Chapter 4 #2
“Apex,” she said, voice desperate.
He’d slumped against the console. The side of his head was wet. Blood ran into his hair and then down his neck, dark in the blue glow. His chest moved. Too shallow. Too slow.
“Core?” she rasped, heading for the locker in the hopes of retrieving a first aid kit. “Talk to me.”
The AI’s voice flickered in and out. “Stabilization… protocols… engaged. Seal compartments… administer suppressant… check vitals…” The words degraded, tone fading to static.
“No, no, don’t go.” She coughed through smoke and swept debris off the first aid kit with her forearm, sending panels clattering.
The kit snapped open under her hands. She didn’t think about the tremor in her fingers or the way the ship creaked ominously around them.
She crawled to Apex, bare knees slipping in something wet. Blood.
She got her shoulder under his and heaved. He was heavy, all that lethal muscle suddenly nothing but sheer bulk with his breath skimming like a stone over water.
“Stay with me,” she muttered. “You don’t get to check out.”
His lashes didn’t move.
She forced his body back from the console to lie along the floor where the angle wasn’t as savage.
The mark at his wrist still shone softly, pulse for pulse with hers.
She peeled back his jacket with shaking hands, then tore his shirt down the seam.
Her breath hitched. For some reason, the sight of him did that—hard planes, brutal beauty, a chest built like armor—but there was nothing beautiful about the bruising already blooming beneath his skin or the way his ribs shifted wrongly under her palm.
“Core,” she said, trying for steady and almost getting there, “diagnostic.”
“…hemothorax… right side… displaced fracture—clavicle… possible splenic bleed… recommend binder application… evac… evac…” The voice frayed, thinned.
“Evac to where?” she whispered, and hated that her voice shook. There was nowhere. Not right now. Only this broken hull, this humming forest, and the pulse of her mark beating back the dark.
She found the hemostatic spray and the sealant patches and the rib binder in the tiny medbay.
She cut away more of his shirt, hands close to trembling now from adrenaline, heat, and the electricity that ran under her skin when she touched him.
Not helpful. She shoved the emotion into a corner and fitted the binder around his chest, careful of the angle of his broken collarbone.
He didn’t wake, but a thin line appeared between his brows, his mouth pulling tight. She wanted to kiss the tightness away.
Not helpful. Focus.
There was more blood along his side. Too much. She pressed her fingers there and sensed another’s rhythm beside his heartbeat, the tide-hum of the planet. The light through the cracked screen pulsed once, brighter, like the world held its breath with her.
She looked around frantically, scanning the wreckage. “Core, is there anything here I can use to fix him?”
“Medbay cabinet two… lower left… auto-suture available…”
She dug for it, ripped the pack, and sprayed the cold gel along the worst of the open edges. The gel foamed, shifted, knitted. She watched the numbers on the portable monitor creep a fraction toward the right direction. Not enough.
“Talk to me,” she told him, because it was easier than talking to Core. “Tell me how you’re going to browbeat me for being reckless. Tell me I touched the wrong switch. Tell me anything.”
His lips were pale instead of their usual bronze color. She touched them lightly with her fingertips, wanting, ridiculously, to feel warmth flare. Instead the flare came from her wrist. The Valenmark burned hot, then hotter still, and the heat rolled across her skin like a tide.
She didn’t know what made her do it, maybe the way the forest’s light slowed to match the rise and fall of his chest, maybe the way her own breath became trapped against her ribs, but she pressed her marked wrist to his. Flesh to flesh. Mark to mark.
The response was immediate. Heat slammed through her, bright as lightning. Her mind went thin at the edges, as if something had opened a door behind her eyes. There wasn’t language in it, not exactly, but there was pattern. Rhythm.
She sensed Apex like a shape in a dark room. The outline of him—discipline, focus, that low endless potency—blazed across her senses. And under it, pain. Sharp. Compartmentalized, the way a soldier would hold it.
“Apex,” she breathed. “Come back.”
For an instant his pulse jumped under her wrist. Her vision blurred and bizarrely, his attention turned. Not waking yet, but orienting. This way, her body seemed to tell him. Here.
The forest brightened. The hum in the air slid a fraction higher in pitch. The cracked screen took the glow and bent it across his skin. He looked otherworldly like that. Or rather, more otherworldly.
“Emmeline,” he grated, voice rough and faraway.
Her eyes stung. “Hey. Stay with me. Please.”
“Do not cry.” Even half-gone, command lived in him. “You will listen.”
“Bossy,” she muttered, absurd relief fizzing through her, then sobered. “I’m listening.”
“Pressure… right quadrant,” he said. “Bind it tight. You will splint the shoulder before I wake or I will move and make it worse.”
“You’re already awake,” she said, but she did it anyway. The splint hissed as it hardened. He grunted, breath catching.
“Pain suppressant,” he said. “Half dose. I will need my mind.”
“You’ll get it,” she said, rummaging in the kit. Her hands didn’t seem like her hands anymore. They were steadier than she had any right to expect. Maybe that was the mark. Maybe the planet. Maybe it was simply that she refused to lose him.
She injected the med. The tension around his eyes eased a fraction. It didn’t take the edge off his presence. If anything, with the blood scrubbed from his temple and the binder snug around the breadth of his chest, he looked more like the force that had upended her entire life and set it spinning.
He blinked, and his gaze finally caught hers, clearer now, focused.
The look went through her like heat. God, she’d become too aware of everything, the flex of his abdomen under her palm when she checked the binder, the rasp of stubble along his jaw when her fingers brushed there to clear away a smear of blood, the clean scent of him beneath smoke.
The bond magnified it all until an intense need layered itself under her skin.
He must’ve picked up on the shift. The corner of his mouth moved in something that wasn’t a smile and wasn’t not. “Later,” he said quietly, and though the word was simple, the promise inside it made her stomach go molten.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” she said, but the protest came out softer than she’d intended.
“Then do not put your mouth so close to mine while I am injured,” he said, so absolutely himself she almost laughed. “I will not be gentle.”
Heat slid through her in a slow, treacherous ribbon. “You’re injured,” she said, because thought seemed safer than sensation. “We’re half-buried. The Core’s dying. And you’re flirting.”
“I am warning you,” he said, amethyst eyes steady.
Something in her answered that steadiness—a click, a fitting into place. She cleared her throat and smoothed her palm once over the binder, along the hard rise of his ribs. The forest’s glow pulsed with the motion, as if the planet were leaning closer to see.
“Okay,” she said, businesslike because that seemed safer. “We need to move you out of the smoke.”
“Agreed.”
“On three,” she said. “And yes, I know you’ll say you don’t need counting. Humor me.”
“I do not need—”
“Three,” she said, and slipped her arm under his shoulders, her other arm across his abdomen. He was heat and mass and the scent of smoke and wind and something unique that belonged to him alone. He braced with his left arm and let her take less of his weight than he should have. Stubborn man.
They got to the corridor beyond the cockpit where the smoke thinned. The angle of the hull forced them into a sideways crab-walk. Emmy swore as a loose panel caught her hip. Apex also swore, though in a language that melted along her skin. Outside, the world breathed light.
They reached the midship compartment before the floor gave a warning shudder. Emmy froze. So did Apex. The shudder passed like a big animal turning over in its sleep.
“Core?” she said. “Stability?”
“…structural integrity… fifty-one percent… hull breach aft… containment failing… powering down non-essential…”
“Don’t you dare power down,” she said. “You don’t get to leave me with him half-broken and a planet trying to… listen.”
“…this world hears you…” the Core whispered, almost human now, then crackled into static.
“Core?” she called. “Core, stay with me.”
Silence.
The sudden absence of that voice made the ship like a body that had just exhaled for the last time. Emmy pressed her lips together hard and breathed through her nose. Don’t cry. Don’t break. Move.
“Emmeline,” Apex said. “Listen.”
She stilled. The hum outside had shifted again. The rhythm had lengthened, slowed to match something steady. Her own heart? No, the beat under her palm where she braced him. The planet mirrored him, not her this time.
“It’s syncing to you,” she whispered. “Or to us.”
“Affirmative,” he said. “We will use it.”
“For what?”
“For time.”
They built a pocket of safety in the half-lit midship like soldiers on a battlefield who’d learned to make shelter out of ruin.
Emmy dragged a thermal blanket from the locker, threw it over the least-damaged stretch of floor, and secured it with emergency crates.
She found the portable lantern, smacked it against her thigh to make it stop flickering, and set it low, so it didn’t fight the planet’s glow.
She propped Apex against a brace post and knelt between his knees, binder tools and medsprays within reach.
“Vitals,” she said, and fitted the clip to his ear. Numbers crawled across the small screen. “Better. Not great.”
“We will call it good enough,” he said.
She cut the rest of his jacket and shirt away and eased the torn sleeve past the splinted shoulder.
Her fingers shook a little. The lines of his body were a study in contradictions, hard strength under battered skin, the extraordinary restraint he carried even now when pain had to be burning him from the inside out.
The mark at his wrist beat slow and steady. It tugged at her own like a tide.
She cleaned the worst of the blood from his temple, then checked the wound beneath.
Shallow. Head wounds always looked worse.
She sealed it anyway and smoothed the edges with her thumb.
He watched her face the entire time, not in that assessing way he had when he was calculating, but as if watching her had become its own vital function he wasn’t willing to surrender.
“What?” she asked, not looking up from the splint straps she re-tightened.
“You are shaking,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“You are lying.”
“Probably,” she admitted, and finally met his gaze. “But I’m still doing what needs to be done.”
The approval in his eyes warmed and sharpened at once. “Affirmative.” A beat. “Emmeline.”
“What?”
“If I lose consciousness, you will not move me alone. You will secure my shoulder against the brace. You will wait for me to wake.”
She stared at him. “You think I plan to sit on my hands while you bleed?”
“I think you will choose not to break yourself trying to carry me through a failing hull,” he said, calm as a blade laid flat. “I will wake. I always wake.”
That stubborn, impossible confidence ran through her like a current. She tried to look unimpressed and failed. “You’re infuriating.”
“Affirmative,” he said, as if she’d praised him.
She huffed a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh and reached for the next tool. “I assume this is going to hurt.”
“I am aware.”
“Then talk me through how to do this as gently as possible. I’m not a trained medic.”
Following his instructions, she injected a local at the worst fracture site and waited long enough to be kind but not long enough to be cruel.
He didn’t flinch. He watched her mouth again, and heat arced through the space between them.
She could pretend the bond did that, made every small proximity similar to gravity.
But she’d wanted him from the moment she’d seen him standing under the auction hall lights, a creature made of war and command and a single-minded, terrible clarity that had somehow made her safe.
Overwhelmed with relief to have reached the last steip, she fastened the final strap, her fingers brushing his skin a moment longer than necessary.
The motion was supposed to be practical, one last check to secure the binding, but the way his breath caught told her he experienced that whisper of her touch as keenly as she did.
The air between them thickened, the scent of metal and smoke giving way to something warmer, edged with want.
She looked up at him through her lashes, pulse racing, her voice a husky tease meant to disguise how badly she wanted him to keep looking. “Stop looking at me like that,” she insisted softly.
“Like what?” he asked, bland in that not-bland way that always made something in her lift its head.
“Like you’re thinking about kissing me,” she said, the words low and trembling between a dare and a confession.
Her gaze dropped to his mouth, tracing the line of it.
The air between them pulsed—hot, charged, dangerous.
Every heartbeat sounded too loud, every breath too shallow.
She leaned closer until their knees brushed, until his breath mingled with hers, the space between them thick with the promise of something they both wanted and both were barely holding back.
“I am thinking about kissing you,” he said, so simply her breath tripped. “I am also thinking about how quickly you will undress if I tell you to.”