I sit. Not because the wounds demand it. Because her voice cracked onstubborn, and the crack wasn't anger.
Snowball and Pudding disappear into the tunnel system while Krilly works on my shoulder. They pause at the entrance, both looking back with those luminous green eyes. An acknowledgment. Then they're gone, moving together with the coordination of beings who share a language the jungle can't translate.
The inner chamber is intact. The cave's main entrance is destroyed, three months of work shredded, but the small sleeping chamber survived. Ten feet across. Moss bedding. The fire pit, somehow still holding embers.
Krilly cleans the wounds with water from the spring, her hands steady despite the fine tremor I can feel when her fingers press the moss compress against torn skin. The cold stings, then eases. Her face is close to my chest, focused on the damage, and her breath ghosts across the raw edges of the cuts.
"You threw yourself in front of it," she says quietly.
"Yes."
"It could have killed you."
"Yes."
"Why?"
The question is notwhy did you protect me.She knows why. The question is something deeper, something about the specific, desperate speed with which I moved, the way I didn't calculate or assess or weigh options. The way my body chose before my brain engaged.
"Because I can't." The words come out rough, stripped. Not the answer I planned. "I can't watch something hurt you. I can'tstand between you and a threat and choose to step aside. My body won't allow it."
Her hands still on my chest. The compress cools against torn skin.
"In the arena, I chose what to protect. Myself, mostly. Sometimes another fighter who'd earned my respect. It was tactical." My jaw tightens. "This isn't that."
"What is it?"
The question she's been waiting for. The one I promised to answerwhen this is over.We're bleeding and alive and the adrenaline is burning off, and I owe her the truth because she earned it in blood tonight, because she freed two creatures with the same hands that freed me, because she named an apex predator Pudding and looked at me like I was worth dying for.
"You asked me what I needed to tell you."
Her eyes come up. Green, steady, waiting.
"This isn't survival instinct. Not proximity, not gratitude, not the desperation of having no other options." Each word costs something I've been hoarding since long before this jungle: the currency of honesty, spent without guarantee of return. "I'm not choosing you because you're here. I'd choose you in a room full of alternatives. On a station full of people. Anywhere, under any circumstances, with every option available to me."
Her breathing has changed. Faster, shallow, her hands still flat against my chest where the blood has soaked through the compress.
"I spent most of my life not choosing. Doing what I was told, fighting who they pointed me at, enduring what they built into me. Three months alone in this jungle was the first time I had choices, and I chose to survive because surviving was all I knew." My hand finds hers on my chest, presses it down over the cuts she's treating, over the scars beneath them, over the skin wherethe harness used to sit. "Then you crashed into my jungle, and I chose you. Not survival.You."
"Horgox—"
"I need you to hear this while I'm still brave enough to say it." The words are ragged now, coming apart at the seams the way controlled things do when the pressure exceeds their design tolerance. "I chose to catch you when you ran. I chose to teach you instead of hauling you to safety. I chose to let you take apart my harness even though it terrified me. I chose to stay when every instinct said run, because running means running from you, and I can't—"
She kisses me.
Not the careful, tentative contact of a first exploration. The full-collision kiss of someone who has heard enough and is done waiting. Her hands fist in the fabric at my shoulders, pulling herself up to reach my mouth, and the stretch of it, the way she has to rise on her knees and I have to bend to meet her, the size difference that should be awkward but instead makes the contact feel like something hard-won—
Her mouth is warm. Insistent. Tastes like mineral water and the copper tang of adrenaline and something underneath that is specifically, unmistakablyher, and my brain shorts out for three full seconds before instinct takes over.
My hands find her waist. Grip. Pull her into my lap where she fits against me, knees bracketing my hips, her body flush against my chest. The contact stings where it presses against the cuts, and I don't care. I would bleed from a hundred wounds for the feeling of her mouth on mine.
The sound she makes against my lips is devastation. Small, needy, a sound that saysI've wanted this since the root cave and I'm furious it took this long.My hand slides up her spine, cupping the back of her neck, angling the kiss deeper, and whenher lips part I taste her with a thoroughness that makes my markings flare.
She bites my lower lip. Gentle, testing, and the soundImake is not controlled. Not suppressible. Harmonic undertones bleeding through, the bass-frequency response that my species produces when something triggers every pleasure centre simultaneously. She feels the vibration and presses closer, chasing it, her hips shifting against mine in a way that—
She pulls back.
Gasping. Flushed from her hairline to the open collar of her jumpsuit, lips swollen, pupils so wide the green is a thin ring. Her hands are shaking where they grip my shoulders.
