Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
The first Alliance medic who reached them was a compact Terellian woman with four hands. She assessed Rhaezon in three seconds flat, barked orders over her shoulder, and turned to November.
"Ma'am, we need to move him to the transport. I'll need you to step back."
"No."
Not loud. Not aggressive. The single syllable landed and stayed there. She had held a fully shifted Drakon's face in her hands and talked him back from the edge. She was not going to be moved by anyone who had not been there when it mattered.
The medic opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at November's cut hands, the dust in her hair, the amber-gold ring in her left iris that the medic's training identified as a bonding marker, even if November herself did not yet know it was there. The medic recalibrated.
"Stay on his left side. Don't touch the shoulder."
November stayed on his left side. She did not touch the shoulder.
They loaded Rhaezon onto a hovering medical platform, and she walked beside it with her hand on his chest, feeling the rise and fall of his breathing beneath her palm.
Healing nanites went into his shoulder first — the deep laceration closing in stages, the white of exposed bone disappearing beneath regenerating tissue.
Then the blaster wound in his side, which had been bleeding steadily and without complaint since before the shift.
Then the wing. The medic spent a long time examining the wing.
"The membrane has new micro-tears from the shift. But the original break..." She looked up at November as though November might have context. "The original damage is decades old. Whoever set this didn't set it correctly. Or at all."
"No one set it. It was meant to stay broken."
The medic's four hands went still for a moment. Then she resumed working.
They treated Davn next. He submitted to their care with the tolerance of understanding their necessity and intending to be done with them as quickly as possible.
His arm was worse than he'd let on — a compound fracture beneath the makeshift binding, the bone visibly displaced.
He made no sound while they set it. November watched his jaw tighten once and release. That was the only indication.
Her own injuries were minor by comparison. Cuts from the windowsill. Bruising across her ribs where she'd hit the floor. A shallow gash on her forearm she didn't remember getting. The medic cleaned and sealed each one.
Rhaezon was unconscious by the time they carried him onto the shuttle.
The nanites had stabilized his shoulder, sealed the blaster wound, and begun the slow process of addressing the wing membrane.
His body had spent everything it had on the shift, and there was nothing left to keep him awake.
She sat on the floor beside his medical cot, held his hand, and watched him breathe.
The shuttle lifted. Aelthar fell away beneath them.
Davn lowered himself into the seat across from her. His newly set arm was in a proper sling. His color was marginally better. He looked at Rhaezon, then at her.
"Where are they taking us?"
"Somewhere safe. The estate of someone named Lord Skarreth. He's an ally of the network." The Alliance officer who'd briefed her had said the name with careful neutrality, as if he respected Skarreth but didn't particularly want to be in a room with him. "His wife is human."
Davn absorbed this. "Good," he said, and closed his eyes.
The estate was on a temperate world two jumps from Aelthar — green and sprawling where Aelthar was stark and vertical.
The estate grounds stretched in every direction, manicured gardens giving way to wild forest at the edges.
The main house was enormous, built from pale stone that caught the light and held it.
It was beautiful in the way that very old money was beautiful — without apology or explanation.
Lord Skarreth met them on the landing pad. He was taller than Rhaezon and darker, his obsidian skin swallowing the afternoon light. Ice-blue eyes tracked over the medical platforms, the wounded, the dust and blood. His expression revealed nothing.
Beside him stood a woman. A human woman.
November registered her before she registered anything else about the estate.
She was lean and strong, dark-skinned, her locs pulled up and away from a face that was watching November with sharp attention.
Paint stains were on her fingers. She was already moving forward while Skarreth was still assessing the situation.
"I'm Octavia." She fell into step beside November as the medical team guided Rhaezon's platform toward the house. "I'm Skarreth's wife. We have a suite prepared for all three of you. The healing wing's through the east corridor."
November looked at her. Octavia looked back. A full three seconds of two human women taking each other's measure across the gap of extraordinary circumstances that neither of them had planned and both of them had chosen.
"November Lachlan."
"I know." Octavia's mouth lifted into a smile. "We got the briefing. Come on. Let's get your people inside."
Your people. November's throat tightened. She nodded.
They put Rhaezon in a room with wide windows and pale walls and a bed large enough for his frame.
The healing nanites continued their work.
His breathing was deep and regular. Color was returning to his skin.
The medic assured her he would wake within hours.
November pulled a chair to his bedside and did not move from it.
Octavia brought food without being asked and set it on the side table. She pulled a second chair to the opposite side of the bed, opened a sketchbook, and began drawing without comment as though she simply intended to be there and did not require conversation to justify it.
November ate because the food was there, and her body demanded it. She did not taste any of it.
After a while, Octavia said, without looking up from her sketch: "The first night is the worst. After that it gets easier. Not easy. Just easier."
November looked at her. Octavia's pencil moved across the page, the world processed through her hands.
"How long have you been here?"
"Three years." A pause that contained multitudes.
"Different circumstances. Same shape, though, if you look at it from far enough away.
" She glanced up. Her dark eyes were warm and direct and did not flinch from what they saw.
"Alien husband, impossible situation, whole life rewritten overnight. Sound familiar?"
November laughed. It came out ragged and wet and surprised her. "Something like that."
"He's going to be fine." Octavia nodded toward Rhaezon. "The big ones always look worse than they are. Trust me. My husband once came home with a hole in his chest you could put your fist through and was irritated about dinner being late."
The laugh that came out of November was real this time. Ugly and loud and close to a sob but real.
Octavia smiled. She went back to drawing.
Rhaezon woke at dusk. November was there. She had not moved.
His eyes found her before they found anything else in the room. Dark brown, nearly black. No amber. Just him, looking at her, present and alive.
She exhaled. Every muscle she'd been holding taut for eight hours released at once. She leaned forward and pressed her forehead to his.
"Hi."
His hand came up. Shaking. Found her jaw. His thumb brushed across her cheekbone.
"Hi."
His voice was raw. The resonance that normally lived beneath it was absent, spent on the shift. He sounded human for the first time since she'd known him.
"How long has it been?"
"A few hours. We're at a safehouse, Lord Skarreth's estate. You're safe. Davn's down the hall. He's pretending to be fine."
"He does that."
"I noticed."
That night they lay together in the dark of the guest room.
She had helped him move from the medical bed to the proper one, ignoring his insistence that he could manage, steadying him when his left leg buckled on the third step.
He had not argued as much as she expected.
She filed this as evidence of how depleted he truly was.
The windows were open. The air on this world smelled green and soft, nothing like the thin mineral sharpness of Aelthar.
She was on her side, facing him. He was on his back because his shoulder would not permit anything else, his head turned toward her.
Their hands were linked on the mattress between them.
His thumb moved in slow circles against her palm.
She could feel the heat of him — diminished from its usual furnace intensity but present. Still there. Still his.
"Caeden told me something."
His thumb paused. Resumed.
"While I was at the Varek estate. He told me about the bonding mark. The brand." She kept her voice even. "He told me it hurts you. To not give it. To be with your mate and not complete the bond." She turned the words over. Tested them. "He said it's excruciating."
Rhaezon was silent for a long time. Long enough that the night sounds of the estate filled the space — insects she couldn't name, wind through trees she hadn't learned yet.
"He said it's painful for you. To not give it. Does it hurt?"
His jaw worked. She could see it in the dark, the movement of muscle beneath the scarring. His thumb had stopped its circles on her palm.
"It's the sweetest pain I've ever felt."
The words landed in her chest and stayed there.
She absorbed them. The shape of what he'd been carrying every time his mouth had drifted toward her neck and then deliberately moved away.
Every time he'd changed their position. Every time his eyes had gone to that specific place on her skin and the heat had risen in him and he'd swallowed it down and given her everything else instead.
"Do you still want to give it to me?"
He went very still. The stillness she had learned to read — not absence but total, concentrated presence.
"Yes."