Chapter 23 #3
I kiss his jaw next. Then I kiss the scar near his chin. Then the edge of his mouth again because his restraint is starting to fray and I want to know what he does when he has to hold himself together while I choose piece after piece of him.
He catches my chin gently.
“Sera.” I look at him through the blue-lit dark. His breathing is rough. So is mine. “If you continue,” he says, “I will need more restraint than I possess.”
The words ripple through me. Heat. Fear. Want. All tangled.
“Then tell me what more means.”
His eyes close. The question costs him. Good, because it costs me too.
When he opens his eyes, they are dark again, red held back by will so fierce I can almost feel the shape of it.
“More means I will want to mate you.”
My stomach drops. Not in fear, at least not exactly.
The word strikes something primal, yes, but also something lonely. A cavern with no future. A City with never enough. Him looking at me like I’m not a ration, not a tool, not a strange blood reaction, not a girl who got too good at disappearing.
Mate.
The word should be too big. It is too big. But part of me reaches for it anyway.
“I know,” I say.
His hands tighten, then open again. “No. You know the word. You do not know the bond.”
“Then tell me.”
“The bond is not only the body.” His voice roughens. “It is instinct, blood, scent, and recognition. It can be beautiful. It can also be hunger wearing holy names, if the male is weak.”
“You’re not weak.”
“I am with you.”
That shuts me up.
The cavern glows around us, a thousand blue curtains seeming to hold their breath. Kavor’s gaze doesn’t leave mine.
“If I mate you, if we form the bond fully, I will not be able to pretend you are only a mission. Only ally. Only human. I will know where your breath changes. I will feel your fear before I understand it. I will want to answer every hunger you have.”
“That sounds terrible,” I whisper.
“Yes.”
“And beautiful.”
His jaw tightens.
“Yes.”
I breathe in. The air tastes like minerals, sweetness, and danger.
“Not yet,” I say.
His entire body stills.
I press my palm to his chest quickly, before he can mistake me. “Not because I don’t want you.”
The red flickers in his eyes, but I keep my hand there.
“Because I need to choose it when the world isn’t trying to eat us. When my arm isn’t bleeding. When the epis isn’t pointing at us like we’re some kind of religious event.”
His mouth almost moves. Almost.
“I want you,” I say.
The words terrify me, but I say them anyway.
“I want this. I want more than I know what to do with. Just not the full bond yet.”
Kavor’s eyes close. His forehead lowers until it rests against mine. Not in defeat. In relief sharp enough to feel like grief.
“Good,” he says.
I laugh once, shaky. “Good?”
“Yes.”
“Most males would be insulted.”
“I am not most males.”
“I noticed.”
His hands settle at my waist, warm-cool and steady.
“I want your choice more than I want the bond,” he says.
There it is. The knife. There it is. The thing that cuts the old belief from the bone.
I have no defense against that. None.
So I kiss him again, more slowly this time. Softer. Not because the want is less. Because it’s stopped trying to prove itself by burning.
He answers the same way. His mouth moves over mine with a reverence that makes me feel too seen. Too held. Too alive. I let myself have this.
A minute.
Two.
A stolen pocket of impossible life in the belly of Tajss, surrounded by blue glow, old machines, and death waiting somewhere beyond the pool.
It’s not enough.
It’s everything.
Then the cavern trembles.
Not from the pool. From below. Kavor breaks the kiss, head lifting.
I feel the shift in him instantly. Warrior. Tracker. Protector. The door closes but doesn’t lock.
“What?” I whisper.
His hand presses to the stone beside us. The floor pulses. Once. A pause. Again.
No. Not the signal. Deeper than that. He goes cold under my hands.
“The zemlja,” he says.
My heart drops.
“Close?”
His eyes sharpen toward the far end of the cavern, where the old channels disappear beneath blackened epis and stone.
“Closer than before.”
The pool machine shudders again, sparked by our kiss, the sample, the broken anchor, or all three together. Blue light ripples across the cavern ceiling. Then the glow beneath my bandage flares. Pain shoots up my arm, bright and cold. I gasp.
Kavor’s hands steady me. “Sera.”
“I’m fine.”
“No.”
“Fine, I’m lying.”
The glow under the bandage spreads, not outward into my skin, but through the blood-soaked cloth toward the sample pouch still strapped against his chest. The sample answers sharply.
Across the cavern, the epis strands turn toward us again. Kavor’s face goes still.
“What is it?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer. He looks past me. Slowly, I turn. At the center of the draining pool, the white-gray machine opens like an eye. Blue light pours into it from every channel we failed to break. And beneath the eye, far under the water, something moves.
Not zemlja. Not plant. Not fully machine. Something old and vast, awake enough to notice us. The system didn’t wake because we broke the anchor.
It woke because the cavern recognized the bond before we had finished choosing it.