“Not soon enough.”
He kissed her again, walking her backward until her spine met one of the great support vines that arched across the cavern ceiling. The moss beneath their feet was soft, cushioning, and he pressed her into the yielding surface of the vine with his entire body, pinning her there with his greater size and strength.
She didn’t resist. If anything, she arched into him, her legs wrapping around his hips in a way that made rational thought impossible.
Mine, the word pulsed through him with every heartbeat. My mate. My Alina.
“I can’t—” she gasped, turning her head to break the kiss even as her body betrayed her words by grinding against him. “Rhyx, we need to talk. There are things I have to tell you?—”
“Later.”
“It’s important?—”
He silenced her with another kiss, gentler this time, coaxing rather than demanding. When he felt her resistance soften, he pulled back to rest his forehead against hers.
“Tell me,” he said quietly. “But first let me hold you. Just… let me hold you.”
The fight went out of her. Her arms came up to wrap around his neck, and she tucked her face into the junction of his shoulder, breathing deep as if trying to memorize his scent the way he’d memorized hers.
They stood like that for a long moment, wrapped around each other in the dim golden glow of the cavern. Rhyx focused on the simple miracle of her presence—the rise and fall of her breathing, the warmth of her skin where it touched his, the steady rhythm of her heart.
But underneath his relief, a cold kernel of dread was forming.
She’d come back. She’d promised to come back, and she had. But she was still in her traveling clothes, still dusty from the journeythrough the lava tubes. She hadn’t brought supplies, hadn’t settled into the cavern the way she had during the storm.
She wasn’t staying.
“How long?” he asked, and felt her stiffen in his arms.
“Rhyx…”
“How long do you have?”
She pulled back, and the expression on her face—guilty, frustrated, torn—confirmed what he’d already suspected.
“I have to go back before morning,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I wanted to stay longer, but there’s a man—Martin—who’s been watching me, and if he realizes I’ve been coming out here?—”
“Then don’t go back.”
“I have to. If I disappear, he’ll send people looking for me. They’ll find this place, find you?—”
“I don’t care.” The words came out rougher than he intended, edged with a desperation he couldn’t quite control. “Let them come. I can protect us. I can?—”
“No.” Alina’s hands came up to frame his face, forcing him to meet her eyes. “You don’t understand. These aren’t people you can fight, Rhyx. They have weapons, technology, resources that would—they would take you apart. Study you. Try to figure out how you exist, and they wouldn’t care if they destroyed you in the process.”
“Then we leave. You said there are other places on this world. Distant places. We could go there, hide?—”
“Mars is small.” Her voice cracked on the words. “Smaller than it seems. There’s nowhere we could go that they wouldn’t eventually find. The only way to keep you safe is to find allies, find people who can help us figure out how to protect you legally, diplomatically?—”
“I don’t want diplomacy!” Rhyx pulled away from her, his frustration boiling over into something hot and painful. “I want you. Here. With me. Is that so impossible? Is it so much to ask that my mate?—”
He stopped, the word hanging between them.
Alina’s eyes had gone wide. “Rhyx…”
“You are.” He couldn’t take it back now, couldn’t pretend he hadn’t said it. “You’re my mate. I knew it the moment I woke. The moment I scented you, touched you—you’re mine, Alina. And I’m yours. That’s not something I can change, even if I wanted to.”
“I’m not—” She swallowed hard. “Rhyx, I’m human. We don’t—it doesn’t work like that for us. There aren’t mates, there’s just… people who choose to be together, or don’t.”
