“You...” Mikaela watches me despite the terror making her brows turn upside down. “You’ve spent months explicitly avoiding exactly that.”
“I am aware,” I repeat, my jaw tight. The leather wrapping on the bone knife is cutting painfully into my palm.
I stare down at the sprawling, golden-glowing shape of Kol holding the line below us. I remember the weight of him dropping to his knees between my thighs hours ago. The vibrating purr literally rattling the blood in my veins. His total devotion, overriding everything else.
I remember the look in his eyes when he picked up my discarded clothes and handed them back to me. Feral. Starving. Possessive in a way that defied every single parameter of human logic.
“Fine,” I say.
Mikaela goes dangerously still. “Fine?”
“Fine,” I snap. The exact same intonation I’d use back in Chicago to authorize an emergency server rollback. “I’ll do it. I’ll stop fighting it. I’ll mate with Kol. Just... keep translating before someone gets their throat ripped out.”
Mikaela stares at me. A fierce, knowing spark flashes in her wide eyes.
Her hand clamps onto my arm, her fingers squeezing hard in the dark. Then she closes her eyes, forcing herself straight back into the terrifying chaos of the telepathic stream.
I did it. I agreed to mate with him. Out loud. It’s not just in my dreams anymore.
It is not a feeling I get to sit with. I don’t get a single second to watch him and wonder if I’m making a mistake.
Because the rival clan doesn’t announce themselves. They don’t roar into the dark or beat their chests. Three figures pour out of the narrow tunnel and the air goes thin.
Mikaela grips my arm. “Oh my god.”
I see them in pieces.
In the spiking bursts of gold that flare off Kol’s starfield skin, I catch them in fragments. A shoulder, a jaw, the flat, dead gleam of a raised claw.
They’re leaner than Kol’s men. Carved down to the bone. Not trained-hard lean,starved-lean. The kind of lean that happens when a body has been eating itself for months.
And they’re running dark. Not a flicker of light on any of them.
At the head of it ishim.
I know before Mikaela says a word.
He is built like Kol. Enormous, sprawling, and lethal. But where Kol’s men move with focused, defensive pressure,heclears the tunnel mouth with his gaze already moving across the cavern. Searching.
Mikaela, Amelia, and I flatten ourselves even further into the darkness of the ledge.
He stops.
Just for a second, his eyes find Kol.
And Kol is blazing.
The starfield mutation is erupting across his shoulders now, charting down his forearms, while the rest of his golden skin is lit up like a bonfire. No Drakav male glows in a fight. You don’t glow when you’re being hunted. You go dark. You disappear.
Kol is on fire.
I watch Lucek’s face process that. Watch his gaze move over Kol. Watch the moment he clocks the starfield skin. See the moment his lips pull back into a terrifying snarl.
His clan-man goes first, kicking off the wall with enough force to send a spray of gravel skittering across the stone floor. He’s fast. Too fast. He’s on Kol in a heartbeat, a bone blade already extended, aiming for the soft spot where the neck meets the shoulder.
Kol stops him with one hand around the throat, mid-air, the same way you’d stop a door from slamming. His feet don’t move. Eyes still on Lucek, he grips the warrior’s arm and twists. The sound is wet. The warrior’s elbow bends the wrong direction andthen the arm is just...hanging there. Useless. With a grunt, his weapon clatters to the floor.
He drops. Kol steps over him.
