8. Rhykor #4
"Forget about the bleeding." I stay on my feet, filling her chamber with the stink of burned metal and my own blood, heat still leaking from my palms in faint pulses that leave scorch marks on her stone floor.
"The machines targeted the clinic." My claws scrape against my palms. "The rampant units in this district converged on one building, on her.
And the bond—" I choke on the word. "Whatever this is.
It's getting worse. I nearly lost control tonight.
Whatever took over, went deeper than battle focus, deeper than combat instinct—far older and wilder—that would have leveled the entire alley if she'd been hurt.
You have to tell me what's happening to me, and you need to stop speaking in riddles when you do it. "
Mother Serak measures me with a silent, piercing look.
The bioluminescent panels shift, casting patterns of blue-green light across the walls, and the incense curling through the chamber smells like old stone and a metallic object I've never been able to name.
When she finally speaks, the words drop heavy, a truth held too long, too carefully, finally released with full knowledge of the damage it will do.
"The human medic is your fated mate, Rhykor."
The admission lands in the chamber like stones dropping into still water. I hear the words understanding their meaning. And the defenses I've built over thirty-four years of refusing to believe in fate or anything that supersedes discipline and willpower. All of it cracks down the center.
"The bond you feel is ancient, Rhykor. It’s older than instinct, older than biology.
And far beyond anything you can diagnose or override.
" She leans forward, milky eyes on me with a gravity that touches my skin.
"It’s the oldest force our species carries in its blood—a recognition written into the very cells that Luvon reshaped when our people first arrived on this world.
Your body knows her. Your blood knows her.
And the more you fight it, the more violently it will fight back, until there is nothing left of you but the war between who you are and what you were made to become. "
I want to argue. My instincts demand that I tear her words apart with logical evidence and thirty-four years of ironclad conviction that surrender is for the dying.
But my hands are still burning. My chest still aches with that nameless tension, lingering from the first night I woke up on Cassia's floor.
And somewhere above me, in an underground clinic surrounded by the wreckage of machines I destroyed with a fury that went beyond strategy or anything I've ever felt on any battlefield, a woman is tending wounds and refusing to break, and my entire being screams at me to go back to her.
"The machines," I manage. "They targeted her and the clinic. Why?"
Mother Serak settles back into her cushions, and the shifting light paints new patterns across the ceremonial scars covering her face.
"That answer lies deeper than my knowledge, young one.
But I will tell you this, the Legion that sleeps beneath this district is older than the occupation, older than the war.
It calculates and predicts. And if it has turned its attention toward you and the woman your blood has chosen, it is because your bond threatens something the machine considers essential to its survival. "
I stare at her in the blue-green light while my wounds and wings throb and the memory of her grip on my durable vest threads through my awareness even here, underground, surrounded by incense and old stone.
The realization of her being my fated mate settles into me like acid shoved into open wounds, burning and illuminating simultaneously, reshaping the architecture of everything I thought I understood about myself.
"What do I do?" The question scrapes out of me for the second time in this chamber, and it costs even more than the first.
Mother Serak closes her milky eyes. "You stop asking that question. You already know the answer." She allows an ancient and immovable pause to settle. "Go back to her, Rhykor. Before the things that hunt you both realize what she is to you."
Climbing the worn stone steps out of her chamber on legs that feel borrowed from someone else, I fly back to Ash Alley on wings held together by willpower and new wounds.
My crew holds the perimeter. The wreckage of the machines still smolders in the alley, casting faint orange light across the walls.
Below, through the hole in her ceiling, generator light spills across Cassia's shoulders as she bends over a patient, staying awake and refusing to stop working because that’s just who she is, whether the world deserves it or not.
The thought that she is my fated mate should repulse me.
Instead it terrifies me, and the terror roots solely in the woman below me, unconnected to destiny, loss of control, or the stories I spent my entire life dismissing.
It terrifies me because I know, with an absolute clarity that goes deeper than bone, that I will burn this entire district to the ground before I let anything take her from me.
Whether that makes me her protector or the most dangerous thing in her life is a question I'm too far gone to answer.