“Fine.” He forced his beast to settle, to categorize rather than react. Food vendors. Machinery. Human sweat and alien spices and the sharp chemical tang of hover-transport exhaust. Beneath it all, her sweet familiar scent anchored him to the present moment. “Where do you want to go?”
“You kidnapped me. Shouldn’t you have a plan?”
“I planned the kidnapping. The rest is improvisation.”
She gave him a startled laugh. It transformed her face, wiping away the strain of the past weeks, and something in his chest loosened at the sound.
They walked without direction, letting the flow of foot traffic carry them away from the tower’s gleaming shadow. The simpler clothes she’d chosen let her blend with the crowd. Without the diamonds and the severe hairstyle, she could have been any young female enjoying an afternoon in the market district.
My young female.
The possessiveness of the thought should have unsettled him. Instead, it settled into his bones like truth.
“I used to come here sometimes with my father,” she said as they entered the sprawling chaos of the central market. Stalls crowded against each other in cheerful disorder, their awnings a patchwork of faded colors, their wares spilling out onto the walkways in defiance of any municipal planning. “Before he decided I was too fragile for crowds.”
“You remember it?”
“Bits and pieces. The colors. The noise. He bought me honeyed nuts from a vendor who had a pet bird on his shoulder,” she said softly, lost in her memories. “I wonder if that stall is still here.”
He guided her deeper into the market, watchful without being obvious about it. Old habits died hard. He tracked the movement of bodies around them, noted the exits, assessed potential threats with the automatic attention of long training. But he also made himself look—really look—at the world Ember had grown up in.
The stalls sold everything imaginable. Fabrics in jewel tones, their surfaces shimmering with embedded light-threads. Food from a dozen different worlds, the aromas mingling into something simultaneously appetizing and bewildering. Tech components and hand-crafted jewelry and live plants in sealed atmosphere globes. A chaos of commerce that somehow worked, each vendor’s territory clearly understood despite the apparent disorder.
“This way.” She tugged him towards a corner stall, her face brightening. “I know this place.”
The vendor was elderly, his skin weathered to the texture of old leather, but his eyes were sharp as he watched them approach. A mechanical bird—not the same one from her childhood, surely, but similar enough—clicked and whirred on a perch beside his display of roasted nuts and candied fruits.
“Two bags of the honey-spiced,” she said, already reaching for her credit chip.
The old man’s gaze lingered on her face. “You look familiar, miss.”
“I have one of those faces.”
“Mmm.” He handed over the bags, his weathered fingers brushing hers. “Enjoy your day.”
They moved on as she pressed one of the warm bags into his hands. The nuts were sweet and sharp with spices he didn’t recognize, each bite releasing a small burst of heat on his tongue.
“Good?”
“Strange.” He took another one anyway. “But good.”
She laughed again, that same startled sound, and he realized how rarely he’d heard it in the past two weeks. The tower had swallowed her joy along with her time, demanding everything she had to give and then demanding more.
She needed this,he thought.We both did.
They wandered for nearly an hour, stopping when something caught Ember’s interest, moving on when the crowd grew too thick. She showed him the fountain where she’d thrown coins as a child, making wishes she no longer remembered. She pointed out the building that had once housed her favorite bookshop, now converted into something called a “sensory experience lounge.” She bought them both cups of something called kava from a stall run by an elderly couple who argued good-naturedly about the proper brewing temperature.
He watched her come alive. The tension bled from her shoulders. The lines around her eyes smoothed. She smiled easily, laughed often, and looked at him with an openness that made his beast purr with satisfaction.
This is what I’m protecting,he realized.Not just her life. This. Her joy.
They were examining a display of hand-carved wooden figures—alien designs that she said reminded her of something from an ancient text—when the scent hit him.
Vultor. Male. Familiar.
He went still, every muscle locking into alertness. He automatically reached for her wrist and drew her closer.
“What is it?”
