“You’re my mate.”
The room tips.
I have to put a hand on the table.
“You were always my mate,” he says. “The child was blocking it. It’s the same thing that happened with Trunk and Ines — he scented her negative for two rotations and then the med lab corrected her infertility and it hit him so hard he had to sit down on the floor. Her body was in the way of the reading.” A pause. “Yours was too. And then you had Lucas, and you healed, and your fertility came back, and yesterday I walked into my own kitchen and my mate was standing in it.”
“That wasyesterday, Cayzor, that was a whole diurnal ago.”
“I had to be certain. I have told you one thing that was wrong once already.” His jaw works. “I was not going to do it twice. So I waited, and I checked again this morning before you woke, and I stood in that doorway for some time.” He looks up at me. “It’s positive. It’s been positive since your body finished what it was doing. You are my Bride.”
I get down on the floor with him because my legs won’t hold me.
He’s got something in his hand. I hadn’t noticed. He opens it and it’s a band — plain, dark metal, the kind of thing a male who works rock with his hands would make out of something he found in it, and it’s far too big for my finger and I can tell he knows that and did it anyway.
“Leah said you put it on the hand,” he says. “She said the fourth finger. She was very specific. I’ve made it wrong.”
“You’ve made it perfect.”
“It doesn’t fit.”
“Cayzor.” I take his enormous face in both my gloved hands. “It doesn’t have to fit.”
“Before you answer,” he says.
He pulls back. Not far. But enough that I know what’s coming is the part he’s been dreading, and he does what he always does, which is give me the whole readout in order without softening any of it.
“You have to hear all of it,” he says. “Not the part you want. All of it.”
“Okay.”
“There’s no undoing a clasp. There’s no divorce among the Xylan — it isn’t a legal difficulty, it’s a biological one. If you clasped my hand and then left me, it would kill me. Not as an expression. My body would stop.” He says it like a load figure. “So you would be choosing to live on this rock, with me, for the rest of your life.”
“I know.”
“And you’d be pregnant immediately.”
That one I hadn’t fully braced for.
“The claiming is a breeding ritual. That’s what it’sfor. There is no version of it where you don’t conceive, and it isn’t chance, it happens.” He holds my eyes. “Lucas is three moon cycles old. You have not slept properly since he was born. And this would be a half-Xylan pregnancy, which is a different thing than the one you had, and a harder birth, and every female in that compound will tell you so. And there’s the claiming itself.” Something in his face closes. “I’ll chase you. I’ll take you to the ground. Your job is to fight me and mine is to overpower you and that is genuinely how it is done, and you arehuman, Mara. You weigh nothing. I have spent nine months learning exactly how easy it would be to break you by accident, and I do not know with certainty that I can hold myself back once it starts. That frightens me more than anything else I’ve ever done.”
He stops. “So,” he says. “Decide with all of it in front of you.”
“Yes,” I say.
His whole body sags.
“Also,” I add, “I want it on the record that I’m going to be extremely bad at the fighting part.”
“You won’t be.”
“Cayzor, I’ve never hit anybody in my life.”
“You’ll be fine,” he says, with a certainty I find deeply suspicious.
Then he tellsme it’s already arranged.
All of it. The holosuite is booked and programmed. Leah has Lucas — she’s had the whole rotation set since yesterday, days of it, Hallie’s spreadsheet redone to cover us. Jana’s cooking. The compound’s ready.
