She was still asleep, her face pressed against his chest, her body warm and soft and utterly alive. He could feel her heartbeat, steady and strong, and inhale her sweet, floral scent. He could see the slow rise and fall of her breathing and the flutter of her eyelids as she dreamed her own dreams.
She’s real,he thought. The certainty of it cut through the grief and the tangle of memories that weren’t quite his.She’s real and she’s here and she found me.
He didn’t understand what he was. He didn’t understand how he had memories of a world that had died millions of years ago, or why her language felt both foreign and familiar, or what had created him in that strange golden pod. He didn’t understand the flashes of metal and cold that sometimes surfaced in his mind, the other memories that tasted different from the ancient ones, more recent and more wrong.
But he understood that Alina was his.
The knowledge settled into his bones with the same certainty as the grief.
Mate.
The word surfaced from somewhere deep inside him. It wasn’t from the human language she’d been teaching him, but something far older. The one who completed you. The one whose soul echoed yours. The one you would protect and cherish and guard until your last breath.
Alina was his mate. He was certain of it with every fiber of his being.
He didn’t know if humans even had the concept of mates or if they recognized the bond the way his people once had. Maybe she would wake and leave and forget about him. Maybe she would return to her research and her life, and he would be nothing but an impossible memory, a story she told herself in the dark.
But that didn’t change what he knew.
She is mine.And he would protect her and cherish her for as long as he existed. Whether that was days or years or the same impossible span of time that somehow filled his head.
He watched the vines shimmer overhead, casting shifting patterns across the cavern walls. She murmured something in her sleep and burrowed closer to him, her fingers flexing against his chest
Mine, that ancient knowledge whispered again.Protect. Keep. Never let go.
He didn’t intend to.
The dream’s grief still lingered at the edges of his mind, a vast and terrible presence that he suspected would never fully fade. His world was gone. His people were gone. Everything he had been before this strange rebirth had been lost to time and death and the slow entropy of a universe that cared nothing for what it destroyed.
But Alina was here. Warm and alive and sleeping in his arms.
And now,he thought,she’s mine.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Three days.Three days trapped in an impossible cavern with an even more impossible creature, and Alina still hadn’t figured out what the hell she was going to do.
She sat with her back against the cavern wall, watching Rhyx move among the bioluminescent vines, collecting water from the leaves, his golden skin catching the soft light as he worked. He was finally willing to release her hand, although only occasionally and never for very long, which meant she had more perspective from which to watch him. The muscles in his back shifted as he worked, and she found herself staring longer than was strictly scientific.
Focus, Alina. You’re a geochemist, not a teenage girl with a crush.
But that was the problem, wasn’t it? She couldn’t think of Rhyx as a research subject. Not after three days of conversation and shared meals and sleeping curled against his chest because he was so impossibly warm and safe.
She pulled out her tablet and checked the atmospheric readings for the hundredth time. The numbers hadn’t changed. The dust storm was still raging outside, the particle density too high for safe travel, and the wind speed high enough to knock the rover off its broad treads.
She was still trapped.
The irony wasn’t lost on her. She’d spent two years dreaming of a discovery like this—something that would change their perspective of the planet entirely. And now that she’d found it, all she could think about was how to hide it.
“Alina.”
She looked up. He had finished collecting water and was watching her with those strange blue eyes, his head tilted questioningly. His English had improved dramatically over the past few days, each word unlocking dozens more, but his expressions were still slightly off. Still alien.
Because he is alien,she reminded herself.He’s an alien. An actual, real-life, honest-to-god alien. And I’ve been sleeping in his arms like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, crossing the cavern towards her with that fluid, predatory grace. “You have the worried face again.”
“I don’t have a worried face.”
