Chapter 17 The Aftermath
The Aftermath
Rynn
I dream of fire.
Not the controlled heat of my heritage—the elegant flare of scales responding to emotion, the warmth that marks my people as something other. This is wild fire. Consuming fire. The kind that devoured Voros’s fleet when his own targeting systems turned traitor.
In my dream, I’m burning too. But it doesn’t hurt.
Because she’s there. Pink hair like a beacon in the flames. Hand reaching for mine.
Rynn.
Her voice cuts through the inferno, and I wake gasping into the dim quiet of the fortress medical bay.
Pain hits first—a full-body inventory of everything the bio-flare cost me. Burns along my arms where I pushed past every limit my biology possessed. Plasma scoring across my ribs from a shot I barely remember taking. Exhaustion so deep it feels carved into my bones.
But underneath all of it, threaded through every ache like golden thread through torn fabric: her.
Polly.
I feel her before I see her. The bond pulses between us, warm and steady as a heartbeat. She’s close. Safe. Here.
My eyes adjust to the low light, and I find her.
She’s curled in a chair beside my bed—a chair that’s been dragged close enough that her knees brush the mattress.
Her pink hair is a disaster, matted on one side where she’s been sleeping against her arm.
There’s a smear of something dark on her cheek.
Probably my blood. She hasn’t changed out of her flight suit.
She looks exhausted. Wrung out. Absolutely beautiful.
And she’s watching me with those sharp eyes that see too much.
“Hey there, Lord Chaos.” Her voice is soft, rough with sleep. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”
I try to speak. My throat feels like I swallowed plasma fire. All that emerges is a rough sound that might be her name.
Her face softens. “Easy. You’ve been out for six hours. Bio-flare took everything you had.” She reaches for something beside her—a cup of water, which she brings to my lips with careful hands. “Small sips. Don’t make me lecture you about overexerting yourself.”
The water is cool, blessed relief. I drink, and she pulls the cup away before I can take too much.
“More later. Healer’s orders.” A small smile curves her lips. “Well. My orders. The actual healer tried to separate us so you could rest, but apparently the bond had other ideas. Started spiking your vitals every time I walked away.”
I remember none of this. The last clear memory I have is the Eclipse exploding, Voros’s scream cutting off mid-transmission, and then—
Polly. Catching her as my knees gave out. Holding her in the wreckage of everything we’d survived.
“You stayed,” I manage. My voice sounds like gravel.
“Obviously.” She says it like there was never any other option. Like leaving me was a physical impossibility rather than a choice. “Someone had to make sure you didn’t try to hero yourself into a medical coma.”
She sets the water aside and turns back to me, and I realize she’s holding a med-cloth. Fresh bandages. Healing salve.
“The healer left supplies. I’ve been changing your dressings while you were out.” She meets my eyes, and something flickers there—vulnerability she’s trying to hide behind her usual sass. “Is that... I mean, I can get someone else if you’d rather—”
“No.” The word comes out rougher than I intend. More possessive. I try again, softer: “Stay. Please.”
Her smile returns, smaller but real. “Okay, Lord Demanding. Let me see your shoulder.”
She leans in, and I’m suddenly acutely aware of her proximity. The scent of her—underneath the smoke and fear-sweat and chaos of battle—is still her. Wildflowers and engine grease and something sweet I’ve never been able to name.
My scales flicker with heat I don’t have the energy to suppress.
Her fingers brush my shoulder as she peels back the bandage, and I shiver. Not from pain.
“Sorry,” she murmurs, misreading my reaction. “I know it’s tender—”
“It’s not that.”
She stills. Looks up at me through her lashes. Pink strands fall across her face, and I want desperately to brush them back.
“Oh.” The word is barely a breath.
Through the bond, I feel her awareness shift. Feel the moment she realizes what her touch is doing to me even now, broken and burned and barely able to lift my head.
She should pull away. Any sensible person would.
Instead, her fingers linger on my skin. Trace the edge of the bandage. Slide down my arm in a path that has nothing to do with medical care and everything to do with the current crackling between us.
“Polly.” Her name is a warning and a plea.
“You’re supposed to be resting.” But she doesn’t stop. Her touch trails across my scales, and I watch them respond—flushing deeper gold, rippling with heat that betrays everything I’m feeling. “The healer was very clear about no strenuous activity.”
“Then stop doing that.”
“Doing what?” Pure innocence. Absolute lie. Her fingers find a pattern of scales near my hip, and I bite back a sound that would embarrass us both. “I’m checking your dressings. Very professional.”
“You are a menace.”
“You love it.”
Gods help me, I do.
I catch her wrist before she can drive me completely mad. Her pulse jumps under my fingers, and the bond sparks with mutual want that makes my head spin.
“I almost lost you.” The words come out before I can stop them. Raw. Unguarded. “I almost—”
She silences me with a kiss.
It’s soft at first. Gentle in a way she rarely is. Her free hand cups my face, thumb stroking my cheekbone, and she kisses me like I’m something precious. Something she’s afraid to break.
I’m not fragile. I refuse to be fragile.
I pull her closer despite my body’s protests, and she makes a small sound of surprise as she ends up perched on the edge of my bed. The new position puts her above me, pink hair falling around us like a curtain, and I reach up to thread my fingers through the tangled strands.
“Rynn—” She pulls back just enough to speak against my lips. “You’re injured. You need to—”
“I need you.”
The words hang between us. True in ways that go beyond the physical. Beyond the bond. I have needed this woman since the moment I saw her—pink-haired and irreverent and absolutely unimpressed by everything I was supposed to be.
She searches my face. Whatever she finds makes her breath catch.
“Well.” Her voice has gone husky. “Since you asked so nicely.”
She kisses me again, and this time there’s nothing soft about it. All the fear and relief and desperate love we’ve been holding back pours out between us. My hands slide down her back, pulling her closer, and she makes a sound against my mouth that sends heat coiling through my ruined body.
I shouldn’t be capable of wanting anything right now. Every muscle screams protest. Every nerve is raw and oversensitized.
But she’s here. Alive. Mine.
I kiss down her jaw, her neck, finding the place where my mark pulses gold against her skin. She gasps when my lips brush it, her whole body arcing into mine, and the bond flares so bright I see stars.
“Rynn—” My name breaks in her throat. “Gods, when you do that—”
“I know.” I can feel exactly what it does to her. The bond hides nothing. “I feel it too.”
She pulls back, breathing hard, and I bite back a growl of protest. But there’s that wicked smile curling her lips now—the one that means trouble. The one I’ve learned to crave like oxygen.
“I’m being very gentle with you right now,” she says. Her finger traces my jaw, light as a whisper. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”
“Is that a threat?”
“A promise.” She leans in, and her breath is warm against my ear. “Because the second you’re healed enough to handle me? I’m going back to being a brat.”
My scales flash with heat. A growl rumbles in my chest.
“And you,” she continues, pulling back just enough to meet my eyes, “are going to have to do something about it.”
“Is that a promise or a threat?”
Her grin sharpens. “Yes.”
I surge up to kiss her again, harder this time, catching her gasp against my lips—
The door chimes.
We spring apart. Well, she springs. I wince, reminded forcefully of all the reasons I shouldn’t be moving quickly.
Mother Morrison’s voice comes through the intercom, dry as dust: “If you two are done with your medical consultation, the Valorian delegation is docking in twenty minutes. Try to look presentable. Or at least vertical.”
Polly drops her forehead against mine, laughing. The sound is warm and real and everything I never knew I needed.
“Your family has terrible timing,” she murmurs.
“They’re about to have worse timing.” I reach up to cup her face, sobering. “They don’t know about you. Not really.”
Her smile falters slightly. “What exactly did you tell them?”
“That I completed the mission. That I’m alive.” I stroke my thumb across her cheekbone, watching the way her eyes soften. “That I found something worth living for.”
Through the bond: a pulse of emotion so strong it steals my breath. Love. Fear. Hope.
She kisses my palm—soft, sure—and pulls away.
“Then let’s get you presentable,” she says. “Can’t have you meeting your parents looking like you lost a fight with a plasma cannon.”
“I won the fight with the plasma cannon.”
“Did you though? Did you really?”
“I’m alive.”
“Barely.” But she’s smiling again as she reaches for the fresh bandages. “Now hold still, Lord Chaos. I need to make you pretty.”
Twenty minutes is not enough time.
Polly helps me into formal clothes from Mother Morrison’s “emergency diplomatic supplies,” and I don’t ask why she happens to have formal wear in my size. That woman terrifies me in ways I’m not prepared to examine.
Polly’s hands smooth the fabric across my shoulders, adjusting the fall of the ceremonial sash. I catch her wrist and bring her palm to my lips.
“Whatever they say.” I press a kiss to her pulse point. “Whatever they think. You are my mate. My choice. My future. That’s not changing.”
“I know.” But her voice is smaller than usual. Through the bond, I feel her fear—not of me, but of them. Of not being enough.