Chapter 4 #2
He opened the locker and pulled out a narrow pouch.
“No shower under silent running. Wipes only.” He passed the pouch across.
His fingers brushed her palm. Heat slid up her arm again in a clean, insistent line.
She bit the inside of her lip and looked down until it receded enough that she was certain she could keep breathing.
When she looked up, he was watching her mouth. She looked away first.
She cleaned her face and throat and the inside of her wrists, then paused over the mark, reluctant to touch it and equally reluctant not to.
She pressed the edge of the cloth to the skin and felt the answering heat, not burning this time, only present.
When she finished, she tucked stray strands of hair behind her ear and returned the pouch to the locker.
Apex had taken the pilot seat while she cleaned. He didn’t look at her when she crossed back to stand near him. “What happens next?” she asked.
“I run the ship dark through the drift,” he said. “You sleep.”
“I won’t sleep.”
“You will,” he said. “Your body is shaking. Lie down.”
“I won’t sleep with you watching me,” she said, and then realized how that sounded. Color climbed her throat.
He didn’t move, didn’t take advantage. “I will watch the boards.” He gestured at the seat, at the posture that invited vigilance rather than rest. “I will not look at you.”
She slid onto the shelf and curled on her side facing the bulkhead, one hand under her cheek, the other cradling her wrist. The blanket was thin but clean and warm over her shift. She closed her eyes and listened for the rhythm of the ship until it became a tide pulling at her thoughts.
Sleep rose and dragged her under.
She woke to quiet and the shape of Apex’s silhouette at the edge of the port.
The cabin lights sat low, so low that the edges of everything softened.
The mark on her wrist was warm, not hot, steady on her skin.
She didn’t know how long she had slept. She knew only that when she sat up, Apex turned toward her as if he had known she would move before she did.
“How long?” she asked.
“Four units,” he said. “We are clear of the densest lanes.”
Her voice came rough with sleep. “And Aram?”
“Searching.” Apex’s head tilted, listening to something only he heard. “Not here.”
She stood, stretched, and crossed to the port. Space had shifted while she slept. The black was still, but the colors at the edges had changed from violet to a green so pale it looked like a breath held in glass. It made her chest ache.
“Thank you,” she said without turning. The words came out simple and heavy with more than gratitude. He had kept her safe while she slept. In her world that counted as something holy.
“You are welcome,” he said.
She looked over her shoulder. “Do you sleep at all?”
“When I must,” he said. “Not now.”
On impulse, without planning a script to protect herself from exposure, she reached for him.
Not a kiss. Not bold. Her fingers found the inside of his forearm where his skin looked smoothest. She touched there, no more than a press of fingertips.
The Valenmark burst hot in answer and he dragged a quiet breath through his teeth.
“I’m not playing with you,” she said. “I’m trying to learn the edges.”
“You are playing with fire,” he said. “And you already know the edges.”
“Show me anyway.”
His throat worked, the motion heavy. The sound that followed was not a sigh—it was a low growl, restrained power edging every breath.
Apex’s dominance pressed through the quiet like a storm he was holding back, the kind that warned of what would happen if he ever stopped holding it.
His eyes darkened. The power in his posture held like tempered metal.
He lifted his free hand and stopped before he touched her face, as if asking permission without words.
She nodded once.
His fingers slid along her cheekbone and behind her ear, a caress that broke nothing and remade everything.
The heat rose like a clean wave and she swayed into it.
He braced her with a palm at the small of her back, not pulling, only there.
She tilted her face up. The universe narrowed to breath and warmth and the aching distance between two mouths that could close that distance with a movement as small as a thought.
He stopped the moment before contact. His voice came low and rough. “Not again. Not yet.”
The refusal didn’t sound like rejection. It sounded like a vow deferred. The restraint in it shook her more than any touch could have. Tears pricked in a place on her that hadn’t softened for anyone in a long time. She blinked them back and stepped away first.
“Right,” she said. “Edges.”
He slid back into the pilot seat and reached for the arcs. “We will hold them until you choose otherwise.”
She opened her mouth to answer. The ship shivered under a force that didn’t belong to engine or drift. A sharp tone cut the air and went straight to the root of her teeth. Apex was already moving, hands on the controls, posture snapping from restrained to ready.
“What is that?” she asked, heart spiking fast.
“Target lock,” he said. “Rear quadrant.” His voice lost every softness it had allowed. It became pure function and steel. “Sit and fasten in.”
“Aram.” Her lips shaped the name before sound formed.
“Affirmative.” He stabbed a command that killed the cabin lights and bled the remaining glow from the panels until the cockpit went nearly dark. Only the stars and the thin amethyst ring of his eyes remained bright. “Harness.”
She sank into the seat beside him. He was already there, snapping the web across her hips with efficient, impersonal speed.
The brush of his knuckles against her stomach sent heat racing toward the mark again.
Her body didn’t understand the difference between battle and nearness.
The Valenmark only understood proximity.
She swallowed hard and locked the shoulder clip.
A hard clang juddered through the hull. The port flashed red as energy scraped their shields like wind tearing at metal siding. Her breath caught and froze in her throat.
“Shields at sixty-eight,” he said. “Guns hot. We will not outgun him. We outfly him.”
“This ship’s fast,” she said, clinging to what she had learned earlier, to anything that sounded like survival.
“It is fast,” he agreed. “Not faster than greed.”
Light knifed across the port, a white trajectory that left a ghost line in its wake. Apex rolled them out of the strike with ruthless grace, the cabin tilting under the force of the maneuver. Emmy’s stomach lurched. The harness cut across her ribs. The Valenmark burned like a live wire under skin.
“Talk to me,” she said through clenched teeth. “I learn better when I talk.”
“Left arc, two degrees,” he said.
Another blast slammed into the shields. The sound shivered through the frame. Her teeth rattled. He was a stone at the center of motion, unshaken.
“He will try to drive us toward the field’s bright lanes,” Apex said. “He assumes we will run for the obvious exit. We take the quiet path instead.”
“The gradients.”
“Affirmative.” He skimmed them into a narrow corridor that looked like nothing to her eyes until she adjusted her focus and saw the faintest seam of darker shadow inside the dark.
A place where sensor shimmer ran thin. He had shown her earlier that the safest way was not the bright one.
Now he put the lesson into blood and metal.
Aram’s ship roared past the port, a predator’s shape silhouetted for a flash against starlight. It turned in a tight arc and came again.
“Hold,” Apex said. “We do not chase. We do not flee. We slide.”
He slid them through the seam the same way he had taught her, fingertips light, heel pressure measured, eyes on the gradients rather than on the bright threat. Breath by breath, motion by motion, he placed the ship inside spaces that didn’t look like space at all.
For an instant she let herself believe they might make it cleanly through.
Aram’s next strike came from above, not behind.
The blast hit just forward of the port. The light that followed was a vicious bloom, bright enough that she flinched and threw an arm over her eyes.
The ship lurched. Metal screamed somewhere deep.
Warning tones layered over one another in a chorus that meant nothing good.
“Forward shield out,” Apex said, voice like iron in cold water. “Brace.”
He shoved them into a dive, less like flight and more like falling through a crack in the universe. The stars wheeled. Gravity pressed them down hard. Another flash raked their flank and the cabin went dead dark for half a breath before the backup grid throbbed into life, weaker and more honest.
Apex didn’t curse. He didn’t promise safety he couldn’t deliver. He simply said, “Hold on,” and drove the small ship into the teeth of the attack as if he had been born for nothing else.
The Valenmark flared white hot and locked to Apex’s pulse. Emmy curled her fingers around the harness until her knuckles ached and gritted her teeth against the scream of metal.
Aram Voss had found them.
And he did not intend to let them go.