Chapter 13 Special Delivery
Special Delivery
Dove
The pasta is obscene.
Not because I did anything special—same rehydrated noodles, same protein base, same cheese sauce I’ve been improvising from station rations for days.
But Tavia declared this a “proper celebration” and proper celebrations apparently require cloth napkins folded into shapes (Pickles provided origami instructions), candles (emergency lanterns set to amber), and assigned seating that puts me directly across from Cetus so I have nowhere to look except at the man who promised to finish what we started.
He’s watching me.
Not the careful, controlled observation I’ve gotten used to over the past week.
This is different. Slower. His yellow eyes track my hands as I serve, linger on my mouth when I taste-test the sauce, drop to my throat when I swallow.
His markings pulse in that deep, steady rhythm—the one Pickles classified as permanent mate calibration—and every pulse sends heat crawling up my spine.
“Pass the cheese?” he says, and his voice drops into harmonics that have absolutely nothing to do with cheese.
I hand him the container. Our fingers brush. His skin burns against mine—fifteen degrees warmer than human baseline, I know that now, I know it in my bones—and the contact holds a beat too long. Two beats. Three.
“You’re both breathing funny again,” Tavia observes through a mouthful of pasta.
Cetus withdraws his hand. I shove cheese into my mouth and pretend I’m not on fire.
Dinner stretches. Tavia recounts the day’s victory with embellishments that would make a war correspondent jealous—the debt collectors grow larger with each retelling, the inspection team more impressed, Cetus’s protective stance more heroic.
He listens with that soft expression that makes his markings glow steady-warm, the one that only appears when his daughter is happy and safe and spinning stories at the dinner table.
Family, I think, and the word doesn’t make me flinch anymore. It settles into my chest like cargo finding its bay.
Tavia yawns. Conspicuously. With sound effects.
“Oh no,” she announces, stretching both arms over her head in a performance that would embarrass a community theatre. “I am SO tired. From all the excitement. Of today.”
Cetus’s eyes narrow. “You had a three-hour nap during lockdown.”
“Emotional exhaustion, Papa. Pickles says cortisol depletion requires extended rest periods.”
“I did provide that data,” Pickles confirms from the overhead speakers. “The small human’s biosignatures are consistent with fatigue. I recommend immediate bedtime protocols.”
Tavia is already sliding out of her chair. “Papa, bedtime story? The long one about the stellar cartographer?”
“That story takes forty-five minutes.”
“I know.” She grins, markings flickering with absolutely zero subtlety. “I need the really long version tonight.”
He stares at her. She stares back. Some wordless negotiation passes between them—father and daughter, eight years of shared language compressed into a single look.
“Fine,” he says. “The long version.”
Tavia rounds the table and throws her arms around my waist. “Night, Dove. Don’t go anywhere.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, small person.”
She squeezes hard, then bolts for her room. At the doorway, she pauses just long enough to stage-whisper at the ceiling: “Pickles? Timer?”
“Fifteen-minute preparation window logged,” Pickles responds crisply. “All non-essential corridor access will be secured for overnight maintenance. I shall be conducting comprehensive system diagnostics that require my full attention. I will be entirely unavailable for approximately eight hours.”
“You’re the best.”
“I am aware.”
The door seals behind her with a pneumatic hiss that sounds, in the charged silence that follows, like a starting pistol.
Cetus rises from his chair. His gaze finds mine across the table—hot and certain and loaded with every promise we haven’t kept yet.
“I won’t be long,” he says. Low. The harmonics turn the words into a physical thing that presses against my skin.
“Take your time.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel. “I’ll clean up.”
He crosses toward Tavia’s room. At the corridor junction, he stops. Turns back. His markings flare once—bright gold, the claiming pattern—before he disappears around the corner.
I wash exactly one dish before my hands start shaking.
The guest quarters shower is barely big enough to turn around in.
Hot water, station-standard soap, steam filling the cramped refresher.
I scrub my skin and catalogue the evidence of the last few days: the fading bruise on my hip from the cargo bay collision on day one.
The scratch on my forearm from scrambling through maintenance tunnels.
And on my shoulder—faint now, almost gone—the shadow of his teeth from the corridor.
From the kiss that turned into a claiming that turned into an interruption that turned into a promise.
I touch the mark. Press my fingers against the ghost of his bite.
Deserve this. Deserve to stay. Deserve to want something and not run from it.
The mirror fogs. I wipe it with my palm and look at myself—flushed, hair dripping, eyes lit with want. The woman who never stays anywhere chose a place. A family. A man whose hands could shred metal but touch her like she’s made of spun glass.
My pulse hammers. The filing cabinet. His hands on my thighs. The ridge-line pressing against me through our clothes, and the broken noise he made when I touched his patterns. The way the whole room went gold.
My body clenches at the memory, hot and liquid, and I press my thighs together against the ache.
Days of tension. Days of almost. Tonight, we finish this.
I towel off. Pull on clean underwear and his shirt—the one with the misbuttoned collar that I stole and he never asked for back.
My bed is right there. My bag—the one that used to be packed and ready under the mattress, the one Cetus found and never mentioned again. My toothbrush. My safe, neutral territory where I could pretend I was still a visitor.
I walk past it without stopping.
His quarters. I’ve never been inside. Just a few days on this station and I’ve slept in the guest room every night like a woman keeping one foot out the door, which is exactly what I was.
The panel reads STORM, C. — PRIVATE in bilingual text, and I stand in front of it with wet hair and shaking hands and the absolute certainty that if I step through this door, I’m not a guest anymore.
Guests sleep in guest rooms. People who stay sleep somewhere else.
The door opens at my touch—unlocked, because Pickles is a meddling romantic who probably unsealed it the moment Cetus left for Tavia’s room.
Smaller than I expected. Sparse. A wide bed with regulation sheets, a console cluttered with atmospheric data, a chair with a stack of Tavia’s drawings balanced on the arm.
It smells like him everywhere—warm metal and ozone and that faintly sweet Lividian musk that’s been driving me slowly insane via borrowed shirts for a week.
But stronger here. Concentrated. His space, saturated with him.
No trace of me anywhere. Because I’ve never been brave enough to leave one.
I sit on the edge of his bed. His bed. The mattress dips under my weight and I press my palms flat against the sheets and breathe.
The runner in me waits for the panic. The bolt reflex, the voice that says you don’t belong in someone else’s space because belonging means losing.
It doesn’t come.
I pull my knees up. Press my face against his pillow and wait.
The door chimes.
He fills the doorway.
Six-foot-eight of teal skin and burning yellow eyes and markings that pulse in rhythms registering in my teeth.
He’s changed too—loose sleep pants, nothing else.
His chest is bare and the bioluminescent patterns trace across his collarbones, down his sternum, along the planes of muscle that shift when he breathes.
“She’s asleep?” I ask.
“She faked unconsciousness within four minutes of the story beginning.” His mouth quirks. “Her acting has not improved since dinner.”
“The doors—”
“Locked. Pickles sealed them before I finished the first paragraph.”
We look at each other. The distance between us is maybe six feet. It feels like nothing. It feels like everything.
“Tavia orchestrated this,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Pickles was complicit.”
“Enthusiastically.”
“And you—” I take a breath. “You knew the whole time.”
“I calculated the probability at approximately ninety-seven percent.” He steps into the room. The door seals behind him. “I chose not to intervene.”
The air between us thickens. Charged, the way the atmosphere gets before an electromagnetic storm—all that energy building, looking for somewhere to ground.
“Cetus.” I hold his gaze. “You said tonight. You promised.”
“I don’t make promises I can’t keep.”
“Then keep this one.”
He crosses the room in two strides. His hands frame my face—always careful, claws sheathed, palms radiating warmth that sinks through my skin and into my blood.
He tilts my head back and looks down at me with an expression equal parts tenderness and hunger and an ancient gravity that lives behind those yellow eyes.
“I need you to understand,” he says, and his voice drops into harmonics so low the air hums. “Lividian bonding is permanent. The bite, the claiming—it changes us both. Biochemically. My markings will respond to your heartbeat. Your scent will be encoded into my neural pathways. There is no undoing this.”
“I know.”
“You’re certain. Despite years of running. Despite every instinct that tells you to—”
“I’m not running.” I fist my hands in the waistband of his pants and pull him closer. “I’m staying. I’m yours. I’ve been yours since I hauled your cargo through a storm and didn’t charge extra, you impossible, beautiful, stubborn—”
He kisses me.