Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
QUIN
Inoticed the light first.
Soft and blue, pulsing slowly across the ceiling, and for one disoriented second, I figured the portable lighting had glitched while we slept.
Then I registered the heat under my cheek. The rise and fall of a chest that wasn't mine. The deep hum vibrating through the body I was sprawled across was way too familiar for someone I'd only known a short time.
I lifted my head.
Vennox was out cold. That rhythmic vibration he made deep in his chest, the one that had set my blood on fire and my libido into overdrive, was now a low, comforting purr, and the light wasn't coming from the disc on the floor.
It was coming from him. From a mark on his sternum, a swirling design that had lit up like a road flare right when—
I sat up fast.
His arm slid off my waist, and I swung my legs over the side of the bunk, putting my back to him while I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes, trying to find the edges of my thoughts, which was harder than it should have been.
There was something at the periphery of my awareness, not a sound but a feeling. A presence like someone else's contentment bleeding through a wall I hadn't known existed until it stopped being solid.
I dropped my hands, and that's when I saw the glow coming from the center of my chest.
Not the bright, incandescence that had turned the room into a cathedral of blue. Just a soft, steady pulse of light beneath my skin, tracing a swirling flourish of the same design marking Vennox's sternum.
I stared at it.
My first thought was that it was bioluminescent. That sex with Vennox had triggered some kind of biological response on my skin. A surface reaction. Temporary and explicable and not—
I clung to that theory for exactly four seconds before the presence at the edge of my awareness brightened, like something had noticed that I was awake and was leaning in to say hello.
I was on my feet before the thought fully formed, snatching my discarded top off the floor and pulling it over my head in the same motion.
The bunk creaked as Vennox stirred with a sleepy sound leaving his lips as I crossed the room, my spine against the wall. I hooked two fingers into my collar, pulling it away from my chest so I could look down at the glowing design sitting below my collarbone, as if it belonged there.
"Quin." My name came out rough with sleep, and I looked up.
Vennox was sitting on the edge of the bunk, the design matching my own, a soft glow against his broad chest, eyes locked on me with an alertness that told me his mind had already caught up with the situation. The expression on his face was careful. Watchful.
"What is this?" I tugged my collar down and jabbed a finger at my chest. "What did you do to me?"
He didn't answer right away. I could practically see him lining up the words like he was defusing a bomb.
"It's called a shawra," he said.
"Never heard of it."
“It's the mark of a bonded pair.” His eyes held mine, steady. “Between spirit mates.”
“Spirit mates?” There was that term again.
He nodded.
I rubbed my forehead as his meaning dawned on me. “You mean like soulmates?”
“Yes.”
“You guys believe in soulmates?” I stared at him, incredulous. “That’s a romantic idea, but redicu—”
I looked down at the soft glow emanating from beneath my top. “Oh, fuck me running.”
Silence followed my curse as I focused on the niggling awareness of an echo now living within me.
It was a subtle, quiet patience that didn't belong to me.
A thread sitting just beneath my own thoughts, and I didn't know how to unfeel it.
But the longer I studied it, the more certain I became that it was him.
"I can feel… something," I patted the shawra, "inside. Like a radio playing in the next room. Is that you?"
"Yes."
“How is that possible?”
"The shawra is a portal," he explained, “where our spirits emerge and coalesce to form an eternal bond. Mating is the catalyst for its creation.” His eyes held mine. "What you feel is a small wisp of my essence, the same as I feel of yours.”
“That’s preposterous…” Even as the words left my lips, I knew what he said was true. “Sex is just sex, nothing more.” At least, back on Earth. But we weren’t on Earth, and Vennox was an alien species.
I pushed off the wall and started to pace, working the mess I’d gotten myself into piece by piece the way I always did, because if I looked at the whole thing at once, it was going to flatten me.
Nobody had forced me into it. I had been the aggressor, while he was the virgin in this equation. My pants had come off by my own hand, and I'd shoved him onto his back and told him I was driving. That he wasn't human was something I'd known going in.
He'd even tried to warn me, telling me the choice was mine. I thought he’d meant the sex.
I hadn’t been willing to listen, since conversation wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I’d straddled his lap with a single-minded determination to scratch an itch. So most of this was on me. Fine. I could own that part. Yet a simple misunderstanding should not equate to a lifelong commitment.
"Does it go away?" I asked.
The pause lasted a beat too long. And thanks to our new connection, I didn’t need to look at his face to know how much my question crushed him.
"From what the elders told me, no. Not entirely," Vennox said. “I will always be a part of you, and you will always be a part of me, but it will fade with time as long as we refrain from mating.”
That knowledge landed like a brick. I closed my eyes.
Opened them again, but light from the mark on my chest still pulsed against the inside of my shirt, soft and steady and infuriatingly permanent.
A design I hadn't chosen, in a language I couldn't read, put there by a process I hadn't consented to because I hadn't known it was happening.
"I can feel that you're sorry." The flatness in my own voice surprised me. I'd aimed for composed and landed somewhere colder. “Through this bond, or whatever this is. I can feel that you didn't intend for it to happen this way.”
I turned to face him, and immediately wished I hadn't. The sadness in his molten gaze hit me like a physical blow, raw and unguarded. The echo of it landed in my chest alongside my own anger.
"Can you feel what I'm feeling right now?"
"Yes," he said quietly.
"Then you already know I'm angry."
"Yes."
I turned away because looking at him was making it harder to stay angry, and I needed the anger right now. It was the only thing keeping me from crossing the room and pulling him into my arms.
"I want to go home." It came out rougher than I planned, cracking open somewhere in the middle of the word home.
"That was always my plan. Survive this hellhole, get off this hellhole, find a way back to Earth.
And now I've got—" I gestured at my chest, "—this glowing… tattoo that I never signed off on."
I pressed my fingers against it and felt the echo of him stir in response, not the sting of rejection I expected, but something quieter and more devastating than that. I didn't understand the whole of it. I only knew it ached, and that it wasn't mine.
"I know what Vala told me. I know what Universeval Rule means for someone like me out here, that every Yulineon patroller I cross paths with is ordered to kill me on sight just for existing off my world. I know the odds." My jaw tightened. "But, I still want the chance to try. I feel the faint longing you feel for your world, so I know you understand. It isn’t you I’m rejecting; it’s the idea of having my choice to return home taken from me. ”
He didn't argue. Didn't try to reason me out of it or remind me of the dangers I'd just acknowledged. He simply looked at me, steady and aching and present, and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would fix it, and he was smart enough to know it.
That should have helped. It didn't.
"For what it's worth," I said, voice rougher than I wanted, "I know you didn't plan this."
"No," he said. "I did not."
"And I know I initiated."
"You did." No hesitation. "I did not stop you. The fault is shared."
He held my gaze for a long moment before speaking.
“I cannot regret that my spirit found its complement in yours,” he said quietly. "To do so would be to deny the greatest gift they could ever bestow." Pain flickered across his features. "But I will always regret that the bond happened before you understood what it meant."
Some of the fight drained out of me. Not because he'd changed my mind, but because I could feel the quiet truth behind his words.
The bond carried no hint of manipulation or false comfort, only genuine regret that my choice had been taken from me.
It was infuriatingly difficult to stay furious with someone who was hurting right alongside me.
My wrist comm buzzed.
"Is Vennox awake?" Vala's voice came through, stripped of everything that wasn't the question.
"Yes," I said. "He's up and mobile."
"Good. We need you both in the cargo hold. Stern end, third hatch past the collapsed bulkhead on the right." A beat. "We found another way back to the ship. One that doesn't take us back through Spore Valley."
I straightened. "What did you find?"
“A Troken skiff.” And that was it. Comm off.
I stared at my wrist. He'd answered the question, technically.
That was very Vala. Direct, complete by his own standards, utterly useless by mine.
After two months, I'd learned that he wasn't being dismissive.
He simply forgot that the rest of us weren't operating from the same catalog of interstellar knowledge he was.
A Troken skiff could have been anything from a life raft to a bathtub as far as I knew, but whatever it was, it was apparently our way out of here without going back through Spore Valley.
That was enough to get my feet moving. I bent down, picked up the light disc from the floor, pressed the center, pocketed it, and looked at Vennox. “You ready to go see what a Troken skiff looks like?”
"Yes," he said, flatly. We were apparently both done explaining ourselves for the moment.
I found my pants in a heap near the foot of the bunk where I'd flung them with enthusiasm, and pulled them on, hopping on one foot when the ankle seam caught. My boots went on next. I was shoving my foot into the second one when movement caught my eye.
Vennox, still on the bunk, swung his legs over the side and hopped down. His kilt was on the floor a few feet away. He bent at the waist to retrieve it, and I got an unobstructed view of a perfect backside.
I really should have looked away.
I didn't.
The warrior had an unfairly perfect ass.
Tight. Sculpted. The kind that probably belonged in a museum dedicated to exceptionally good life choices.
He shook out the kilt and wrapped it around his hips with practiced efficiency while I stood there appreciating the view far longer than I should, given how I’d basically shut him down after the best sex of my life.
I dragged my gaze away. The light disc was already in my hand. I crossed to the hatch, threw the bolt, and the latch gave with a clunk that echoed off the walls. The seal broke with a soft hiss, and the door swung inward, hinges grinding with the stiffness of long disuse.
The corridor swallowed the light disc's glow within a few feet in either direction. I stepped out, and Vennox fell into step beside me, and I became immediately aware, the way you become aware of a change in air pressure, of the echo of him pressing against the edges of my thoughts.
It wasn't grief, exactly. It was more like the emotional equivalent of a gray sky, not storming, not threatening anything specific, just overcast in a way that had probably been true for so long it felt like the default.
The weight of a male who had been carrying something heavy for so long he'd stopped remembering what it felt like not to.
It moved with me down the corridor like weather that had decided to follow me indoors, and there wasn't a single thing I could do about it.
I focused on the third hatch past the collapsed bulkhead, and what Vala had found, and the alertness that came with not knowing what was on the other side of a door.
It was easier than feeling his fog as my own.
For now.