Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
VENNOX
The reactor housing weighed almost as much as I did, and the warped plating along its eastern flank had fused to the deck in three places where the crash had driven the assembly sideways into the bulkhead.
I braced my shoulder against the metalloid and drove my weight forward, scales scraping against the alloy as the housing groaned and shifted half a hand.
Beside me, Truxxet matched my effort, his pointed ears flat against his skull with the strain, his silver scales flushed deep blue with exertion.
“Again,” Vala called from the raised platform where he oversaw the work with a calm that bordered on eerie. His reflective skin gleamed in the dimness, catching fractured light from a dozen angles. “The housing needs another four degrees before the coupling collar will seat.”
I planted my boots against the deck plating and shoved. Metalloid shrieked against metalloid as the housing lurched forward nearly a handspan.
"Hold it there!" Vala called.
Truxxet and I locked our arms against the massive assembly, straining to keep it from shifting back.
Tyrk crouched beside the opening, peering along the mounting rails while Ruze checked the alignment from the opposite side. Mehr darted between them with a measuring rod and a handful of tools, relaying Vala's instructions as the Nomadican studied the gap with narrowed eyes.
I didn’t understand the tech. Didn’t need to. My hands knew the weight of the housing, knew the burn of metalloid against my palms, and that was enough to keep them occupied. My head was another problem entirely.
She lived at the edges of all of it. In the heat of the compartment, under Vala’s clipped instructions, with Truxxet’s labored breathing and the shriek of a metalloid finding its place…
she was there. The wisp of her essence carried like a frequency I couldn’t tune out, the familiar current of her turmoil, and beneath it, a longing she would never admit to.
I tightened my grip on the housing and held on despite the texture of her essence changing.
The echo of her conflict did not vanish. It simply sank beneath a heavier darkness, replaced by a thick current of sadness I was unprepared for. It carried weight and settled into the spaces between my ribs the way cold settles into stone, and I had to remind myself to breathe.
Her emotions darkened, and the hollow ache of it filled my chest like a physical thing. The walls she'd built inside herself had reached their limit, and they were collapsing now, somewhere above me on the command deck, while I stood here holding a piece of metalloid I no longer cared about.
Her despair reached a pitch that made my ancillary heart stutter in my chest, and I felt Quin coming apart.
“My spirit mate needs me,” I stated before dropping the housing.
The metalloid hit the deck with a sound that shook the entire compartment, a massive, resonant clang that brought every head turning in my direction. I was moving before the echo had faded, adrenalyne surging through my veins.
“Fucking Helios!” Truxxet cursed as he took the full weight of the housing.
“Vennox!” Tyrk’s voice followed me. “Get your ass back here.”
I took the ladder to the deck above two rungs at a time, my boots striking the metalloid with a rhythm that matched the hammering of my hearts.
I could already smell her tears before I burst through the doorway onto the command deck. Five heads whipped toward me in unison from where the females sat gathered around the crates of salvaged components, but the work had stilled in their hands.
Quin sat among them, a component held loosely in one hand. Her shoulders trembled slightly, tears tracking silently down her cheeks, making no attempt to explain them to anyone.
No one spoke. The command deck held its breath as I crossed the deck in three strides. When I reached Quin, I dropped to one knee before her, the impact driving a dull thud through the deck plating, echoing in the silence.
I reached for her with both hands, sliding one arm beneath her knees and the other around her shoulders, and lifted her from the deck the way you lift something you fear losing.
Her body melted into my arms, a perfect, pliant weight that settled against my chest as if she’d been made to fit there. Before I’d even found my footing, her arms were locked around my neck, fingers digging into my scales as if I were the only solid thing in a world coming undone.
She buried her face in the hollow of my throat, her breath hitching in ragged, wet bursts that ghosted across my flesh.
I could feel the hot spill of her tears against me, each one a small scalding brand, and I held her tighter.
She sobbed, silent and relentless, until the very beat of my hearts seemed to answer the rhythm of her grief.
A low, steady resonance rose from someplace deep within me.
The thrumming did what words could not. Her next breath came slower, the one after that slower still, the desperate clutch of her fingers at my neck loosening by degrees until her grip softened into what felt less like drowning and more like holding on.
I rose with Quin in my arms. She weighed almost nothing, a fact that stirred the protective instinct that lived at the core of my being.
Her body settled against my chest with the trust of a spirit mate who had found shelter.
Uri had broken something inside me that I had not yet found a name for, and I was humbled anew by how Quin reached for me in her time of distress.
I carried her from the command deck. My footsteps echoed in the empty corridor, measured and deliberate, each stride carrying us away from the eyes of others.
The first crew quarters I found stood empty, the interior dark and still.
I carried Quin across the threshold, the hatch sealing behind us.
I crossed to the bunk, lowered myself onto its edge, and settled Quin in my lap.
The weight adjusted until she was cradled securely against my chest. Her knees tucked against my side, her face still pressed into the hollow of my throat, her arms still wrapped securely around my neck.
We sat in the quiet. The only sound was the distant, muted groan of the ship settling around us and the softer sound of Quin’s breathing, steady and measured, the rhythm of someone who had weathered a storm and was taking stock of the damage.
“How long?” Her voice was quiet. Hoarse from crying, but steady. “If we never... if we don’t mate again. How long until it fades?”
My spirit twisted in rebellion. The very thought of denying the bond opened a raw and ragged wound in my chest.
“I do not know for certain,” I said. The truth, offered without embellishment. “I was only a youngling when our females succumbed to the germ meant for the Gretolics. No bonded pair ever chose to deny the call of their spirit to its complement. There is no precedent for it.”
“Will it always hurt this much? The... hollow feeling. Will that get better, or is this just how it’s going to be?”
"Before my abduction, there was a warrior in Clan Huren named Draggar." The name felt solid in my mouth, an anchor to a world I had nearly forgotten. "Nakkia, his first spirit mate, was killed by a floratrap. A carnivorous plant not so dissimilar to what is on this world.”
Quin's breath caught. A wisp of a sympathetic ache, the horror of imagining what I described.
“Once his spirit mate entered the Realm of the Spirits, Draggar became a shadow of the warrior I had admired. He spoke less. He fought with a recklessness that bordered on self-destruction. But he endured, and he learned to live with the loss just like all the other males who have lost their mates.”
“This whole spirit mate thing sounds like a terrible ordeal.” Quin lifted her head from my shoulder and met my eyes. “Mourning the loss of a spouse is one thing, but what you describe sounds horrific.”
"Draggar endures because he knows the bond does not end at death. When his suns-rises in this world are done, he will find be reunited with her in the next realm. Spirit mates are not separated by death. They are only separated by time."
"You truly believe there's another realm waiting for you?" she asked. "That spirit mates find each other again?"
“I do,” I said, clinging to a thread of optimism.
“After I returned to Valose after Gorka, I saw something I had not believed possible.
Draggar's shawra glowed again. Not the stain of a dead shawra. A living glow. The Spirits had blessed him with a second spirit mate. A human female named Marie. When you return to your world, there might still be a second chance for happiness. For both of us.”
Quin flinched as though I had struck her, her eyes widening. A wave, hot and sharp, shot through me. Jealousy, pure and visceral.
Quin slid from my lap and began to pace.
Three steps toward the bulkhead, turn, three steps back.
Her boots struck the deck plating with a rhythm that betrayed her agitation.
“This would all be so much easier if I didn’t like you so much.
” The words burst from her as though she had been holding them behind her teeth.
“If you were an asshole, or controlling, or—or anything other than what you are. Then I could walk away, and it would hurt less.”
An unguarded surge of joy bloomed in my chest at the raw honesty of her words. Her resistance was not born of indifference but of care too deep to safely carry. Quin stiffened mid-stride.
“Stop that.” She wheeled to face me, pointing a finger at my shawra. “Stop projecting your… your warm and fuzzies into me. I’m trying to be angry, and you’re making it impossible.”
I laughed. The sound surprised us both, a genuine, unrestrained laugh that fractured the tension between us like ice under a spring thaw.
Quin’s mouth twitched. The corner of her lip curved upward despite her obvious efforts to prevent it, and for a moment, the hollow in her chest that I had carried since the engine compartment felt less like a wound and more like a space waiting to be filled.
Silence settled over the crew quarters once more, heavy and expectant, as though the ship itself was holding its breath.
Quin stood before me, her dark hair falling in waves around her shoulders, her dove-gray eyes searching my face with an intensity that made my scales prickle.
For several heartbeats she simply studied me.
Her gaze traced the line of my jaw, lingered on the set of my mouth, then dropped to the scars at my throat that I could not hide.
I held still beneath her examination, offering no resistance.
Then her lips curved. A bittersweet expression that carried so much tenderness it made my chest ache, and beneath it, a sadness so profound it nearly broke both my hearts.
She crossed the remaining distance between us and stepped between my knees.
My hands found her waist as naturally as breathing, resting there with gentle restraint, my thumbs tracing idle circles against the fabric of her shirt.
She was warm beneath my palms, solid and real, and the ache of her spirit ribboned around mine, a faint echo of emotions that were not my own but had become impossible to distinguish from what belonged to me.
“Then let us make an agreement,” I said, smiling despite myself. “I will do my best not to overwhelm you with my... warm and fuzzies, if you will stop sharing the ache of your heartbreak with me.”
She cupped my face in both hands. Her palms were warm against my scales, her thumbs resting against the ridges of my cheekbones with a gentleness that made my breath catch. Her eyes held mine, gray and steady and impossibly deep.
“I wish I could,” she whispered. The words were barely audible, shaped by lips that trembled slightly. “I wish I knew how to stop feeling what I feel. But I don’t.”
Before either of us could overthink it, she leaned down and kissed me.
Softly. Tenderly. Her lips pressed against mine with a gentleness that belied the storm I could feel building beneath her skin.
The kiss was unhurried, a slow exploration that tasted of salt and warmth and sweeter beneath both.
She lingered, her mouth moving against mine with a patience that made my hands tighten at her waist, and when she finally pulled back, the space between us felt charged with everything she had not said.
My forehead pressed against hers. I felt the warmth of her breath on my lips, slightly unsteady, and watched the delicate flutter beneath the skin of her throat where her pulse raced.
“If you kiss me like that again,” I said softly, my voice rough with restrained desire, “I will forget every promise we made to deny the bond.” I swallowed hard, my thumbs pressing against the curve of her waist. “And I will have you beneath me before either of us remembers why we should stop.”