I didn't interrupt.
"Before the Fall," he continued, "Arkhevari did not exist in isolation. The balance was not abstract. It was embodied. Male and female. Not in dominance. Not in hierarchy. Incounterpressure." My pulse ticked faster. "After the fall, something unheard of happened. The females aged," he said quietly. "They died."
That landed hard.
"In Nox Eternum," he went on, "time behaves differently. Our kind can endure it. They could not, not forever. Each rebirth cost them more. Memory, coherence. Eventually… they burned out."
I swallowed.
"And the males?" I asked.
His aura shifted. I saw it then, subtle, but unmistakable. A darkening at the edges, like smoke threading through light. "We endure. But without them, something corrodes. The longer the imbalance lasts, the more our auras darken. Aggression sharpens. Judgment fractures. Control becomes… brittle."
An eon-long war suddenly snapped into focus. Conquest. Retreat. Obsession. Nythor. "This isn't about romance, is it?" I guessed quietly.
"No," he replied. "It's about survival."
I leaned back slowly, my mind was racing a hundred miles an hour, and pieces were rearranging themselves with brutal clarity. "And you didn't tell me, because you wanted to see whether I'd run."
"Yes."
I stared at him, the urge to throttle him was warring with something colder, more precise.
"You're infuriating," I told him.
He inclined his head slightly. "So I've been told."
I closed my eyes for a moment, steadying myself, then opened them again. The anger was still there. Bright. Sharp. Clean. I held onto it deliberately. Because the alternative… the alternative was… messy.
He still kidnapped me. That fact didn't change just because his reasoning had structure. Didn't change because his logic held up under scrutiny. Didn't change because, for the first time since this whole nightmare began, something he said actually…aligned. That didn't absolve him. It didn't make it right. It just made it harder to dismiss. And I hated that.
My gaze flicked back to him, taking him in again, not as the thing that had taken me, but as the system behind it. Ancient. Controlled. Fracturing. Not a god. Not a myth. A mechanism. And mechanisms had rules. Which meant… my thoughts shifted, recalibrated, and rearranged themselves around new variables, whether I liked it or not. If what he was saying was true… if Arkhevari required this bond to stabilize, then his behavior wasn't random. It was adaptive. Necessary. That realization didn't soften anything. It sharpened it. Because necessary actions didn't care about consent. A slow, cold understanding settled in. He hadn't taken me because he wanted to.
He had taken me because heneededto. My jaw tightened. That didn't make me safer. It made me valuable. And being valuable had never, in the history of anything, been synonymous with being free. Despite that, a flicker of unease slipped beneath my anger. I crushed it immediately.
No!I wasn't going to let this turn into justification. He had been in my head. He had overridden my will. He had made that decision for me. That didn't get reframed. That didn't get forgiven. And yet… something in me refused to settle back into clean lines.
Refused to stay neatly in outrage. Because under the anger, under the violation, under the very real desire to put as much distance between us as possible, there was something else. Something quieter. More dangerous. Not trust. Definitely not that. But?—
Attention.
Awareness.
The kind that didn't switch off when it should. The kind that tracked him without permission. The kind that noticed things I had no interest in noticing. The way his controlwasn't arrogance, it was necessity stretched thin. The way his answers came without hesitation, without deflection. The way he admitted to the violation without trying to excuse it.
That should have made him easier to hate. It didn't. Which was… unacceptable. I shifted slightly, irritated at myself now, the feeling sliding under my skin like something I couldn't quite reach.
This wasn't him. That was the important part. This wasn't him pushing into my mind. This wasn't influence. There was no pressure. No external force. Which meant, like it or not, this was me. My reaction.
My… whatever this was. And that made it worse. Because I couldn't shut it down. I didn't have a model for it. No framework. No clean category to drop it into and move on. My brain wanted to label it. To define it. To contain it.
It refused to be contained.
The sensation lingered, low, persistent, impossible to ignore. Curiosity.
Sharp. Focused. Relentless. The same instinct that had pulled me into astrophysics in the first place. The need to understand what didn't fit. And right now—he didn't fit. I exhaled slowly, tension coiling tighter instead of loosening.
I opened my eyes and stared at him, hard. "Next time, you don't get to decide what I can handle."
