockets through me—white-hot, blinding, every nerve ending lit up at once. The markings are wired directly into pleasure centers that exist for exactly this: a partner’s touch, cascading responses, rational thought gone.
I growl. The sound reverberates through harmonics that make the deck plates hum beneath our feet.
Her back hits the wall. I don’t remember moving her there, but my body is operating on protocols older than conscious thought. One hand braces beside her head, claws sinking into the stationplating with a shriek of metal. The other slides down her hip, her thigh, fingers hooking behind her knee and pulling her leg up against my waist—and the position presses us together in a way that makes us both groan.
“Cetus—God—your hands—”
My claws. Extended again. Pricking the fabric of her pants, tiny points of controlled danger against the soft flesh of her thigh. I should retract them. Should be careful. Should—
She wraps her fingers around my wrist and holds my hand where it is.
“Don’t,” she breathes against my mouth. “Don’t you dare pull back right now.”
Something snaps. Not a restraint I chose to release—a limit I didn’t know existed, shattering under the combined weight of her permission and my need.
I pin her against the wall with my full weight and she moans—God, that sound, the one I’ve been fantasizing about for days—and my hips roll forward on instinct, grinding against her, and the friction sends white-hot feedback through my entire system because the ridges are responding to her.
Swelling. Engorging. Each node along the underside of my cock thickening with blood, becoming more pronounced, more textured. Stimulation no human male can replicate. They press against my pants in a rigid line that catches against the heat between her thighs, and Dove’s eyes go wide.
“Oh.” Her breath stutters. “That’s—I can feel—”
“Yes.” My forehead drops to hers. The word comes out guttural, barely language. “They respond to you. To proximity. To pressure. To the sound you just made.”
She rolls her hips. Experimentally. Grinding against the ridge-line through two layers of fabric, and my vision whites out. Each node catches against her center—friction and pressure andfeedback cascading through my nervous system in waves that make my claws score deeper into the wall.
“Dove.” Her name is a warning. “If you do that again—”
She does it again. Deliberately. Harder. Her hands gripping my shoulders for leverage, her head tipping back against the wall, lips parted, eyes dark and half-lidded and watching my face come apart.
“Maybe I don’t want you to stop,” she whispers.
My mouth finds her throat. Her pulse hammers against my lips, wild and fast, and I drag my teeth across the spot—the specialized canines that ache when I look at her. The bite mark from days ago has faded to a shadow. The urge to replace it, to press down and claim and mark, roars through me hard enough to make my jaw tremble.
“Mine.” The word comes out in harmonics so low the air vibrates. So low the monitors on the far wall flicker. “Say it.”
“Yours.” No hesitation. No calculation. “I’m yours. I’ve been yours since I carried your cargo in a storm and didn’t charge extra—”
