The cave ceiling is not helping. Arena combat drills: the sequence fails when the first imagined opponent has red hair. Hyperspace fuel thermodynamics: the calculations collapse when I try to assign a variable to the heat radiating from her hip. The mating habits of Ursuris Prime’s lesser canyon predators: the irony kills the exercise before it starts.
Nothing works. Everything routes back to her.
Tomorrow I’ll be in your lap doing things that don’t require nobility.
I’m going to touch your horns. And I’m going to mean every nerve ending of it.
The wall thing is very important to me.
Arena combat drills are not helping.
“For the record,” Bebo says quietly, after the silence has settled into something more still, “her vital signs during the confessional period showed patterns consistent with genuine emotional attachment, not chemically induced infatuation. The fruit amplified her honesty. It did not create her feelings.”
“I know.”
“Additionally, your own vital signs indicate a neurochemical state consistent with what the Varkaani literature describes as pre-bonding resonance. You are already attuning to her. The claiming color you discussed?” A pause that is not quite clinical. “Your markings shifted toward an uncharacterised wavelength three times tonight. I logged the instances.”
Very still. Every molecule in my body listening.
“I thought you might want to know,” Bebo says. “Before tomorrow.”
Before tomorrow. When she wakes up clear-eyed and remembers every word. The shoulders complaint. The color catalogue. The horn conversation. The jumpsuit. The dream she tried to tell me about before I covered her mouth and shelicked my palmlike the absolute menace she is.
She’ll remember all of it.
And she’ll either be mortified, or she’ll look at me with those green eyes and do exactly what she promised.
I know which one. I’ve known since she took apart my chains with steady hands and called the word that slipped outthe reason it mattered.
But knowing and believing are different things. And three hundred and forty-seven years have taught me that hope is the most dangerous thing a being can carry.
She murmurs something in her sleep. Presses her face harder against my neck. Her hand curls into a fist over my heart, clutching skin and scar tissue, holding on like she’s afraid I’ll leave if she loosens her grip.
I won’t. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not when rescue comes and the universe offers her a thousand better options than a scarred gladiator with bonding equipment on his head and a lifetime of captivity behind him.
The color in my markings settles to a steady warmth. And underneath, something Bebo’s instruments detect: a shimmer that has no name yet because no one has ever triggered it before.
The claiming color, beginning.
I let it come.
Tomorrow is going to be the most terrifying day of my life.
And I want it faster than anything I have ever wanted.
9
The Longest Day
Krilly
ThememoriesarrivebeforeI'm fully conscious. Not in fragments. In a flood.
His shoulders are absurd. Forty-three percent of plant identification training. The harmonic frequency and the places it makes clench. The palm lick. The cave-wall dream I tried to describe before he physically stopped me. The horn-sensitivity conversation and the wordsoul-contactand the specific, devastating way he saidequivalent to you asking me to make love to you, yes. Both times.
My eyes open. The cave ceiling is stone and firelight. His arm is around me, my face pressed into his neck, my hand curled in a fist over his heart exactly where I put it last night. He's warm beneath me in that reactor-core way that my body has decided is the correct temperature for all sleeping arrangements from now until the end of time.
He hasn't slept. The tension in his shoulders, the weapon in his free hand, the hypervigilance radiating from every line of him. He's been on watch all night while I catalogued his physical attributes and licked his palm and told him I was going to bond the hell out of him.
