Chapter 18
The door sealed with a soft breath of air.
Morgan stared at it as if it had personally offended her.
He came to see you. And then he just walks out.
Her pulse still raced from the confrontation. Anger and humiliation churned together, tangled with the simmering heat his presence had left behind. Her body felt too tight, her skin too thin, as though every nerve had been stripped bare.
She took a step away from the bed.
The room tilted.
Her hand shot out to catch the edge of a low table, but the surface seemed to drift away from her. A rush of dizziness crashed over her, hot and cold at once. Her vision narrowed, the chamber shrinking to a long tunnel framed by dark stone and muted light.
“Oh, come on,” she whispered, dragging in a breath that did not seem to reach her lungs. “Not now.”
Her heart hammered painfully. The air felt wrong—thinner, harsher, as if something vital had been pulled out of it. Her senses strained for a presence that was no longer there, reaching instinctively for a gravity that had just stepped through the door.
He was gone.
And whatever thread connected them did not like that at all.
Her knees weakened. The table edge slid from under her fingers. She staggered, caught herself on the wall, then lost that, too. The stone blurred beneath her palm.
She heard the sound of her own breathing, harsh and shallow. Felt the wild, disordered pounding of her heart. Heat flashed through her body, followed by a cold so sharp it made her shiver.
This is absurd. You are not falling apart because some alien walked out of the room.
Except she was. Every part of her felt unmoored, as if someone had quietly reached inside her chest and twisted something out of place.
The floor rushed toward her, but she didn’t hit it.
Arms closed around her in a single, decisive movement. The impact was firm but carefully moderated, the kind of strength that could have easily crushed her, bent instead into control.
She knew who it was before her mind caught up.
He had not knocked. He had not announced himself. One moment the room had been empty, the next she was gathered against a solid mass of armor and heat.
Her vision cleared enough for her to see the lines of his chestplate close up, the dark metal etched with patterns that glowed faintly at the edges.
Her cheek rested against the cool, smooth surface.
Beneath it, she felt a subdued hum, like the muted thrum of distant machinery wrapped in muscle and bone.
“You should not stand yet,” he said.
Of course he was back.
Her fingers flexed reflexively, catching at the edge of his armor as he lifted her.
He carried her as though she weighed almost nothing, crossing the short distance to the bed and lowering himself with her still in his arms until he sat back against the headboard, drawing her with him as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
She ended up half curled against his front, enclosed by hard lines and impenetrable plates.
Her breathing began to even out almost immediately.
The spinning slowed, the crushing tightness in her chest eased, and the chaotic rush of heat cooled into a deep, steady warmth that spread from where her body pressed against his.
Her mind, which had been flailing like a trapped bird, began to settle.
You have got to be kidding me.
She recognized the stabilizing effect even as it infuriated her.
His presence grounded her more efficiently than anything she had ever experienced.
Where other people’s comfort had always felt conditional and fragile, his was enormous and absolute, as if the very structure of the world reasserted itself around him.
This is the venom, she told herself. It’s the bond and the pheromones… and whatever else these aliens have engineered. This is not real comfort. This is chemistry and proximity and psychological manipulation.
Also known as a very fancy form of Stockholm syndrome.
“How dare you,” she muttered under her breath.
He looked down at her, helm tilting slightly. “Explain.”
“You do this to me,” she snapped, her voice raw. “You take me, you drug me with your… whatever that was, you throw my body completely out of control, and then you come back and hold me like you are doing me a favor.”
His arms did not tighten. They did not loosen either.
“I did not intend for the disruption to be so immediate,” he said. “The distance between us destabilized you more quickly than I anticipated.”
“So I’m supposed to stay near you?” The words came out on a half-breathless laugh. “Is that the idea?”
“For now,” he answered. “Until the bond settles.”
Her anger flared again. “You keep calling it a bond, like this is some kind of mutual agreement. I did not sign anything. I did not choose—”
Her voice faltered as another wave of relief washed through her. It rose from the contact itself—where her body met his, where the chaotic buzzing in her nerves dulled into something very close to calm.
He was hard everywhere she touched him: armor, muscle, and just his sheer size—all of it unyielding. Yet warmth radiated through the metal, turning the unyielding surface into something she could lean against. The hum under his chestplate synchronized slowly with her pulse.
She wanted to pull away on principle. Her body refused to move.
“You should rest,” he said quietly. “Your system is recalibrating.”
“You are unbearable,” she said, without much force.
“Yes.”
The translator rendered the word without nuance, but somehow she could hear the faint note of acceptance.
She stared up at his mask. At the smooth, lethal lines of it, the narrow crimson slits that watched her with an intensity that never seemed to waver. There was no face to read, no expression to gauge, only that unbroken surface and the certainty of the thing underneath it.
A thought slipped out before she could catch it.
“Why don’t you take it off?”
The translator stone on the bedside table caught the words and delivered them back in perfect Vykan tones. She heard the provocation in them only after they had already left her mouth.
“That,” she added, her voice turning dry. “The mask. If your venom is not going to kill me, then why keep it on?”
He did not answer immediately.
For a moment there was only the quiet vibration of his chest against her, the faint rush of her own breath, the distant trickle of water from the garden beyond the archway.
Then he shook his head once, slow and final.
“Not yet.”
The refusal was not sharp. Not defensive. Simply absolute.
“Because you do not trust me?” she asked.
“Because I do not trust myself,” he said.
The honesty in it sent a strange shiver through her.
She wanted to mock him for that, to find some sharp line to throw back at him. All she managed was a weary exhale.
He held her without shifting, huge and solid and impossibly steady. No attempt to stroke her hair, no crude claim, no pressure beyond the fact that he was there and she was wrapped in his presence whether she liked it or not.
The warmth in her body rose again, not as violent as before but insistent, coiling through her blood like liquid heat. It settled low in her belly, in her chest, in every place that touched him.
He said he could hardly control himself.
The thought unfurled slowly, curling around her mind as her eyelids grew heavier. What did that mean, exactly? That he wanted her? That his instincts recognized her as something to claim, to keep, to reshape? That all of this would get worse before it became anything resembling safe?
What is going to happen to me?
Her anger remained, a hot coal in her chest. He had stolen her away from Earth. He had claimed her without permission, spoken about her fate as if she were an asset being allocated, not a person whose life had been ripped apart.
She should hate him.
She wanted to.
But her traitorous body recognized the way his presence steadied her, how the world stopped tilting when he was near, how the ache and panic and disorientation slipped back from a roar to a low, manageable hum.
It was not forgiveness.
It was not acceptance.
It was survival.
Her muscles loosened despite her will. Her head rested more fully against his chestplate. The rhythmic hum beneath the armor, the warmth, the sheer immovability of him drew her down toward sleep.
She held on to one last coil of resistance, promising herself she would fight harder tomorrow, that she would find a way to turn whatever this was to her advantage.
Then the heat and exhaustion claimed her, and she drifted under, falling asleep in the arms of a dangerous, deadly alien who had torn her from her life, claimed her without consent, and now held her as if she were the most natural thing in his world.
She knew she should hate him. She wanted to.
But in that moment, wrapped in his impossible steadiness, she could not.