She chose me. She keeps choosing me. Every morning she wakes in my bed and doesn't reach for a weapon. Every time she walks the station wearing my mark and doesn't hide it. Every decision she makes that binds her deeper into this empire she never asked for and now helps run.
The force of it bows my spine. I close my eyes, and my marks flare bright, bright enough that even through closed lids I see the purple-white glow painting the darkness. My hand on her throat trembles, and I hate that, the evidence of what she does to me, how she reaches past every defense I've ever built and touches the thing underneath.
She feels me shaking. Through the bond, I feel her feel it, and the tenderness that rises in her almost breaks me worse than anything else.
"Your turn," she says. Quiet. Steady. A demand disguised as an invitation.
I could refuse. Could pull back behind the walls I've maintained since my father disappeared and left me a station full of wolves to manage at nineteen. Could give her the controlled version, the measured portion, the amount of myself I've calculated is safe to offer.
Instead, I let go.
The walls come down, and I feel her gasp as it hits her, the full unedited weight of what I feel for this woman whowalked into my station as cargo and became the axis my world turns on.
It is vast. That's the only word for it.
Vast and terrifying and so consuming that I understand, in this moment, why the Empri bond was designed to be chosen slowly, carefully, over years of gradual connection. Because receiving this much at once is like staring into a star. It should burn. It should destroy. It should be too much for a human nervous system to process.
She doesn't look away. Through the bond, through my hand on her mark, I feel her take it all in and not break under it. Her eyes are wet, but her gaze is iron, and the sound she makes is not a sob. It's closer to a battle cry swallowed at the last second.
My love is not kind. I know this.
It is possessive and consuming and ruthless, the love of a man who would glass a sector to keep her safe and would feel nothing about the dead except satisfaction. I love her the way I run this station: completely, with absolute authority, tolerating no competition and no compromise. It is the love of a monster who found the one thing that makes the monstrous feel like purpose instead of pathology.
She feels all of it. Every dark corner of it. Every possessive, violent, desperate inch.
And she doesn't pull away.
Her hand comes up to cover mine where it rests against her mark, pressing harder, pulling more of the connection through. Her other hand finds my jaw, turns my face toward hers. She's close enough that I can count the darker flecks in her irises, can smell the salt of the tears she hasn't let fall, can feel her breath against my mouth.
"That's terrifying," she whispers.
"Yes."
"Don't you dare put those walls back up."
The sound I make might be a laugh. It comes from somewhere deep and unguarded, a place I'd forgotten existed. "I couldn't if I wanted to. You've ruined me for pretending."
Her mouth finds mine. The kiss is slow and devastating, the bond amplifying every sensation until I can't distinguish between my heartbeat and hers, between my desire and the echo of hers feeding back through the connection. Her fingers curl in my hair, and the small pain of it sings through both of us simultaneously, a shared gasp that neither of us can claim as only their own.
When she pulls back, her pupils are wide, her lips swollen, her mark blazing against her throat like a captured star.
"We've been through fire," she says.
"We have."
"And whatever comes next. The anomaly. The 7 Protocol. Whatever war your brother thinks is coming. We face it."
"Together."
The word settles between us with the weight of a treaty signed in something more binding than ink. I turn my hand under hers, lace our fingers together over the mark, and feel the bond pulse in recognition. Two heartbeats synchronized. Two monsters who found each other in the dark and decided that the dark was better shared.
It isn't a happy ending. The threats still orbit like debris, and the next crisis is already taking shape in communications I haven't answered yet. Aura Zalt. The Obsidian Protocol. The anomaly and its secrets, and the men who went through and never came back.
But Talia is beside me, and her hand is in mine, and for the first time in six years the weight of this station doesn't rest on my shoulders alone.
That's enough. For now, in this room, with the void outside the hull and the wolves outside the door, it is enough.
Chapter 18
