12. Rhykor #3
"Walk with me." She directs the request at Cassia with a quiet authority that makes Dessikt's hand drift toward his weapon. "At a distance."
Cassia looks at me. I give her a look of confirmation, short, tight, carrying a trust in Nysera that I've earned over years of alliance and that still costs me to extend in this moment, with this woman, toward the person I am physically incapable of losing.
They walk about twenty feet down the corridor, far enough that my hearing—Kraaj-enhanced, built for surveillance—catches fragments rather than full sentences.
Nysera speaks with her head tilting toward Cassia, her murmur below comfortable eavesdropping range, and even from this distance I witness the shift in Cassia's posture, the gradual stiffening of her spine, and her hands closing into fists at her sides the moment she stops walking and turns to face Nysera with an emotion that makes my chest constrict.
They speak for three more minutes. Then Nysera inclines her head—a gesture of formal acknowledgment that carries more respect than I've seen her offer any human—and walks back toward the briefing complex without another word.
Cassia returns to my side. Her face hardens into an expression I recognize from the first night I crashed through her ceiling, a fierce, brittle composure, a woman absorbing world-altering information and refusing to let it break her in public.
"What did she say?" My hand finds the dip above her hips, and this time I make contact, my palm on her spine, heat seeping through the fabric of her jacket, tethering us to the present.
"She warned me." Cassia blinks, her eyes darting as she fights for control while a flash of complicated emotions cuts through her fear.
"And for a woman who used to share your bed, she was brutally honest about your weaknesses.
Nysera explained that powerful Kraaj leaders or officers above your rank may try to use me against you.
Target me to control you. Leverage what we are to each other as a pressure point.
" Looking up at me with furious, resolved eyes, she adds, "I was told that I'm a vulnerability now.
That people like Daxos will see me as the fastest way to bring you to heel. "
The fury that detonated in the briefing chamber was hot, sudden, explosive, and consuming.
An ancient gravity moves through me now, colder and heavier than anything I have felt before.
It is the grinding, tectonic reality of an oath taking shape in the innermost part of my chest, where the marks burn against my ribs, and the bond thrums with a frequency that drowns out everything except this woman and the promise I am about to make.
Turning her toward me, I place both hands on her shoulders with my claws tucked and my thumbs resting against her collarbones, where the tension in her frame hums. I duck my head until my forehead is against hers, an intimacy that, in Kraaj culture, is synonymous with a binding vow.
"Listen to me," I pitch each word to reach her and no one else.
"Daxos, Rexicon, the officers in that chamber, and the politicians above them can file their reports, hold their tribunals, and strip my titles.
They can take my command, my rank, my standing.
They can burn my career to the ground and scatter the ashes.
" My hands tighten on her shoulders. "Nobody touches you while I still breathe.
That is the only fact in my life that outranks everything else. "
Her hands come up to grip my wrists, fingers wrapping around the place where the markings pass over my pulse points, touching the blemishes with an intent that echoes through me.
“That’s a flawed strategy,” she whispers. “That’s a death wish.”
"It's a promise." My mouth brushes her forehead in a warm, intentional echo of the gesture she made in the maintenance room. "And I have never broken one."
She closes her eyes. Her fingers tighten around my wrists, and we stand there in the amber corridor of a Kraaj military installation, surrounded by soldiers intent on separating us and politicians scheming to use her as a threat to operational integrity, while we hold each other and the bond settles deeper into the architecture of my chest with our shared breaths.
Whatever Daxos plans and whatever the consequences of this afternoon's catastrophic display of exactly how compromised I am—none of it changes the fundamental equation.
She is mine to protect. And I will destroy anything that tries to take her from me.
The drive back takes forty minutes through devastated urban terrain, but I order Dessik to stop the transport a mile from the compound gates.
Cassia and I walk the final stretch in silence, my hand on the small of her back the entire way, and she lets me, and we don't speak, because some promises are too large for words and too heavy for silence, and the only container that holds them is the space where two people walk side by side through a district intent on tearing them apart.