Chapter 10 #3
He hums. The sound vibrates through his chest and into mine, a low resonance that bypasses my ears and settles into my bones.
I freeze, shocked into stillness by the unexpectedness of it.
The melody is nothing I recognize, ancient and alien and achingly beautiful, notes that wind around each other in patterns that don't follow any scale I learned in human music theory.
The sound he makes is devastating, the thought surfacing through the wreckage of my mind. This male who kills with his hands, who built himself into a weapon, who terrifies half a planet with his mere existence, produces a sound like mourning and comfort woven into one thread.
His voice wraps around me like a second embrace, and I sink into his chest rather than fighting against it.
The panic doesn't disappear, but it softens, edges blurring as the vibrations work through muscle and bone.
He's so much larger than me. His arms could crush without effort, his hands could break me in a dozen different ways, and instead they're cradling me against heat that seeps through my sleep clothes and into skin that's been cold for so long.
He's not demanding anything. Not asking for explanations or apologies or promises I can't keep. He's holding me through the breaking, letting me shatter against his chest while he hums a melody that sounds like grief given form.
His chin settles on top of my head, and he rocks. No one has ever held me while I broke. My mother was too sick by the time I needed holding. The military didn't train for comfort. Every relationship I've had since has been transactional, and temporary.
This male is letting me exist in my grief without asking for anything in return. The realization cracks open a place in my chest I thought closed forever.
“You should sleep.” The syllables rumble through his chest where my ear presses against it.
I'm so tired. The exhaustion I've been carrying since I landed on this planet has teeth, dragging at me with a weight I can't fight.
I don't want to sleep, don't want to risk another nightmare, but more than that I don't want this to end.
His heat. The safety of arms that were built for violence choosing softness instead.
Once. I want someone to hold me demanding nothing, and he's offering exactly that.
“Will… you stay?” The question is a surrender I shouldn't be offering, especially to him. I want him to stay anyway.
His arms tighten around me, pressure that speaks louder than words. When he answers, the single syllable barely registers before sleep drags me under.
“Yes.”
Light against my eyelids. Orange glow bleeding through sealed windows, announcing a morning that arrived while I was elsewhere.
I slept without dreams, without counting breaths that stopped, without carrying bodies through the dark corridors of memory. The realization surfaces through the fog of deep sleep, remarkable in its simplicity.
He still holds me tightly in his arms, pressing me close to a heat that has chased away the cold I’ve carried for years.
He fixes his gaze on the window. The angles of his face are softer in morning glow, harsh lines eased into quiet.
His coiled tension has shifted. Not the predator patience of before but a stillness.
Then he senses my attention and turns his head. His arms tightening around me before he schools his features into neutral.
“Did you sleep well, female?”
The question is formal, distant, the words of a male trying to pretend the night didn't happen.
“Yes.” My words come out rusty with sleep and tears and truths I shouldn't speak. “I did.”
He nods, and then his arms loosen and he’s lifting me, setting me on the bed, rising to his feet in one fluid motion. His heat vanishes immediately, unwelcome, and I track him crossing to the door like someone who spent the night learning the shape of what she shouldn’t want.
“That song.” He stops. Turns his head, and I ask. “What was the song from last night?”
He pauses at the threshold. Doesn't turn around. I don't think he'll answer me, but he speaks. “A song my mother used to sing to me when I was young.”
He takes one step into the corridor. “The kitchen will send breakfast. The investigation continues at 0900.”
I should let him go. Should accept the retreat he's offering and the walls he's trying to rebuild between us.
Should remember that he's still my captor and I'm still his property and everything that happened in this room changes nothing about the fundamental architecture of our situation.
He needs me functional. That's all this was.
Instead, I say, “Thank you. For staying. For... all of it.”
His shoulders stiffen. I think he'll turn, will look at me and acknowledge what we both understand about the night we shared, but he's through the door without another word.
The door shuts after him and the room is emptier without him.
The carved stone ceiling stares back at me, unchanged by what happened beneath it, and I lie in sheets that still hold where his body pressed into the mattress, tracing the ghost of his heat across my skin.
I trace the scar on my forearm, that ridge of healed tissue that has grounded me through every loss. His heat is another scar now. Another reminder. I'll carry what he gave me last night for as long as I carry everything else I've survived.
A wall that should have held has crumbled between us, and I'm not certain whether what we're building in its place will save me or destroy me. Orange light fills my room with shades of rust and amber, and I let the morning settle into my bones alongside the truth I can no longer deny.
I'm not afraid of him anymore. That might be the most dangerous thing of all.