My marks are glowing faintly, a soft amber that I can see reflected in the viewport across the room. Steady. Content. Broadcasting something I've spent my whole life keeping locked behind control and calculation. I should be worried about that. I should be worried about a lot of things: Zane's grief, Elissa's confession, the war's aftermath, the empire that needs rebuilding.
I'm not worried about any of it.
For the first time in my life, I am lying still in a narrow bed with a woman who has every reason to hate me and doesn't, and the only thing I feel is the specific, dangerous peace of having something worth losing.
"You're thinking too loud." Her voice, rough with sleep, vibrating against my chest.
My hand tightens on her hip. "Can you actually feel that?"
"No." She shifts against me, just enough to settle deeper into the curve of my body. "But I know you."
She opens one eye. Brown and sharp and full of the particular intelligence that first made me look at her, years ago, in a briefing room on a station that doesn't exist anymore. Even half-asleep, with her hair a disaster and a crease from the pillow running across her cheek, she reads me like a systems diagnostic.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong." The words come out with a steadiness that surprises me because they're true. Not a deflection, not a strategic omission, not the careful editing I've done my entire life when someone asks me how I am. The truth, simple and whole and terrifying in its completeness. "Everything's exactly right."
"Liar." But she's smiling. A real smile, the kind she rations like ammunition, rare and devastating and aimed with precision. It transforms her face into something I want to memorize, want to keep, want to build walls around and fill with guards.
"Get used to it." She closes her eye again, pressing her face into my chest with a sigh that carries the last of her tension out of her body. "I'm not going anywhere."
The war is over. The scars remain, hers on her skin andmine glowing beneath it, and the brother grieving down the corridor and the sister in a holding suite who would have walked into the dark if someone had held the door.
But she's here. Her breath against my chest. Her body, scarred and warm and alive, curved into mine like she was always meant to occupy this space.
I close my eyes, press my lips to the top of her head, and let myself have this.
Just this.
For now, it's enough.
Chapter 17
Astra
The smellof scorched wiring followed me through every corridor on Veridian-7 like a dog that wouldn't stop heeling.
Three days since the Vex breached the outer ring. Three days since I killed more of them than I could count and nearly lost the man I loved in the process. The station was healing, the way stations do, with work crews and welding torches and the relentless hum of repair drones patching hull breaches that still whistled thin streams of cold when you pressed your palm to the walls. I could feel the temperature differential through my gloves as I walked the C-ring junction, cataloguing damage out of habit. Structural reinforcement at junction seven. Blown-out lighting panels replaced with temporary strips that cast everything in a bluish wash, making the faces of passing crew look like they'd been pulled from water.
Veridian-7 was resilient. The people who lived here had survived worse than a Vex incursion, or so the old-timers claimed, though the way they said it suggested they were trying to convince themselves as much as anyone. Scorchmarks still laced the bulkhead near the secondary security checkpoint. Someone had tried to scrub them away and given up halfway through, leaving a smear that looked like a bruise in the middle of fading.
I was resilient too. That's what I told myself, anyway, while the bruises on my ribs turned from purple to green and the stitched gash on my forearm itched under its biofilm seal with every movement.
"Venn." Corporal Hadley fell into step beside me, datapad in hand. "Dexter Torrence is requesting your presence in the security hub. He says, and I quote, 'at her earliest convenience, which I'd prefer to be now.'"
I bit the inside of my cheek to kill the smile before it reached my mouth. "Tell him I'm on my way."
Hadley glanced at me. Then at the direction I was already walking, which was toward the security hub, because I'd been heading there before he intercepted me. His expression said he was doing math he didn't want to show his work on.
"Copy that," he said, and peeled off.
The security hubwas operational again, though "operational" was generous. Half the displays were running on backup power, their interfaces stuttering every few seconds with a flicker that made my eyes ache. The main tactical board had been replaced entirely, the old one having taken a direct hit from a Vex plasma charge during the breach. The new one was military surplus, blocky and graceless, its display a flat green that belonged to a generation of tech most people had forgotten. It worked. That was enough.
Dexter stood at the center console, forearms bracedagainst the edge, his sleeves pushed up past his elbows. His syndicate marks traced the corded muscle of his forearms in patterns I could now read better than I wanted to admit. Calm, at the moment. Focused. The faintest luminous thread pulsing at his wrist where his heartbeat lived.
He looked up when I entered, and the marks shifted. Just barely. A warming along the lines at his throat, where the patterns disappeared beneath his collar.
"Earliest convenience," I said. "Here I am."
