Chapter 16
Sloane
Sorik’s home—our home—was built into a cliff on the edge of his village.
Not against it — into it, the obsidian of the cliff face incorporated into the structure so thoroughly that it was impossible to say where natural rock ended and built walls began.
It sat at the settlement's edge where the valley wall rose sheer and dark, accessed by a path I would never have found without him — narrow and deliberate, cut into the cliff face at a height that gave the structure a view over the entire valley floor.
The storm was extraordinary to behold from the walking path.
The valley below existed in shades of palest blue-violet, gray and white.
Not intermittently — continuously, the lightning moving through the charge-saturated atmosphere in sustained cascades that lit the stormglass trees from below and turned the jungle canopy into something that breathed light.
The thunder did not ebb and flow. It was a sustained, rolling, bone-deep rumble I felt in my bones.
My new marks pulsed and danced under my skin in a rewired nervous system that no longer pretended it didn't speak this planet’s strange language.
I truly was part of it now. Part of him.
I stopped on the path and stared in awe. Unafraid.
"Sloane." Sorik's voice, low and immediate, echoed in my ear moments before he wrapped his arms around me from behind.
He stood at my back. My marks blazed brighter at his proximity.
Everything pulsed with life. With energy.
From the stone under my feet to the air in my lungs.
My own blood seemed to sing inside my veins.
My pussy throbbed with need. I was empty and aching for him.
The ache in my chest was worse, my heart beating a rhythm I knew would never feel right without him.
My skin called out to be touched. By him. Only him.
"I don’t know how to describe what I’m feeling. This is….” Too much? Not enough? Both? I didn’t know what to say.
"This is us. You and me, mate. Our bond. Our home.” His chest pressed to my back.
His lips brushed the side of my neck. His heat soaked into my system with more power than the storm-charged air.
"The elders say that the storm is the planet speaking.
That the lightning is its language. The thunder is its breath. And the electromagnetic surges are—"
"Its heartbeat," I finished for him. I finally understood. Not only with my mind. With my body. My heart.
"Yes," he said, very softly. "That is what they say."
I turned in his arms and looked up at him. “The storm chooses the path.”
“We walk the path.” He grinned with pure happiness.
The sustained lightning lit his face. Every node and mark in his body blazed with full-storm intensity, throwing silver across the cliff face behind him.
Lighting his skin where the storm’s energy blazed in waves through the marks that covered his chest and shoulders.
The same surge of power moved through me, wrapped around my neck, covered my collarbones, raced down my arms to the delicate marks in my hands that were so small, so perfect, they were finer than the silk of a spider’s web.
The marks that matched his. That said I was his and he was mine.
The same branching fractal geometry written into both of us by the same hand, the same planet, the same choice we both made.
We chose each other. The storm had forced us together, but we had chosen. In the cave. With every touch. Every kiss. Every moment I hadn’t run back to my ship and tried to leave him behind. I had chosen him. Chosen this new life.
I stared into his eyes, allowed my emotions to flow as freely as the energy moving through my system.
All of it. Everything.
The terror of the crash. Every hour since.
My shock when I first saw him watching me with that possessive look in his eyes.
The jungle, and the cave, and the cliff, and the crystal fissure.
Turning off the beacon in my ship. His people welcoming me at the village Hearth.
Our synchronized heartbeats. Our markings.
The planet's hum through the bark of the stormglass trees.
Their songs drifting in the air, more beautiful and haunting than anything a musical composer on Earth had ever written.
Him. The way he touched me. The emotions I felt pulsing in the atmosphere between us.
The way our bodies harmonized now. Our energy flowing.
Two hearts beating with the same rhythm.
The way his desire activated mine, created a feedback loop that was sensual, overwhelming.
Totally fucking addictive. A level of pleasure I’d never even dreamed existed.
All of it moved through me at once, the realization that my life, my future, had shifted like quicksand under my feet. I lifted my hands to his face. Studied the strangeness of his silver eyes, the light moving under his flesh. The alien strangeness of his skin.
I did not see an alien. I was not afraid. I saw my mate. I saw love and acceptance and a wonderful future I had never dared imagine. “Sorik.”
"Yes." His silver eyes watched me, steady and blazing and certain in the way he was always certain — the certainty I had been fighting and falling toward since the first moment I'd seen him step out of the alien dusk as if the planet had made him specifically to steal my heart.
"I need to tell you something," I whispered as the confession built inside me.
"Tell me.”
"I love you. I wanted to stay." The words came out bare and stripped of every scientific excuse I’d been hiding behind since I met him.
I pressed my palm flat against his chest — over the marks there, pulsing their warm rhythm under my hand — and felt his heartbeat, deep and steady and synchronized perfectly with mine.
The same rhythm. The same frequency. My frequency, now.
"I don’t know how or why this happened. But I fell in love with you. "
He stared at me.
For one suspended moment the lightning cascaded through the valley around us.
Neither of us moved as the thunder rolled through the cliff face around us.
The storm pressed its enormous presence into every molecule of air between us.
His nodes blazed and my marks answered, the Skybond running between us.
For one full, trembling moment, he simply looked at me.
Then his hands came up and cupped my face.
Warm. Enormous. Careful in the tender, devastating way he was always careful with me — like I was precious.
"I love you, too. You’re mine. I’m never letting you go.”
He lifted me off my feet and carried me the rest of the way to his home. When we were inside, the heavy door braced against the storm, he set me on my feet in the middle of a small, cozy living area.
He lit one lamp. Amber. Small. Placed on the low obsidian shelf near the valley-facing wall. The amber and the white lightning mixed in the space and cast everything in warm gold threaded with electric blue.
I stood in the middle of his home and looked at it.
At the spare, deliberate arrangement of a warrior who had lived alone and hadn't needed the space to be more than functional. At the smooth, obsidian walls. At the node network I could feel pulsing through the floor. Some sort of panel covered an entire wall, cut so thin and perfect they were like colored glass that perfectly framed the cliffs and skyline outside. Lightning arced outside in a stunning display of power and sheer, heart stopping magnificence. I’d never seen anything more shocking in both power and magnificence.
The reflection of the single amber lamp he had lit for me glowed like a firefly behind me. I watched him come for me. My mate. The energy in his body shifting and flowing like water in a river. Couldn’t wait for all that energy to flow into me when he kissed me. Touched me. Made me part of him.
I loved an alien. His honor. His courage.
The way he refused to leave my side. The devotion I could feel flowing through him when he touched me.
I loved the way my body recognized his, tuned itself to his rhythm.
Loved the way I felt alive when I was around him.
Alive. Aware. So much stronger than I was before.
"I have been waiting for you since before I knew I was waiting.
" He spoke as he undressed me, his voice was low and unhurried and entirely unguarded.
"Every storm I have navigated in my life was practice for the storm that brought you to me.
" Leaned down and kissed the bared marks covering my collarbone. My shoulder. One kiss. Two.
Three.
I was going to spontaneously combust. He was moving too damn slow.
I tugged at my suit, the one thing that I carried from my old life. I never wanted to put it on again.
My head dropped back on my neck and I leaned away to give him better access. I was more than happy to give him everything.
He must have felt my surrender through the bond because his eyes flashed silver and his hands tightened around my waist. "I need you to know that I love you, Sloane Carter of Earth.
Not the Skybond. Not the bond's biology.
You. Your curious mind. Your courage. Your determination to save my village and your crew.
You are amazing, mate. The storm chose well. " His eyes held mine. "I love you."
The words broke down that last wall I had around my heart, a barrier I hadn’t even known I was still carrying. The wall that would have let me survive leaving him, getting on my ship and going back to my old life.
"Show me.” My voice came from somewhere deep and undefended. I looked up at him — at the silver eyes blazing in the storm's light, at the marks at his collar that were mine as much as his now.
My marks blazed. This was home.