Chapter 2
Delilah settled into sleep between one breath and the next.
Kellat stood at the side of her bed and watched the monitors.
Heartrate. Oxygen. Neural activity. It was all smoothing out into the slow, steady patter of deep rest. Twenty minutes ago, she’d woken screaming, clawing at the sheets, her eyes wide and unseeing, and now she was curled on her side with one hand tucked under her cheek like a child.
He shook his head. He hadn’t managed to run anything but the most basic tests until she’d run out of energy, her incessant chatter slowing enough that he realized she’d tired herself out, but it didn’t matter.
She needed her rest. Murmuring something in her sleep, she burrowed deeper under the covers.
The sheets were twisted around her legs, and he reached out to untangle them.
She was so tiny.
And utterly beautiful. Her hair tangled against the pillow, dark and messy, and her lips were parted.
He ached to taste them. All he wanted to do was gather her up, feel her slight weight against his larger, harder body…
wake her with his hands and his mouth. His cock throbbed, heat slamming straight down to the root.
She was his patient, and she was injured, but that didn’t stop him wanting her.
Ninety-nine point eight percent.
“Resume standard monitoring,” he said, turning from the bed. “If she wakes again, notify me directly. Do not attempt to manage it yourself.”
“Yes, Lead Healer.”
The junior healer at the side of the bay stepped aside as he passed, and Kellat walked the short corridor to his office without looking back. He didn’t need to; her bay readouts were all routed direct to his console.
He closed the door behind him and let the quiet of his office settle around his shoulders.
The observation pane looked down into the main bay, and from here he could see the door to her room.
Closed. Monitors blinking their steady green on the panel beside it.
The junior had already retreated to the duty station.
Good.
He sat at his desk.
Ninety-nine point eight percent.
The Mate Program notification was still sitting in his private files where he’d buried it the day it arrived. He hadn’t looked at it since. He didn’t need to. The number was burned into the back of his mind, four digits that were there every time he closed his eyes.
His match. His kelarris. And she had no idea.
He steepled his fingers on the desk and built the rationalization the way he’d build a treatment plan.
One: she was still recovering from catastrophic head trauma.
Two: her neural architecture had undergone a remapping that he couldn’t fully explain, and introducing the additional stress of a mating claim before he understood the implications would be medically irresponsible.
Three: she’d just woken from a coma. Dumping a match on top of all that was not caution.
It was cruelty.
Or cowardice.
No, no… Caution was the correct course. Caution was always the correct course when dealing with human patients.
He was the Lead Healer of Devan Station.
He’d earned his rank through years of clinical discipline and the kind of brutal physical trials that killed one in three candidates before they ever got near a patient.
He did not make decisions based on what his cock wanted. He made them based on the evidence.
And the evidence said she wasn’t ready. Not yet.
He was still sitting there, not looking at the buried notification, when the holo emitter on his desk chimed. He looked up, and his eyes widened at the ID tag for the caller.
His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Daaynal K’Saan.
Kellat straightened in his chair. The emperor didn’t call without a reason. Tapping the accept sigil, he waited as the emperor’s image appeared in front of him.
“Your Majesty.”
“Lead Healer.” Daaynal’s voice was rougher than usual, and he looked like he hadn’t slept.
His many braids were neat; they were always neat, but there was a tension around his eyes that Kellat recognized.
He’d seen it on warriors who’d been in the field too long.
“I trust I’m not interrupting anything critical. ”
“Indeed not, your majesty.” Kellat leaned back and let his hands rest on the arms of his chair. The posture was deliberate. Relaxed. The emperor didn’t need to know that his Lead Healer had just been sitting in the dark, staring at a door. “What do you need?”
“The human female, Charlotte Mason,” Daaynal said bluntly. “I want an update.”
Kellat was pulling up the file before the emperor had finished the sentence. “She’s healing well. The tissue regeneration around the surgical site is progressing within expected parameters, and the neurological scans came back positive. Another week and I’ll be happy to wake her.”
Daaynal nodded. His expression didn’t change. But Kellat had been reading the emperor’s silences for decades, and he read this one easily: relief mixed with something that looked a lot like guilt.
The reason for the guilt wasn’t hard to find. Daaynal was off-station hunting Purists, the same cell that had taken Lady Emily… the female who’d been matched to one of his own guards instead of him. A bond Daaynal had been, by every account Kellat had heard, quietly relieved to see happen.
Because the emperor looked at Charlotte Mason the way a male looked at his mate.
And Kellat kept that observation where it belonged: behind his teeth. If the emperor wanted to discuss it, he would. Until then, his job was to provide medical updates and not to notice things that weren’t his business. Even if those things were obvious to anyone with eyes in their heads.
“Good. I’ll be back on station within the week,” Daaynal said. “Keep me informed if anything changes.”
“Of course.”
There was a small pause, and Daaynal’s gaze shifted. For a moment, the emperor wasn’t looking at Kellat but at the room behind him.
“Miisan’s not with you.”
It wasn’t a question.
“She had other duties,” Kellat said, which was true in the technical sense and a lie in every sense that mattered.
Miisan had probably seen the incoming call and made herself scarce the way she always did when Daaynal reached out.
She never said why. She didn’t have to. Everyone knew that the emperor couldn’t bear to look at the AI clone of his dead sister, but only Kellat knew that it cut her every time.
The emperor’s jaw tightened.
“The human you pulled from the wreckage,” he said, shifting topics with an abruptness that meant the previous one was closed. “The Sawyer female. How is she?”
Kellat smiled. “She’s now awake. Today, actually.”
“And?”
Kellat didn’t ask how Daaynal knew. The emperor made it his business to know everything that happened on Devan Station, especially when it involved humans. “And she’s recovering. Neurological function is intact. Motor control is returning. She was lucid when I assessed her.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
No. It never was. Daaynal’s interest in the other female was more than transparent. Both females had been kept in induced comas while they healed, even if they were healing from different injuries.
“Her brain remapped itself somehow during the coma,” he explained.
“Her neural architecture reconfigured around the trauma sites in a way I’ve not seen before, and definitely nothing like anything I can find in the human databases.
The only time I’ve seen anything like that is in records of the adaptive regeneration in some of the old-clan bloodlines.
She shouldn’t have that ability, even we lost it generations ago, but the scans don’t lie.
The pathways are new. Self-generated. It’s—“
He caught himself, and Daaynal’s lips quirked.
“Remarkable,” Kellat finished.
“Remarkable,” Daaynal repeated. “Excellent. Keep me updated on both females.”
“Of course, your majesty.”
Daaynal nodded once and ended the call. Kellat was alone in his office with the quiet hum of the station and the echo of his own words.
Remarkable.
He’d said it out loud. He’d said it to the emperor, who missed nothing, sounding like a novice who’d just discovered that the body was more interesting than the textbook said it should be.
The worst part was that he’d meant it.
He pulled up the feeds from both high-dependency bays on his console. All the readings were still green. Charlotte was still deeply under, so he turned his attention to Delilah. She was still sleeping, small and stubborn and wired differently than any human he’d ever studied.
The most interesting case of his career was the female he couldn’t… wouldn’t claim.
Caution, he reminded himself. Evidence. Clinical judgment.
Sitting back down, he pulled up the old clan databases before he could talk himself out of it.
They were lineage records. Lost bloodlines that had scattered across the empire long before humans were discovered.
But humanity was descended from the Lathar, from the expedition ship that had crashed hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Which meant she did have lathar DNA, and if her brain had remapped itself, then the answer was in the data.
It had to be. The archives went back over three thousand generations, and somewhere in those records was a genetic signature that matched hers.
He was three hours deep in the search before he noticed that the silence in the office was wrong.
It took him a full ten seconds to understand why.
The layered sound of the medical bay was as familiar to him as his own heartbeat…
all the monitors with their steady chorus, and the cycling of air through the filtration systems. He’d spent so many years inside that sound that he stopped hearing it unless something changed.
And something had changed. Frowning, he looked up. There was a gap. One of the monitor cadences had dropped out, and it took him another two seconds to identify which one it was.
Delilah’s bay.
He was on his feet and through the door in an instant.