Page 151 of Commander’s Mate

Scarlet made a sound behind me. “Look at you.”

“What?”

“You found work in under five minutes.”

They were not enough. Not clothes, not rights, not home, not safety.

But they were something.

I passed the first shirt to a woman whose hands trembled when she took it.

“We’re going to make a list,” I told her softly. “Names. Needs. Questions. No one gets lost in the crowd.”

Her eyes filled, but she nodded.

Nora moved for a discarded meal tray that could hold scraps of writing film.

Zoe took the stack of shirts from me and began sorting.

For the first time since I had woken strapped to a bunk on a slaver ship, I felt something other than fear, grief, or desire.

Purpose.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Zared

I lasted twenty-two minutes.

Then I checked the corridor feed outside the conference room.

The third time I looked, Admiral Degatu spoke from behind me.

“If you continue staring at that screen, you may as well stand outside the door with a weapon drawn.”

I closed the feed.

“You were checking your mate.”

“She is among a hundred rescued females in a crowded room with insufficient supplies.”

“She is exactly where she asked to be.”

I turned from the console. Degatu stood inside my office with his hands clasped behind his back, his expression annoyingly calm. He had known me too long. That was useful in war and inconvenient in private matters.

“Do you?”

The question scraped.

I had slept very little. Harper’s scent lingered in my quarters, on my skin, in my mind. Her body had fit against mine as if the gods had carved the missing place in my soul and shaped her to fill it. Yet she had left my bed, put on my shirt, looked at me with those blue eyes, and told me not to stand guard.

That was the part I did not like in myself.

It would have been easier if she were Uatu. Not because Uatu females were weak. They were not. They trained, fought, commanded, chose, refused, and killed when necessary. But they understood solmatu. They understood that once recognition struck, a mate’s need to protect was not an insult.

Harper understood only that men with power had taken her once.

Even if every instinct in me tried to drag me in that direction.