Chapter 10 NADINE #3
That's when I knew he wasn't telling me the full truth. Even if I allowed myself to believe in what he had said already, he was dancing around something. Something vital. I clenched my jaw. I wouldn't have been me if I hadn't accused, "That's not the whole story, though, is it?"
Dravok didn't answer. He didn't need to. His silence did it for him. I sat up straighter, anger sliding back into place like armor. "What are you not telling me?"
His gaze sharpened, not startled, not defensive. Assessing. That did it.
"Oh," I snapped. "You're testing me. Seeing how much I can handle."
One corner of his mouth lifted. "If the shoe fits."
I halted mid-breath.
"If the—" I stared at him. "Have you been poking around in my head again?"
I felt heat crawl up my spine, fury sharp and immediate. My hands curled into fists, but I forced myself to stay still. Don't react. That's what he wants.
Nice try.
"No," he said calmly. "If I had, you'd know."
I didn't believe him.
"Tell me," I probed, forcing my voice to stay low and calm. "What you're not telling me."
He studied me for a long moment. Not like prey. Not like an asset. Like a risk. Then he exhaled—slow, controlled—as if conceding ground he'd intended to keep.
"The Aelyth bonds were not only functional," he said. "They were… lived."
I didn't interrupt.
"Before the Fall," he continued, "Arkhevari did not exist in isolation.
The balance was not abstract. It was embodied.
Male and female. Not in dominance. Not in hierarchy.
In counterpressure." My pulse ticked faster.
"After the fall, something unheard of happened.
The females aged," he said quietly. "They died. "
That landed hard.
"In Nox Eternum," he went on, "time behaves differently. Our kind can endure it. They could not, not forever. Each rebirth cost them more. Memory, coherence. Eventually… they burned out."
I swallowed.
"And the males?" I asked.
His aura shifted. I saw it then, subtle, but unmistakable. A darkening at the edges, like smoke threading through light. "We endure. But without them, something corrodes. The longer the imbalance lasts, the more our auras darken. Aggression sharpens. Judgment fractures. Control becomes… brittle."
An eon-long war suddenly snapped into focus. Conquest. Retreat. Obsession. Nythor. "This isn't about romance, is it?" I guessed quietly.
"No," he replied. "It's about survival."
I leaned back slowly, my mind was racing a hundred miles an hour, and pieces were rearranging themselves with brutal clarity. "And you didn't tell me, because you wanted to see whether I'd run."
"Yes."
I stared at him, the urge to throttle him was warring with something colder, more precise.
"You're infuriating," I told him.
He inclined his head slightly. "So I've been told."
I closed my eyes for a moment, steadying myself, then opened them again. The anger was still there. Bright. Sharp. Clean. I held onto it deliberately. Because the alternative… the alternative was… messy.
He still kidnapped me. That fact didn't change just because his reasoning had structure.
Didn't change because his logic held up under scrutiny.
Didn't change because, for the first time since this whole nightmare began, something he said actually…
aligned. That didn't absolve him. It didn't make it right.
It just made it harder to dismiss. And I hated that.
My gaze flicked back to him, taking him in again, not as the thing that had taken me, but as the system behind it.
Ancient. Controlled. Fracturing. Not a god.
Not a myth. A mechanism. And mechanisms had rules.
Which meant… my thoughts shifted, recalibrated, and rearranged themselves around new variables, whether I liked it or not.
If what he was saying was true… if Arkhevari required this bond to stabilize, then his behavior wasn't random.
It was adaptive. Necessary. That realization didn't soften anything.
It sharpened it. Because necessary actions didn't care about consent.
A slow, cold understanding settled in. He hadn't taken me because he wanted to.
He had taken me because he needed to. My jaw tightened. That didn't make me safer. It made me valuable. And being valuable had never, in the history of anything, been synonymous with being free. Despite that, a flicker of unease slipped beneath my anger. I crushed it immediately.
No! I wasn't going to let this turn into justification. He had been in my head. He had overridden my will. He had made that decision for me. That didn't get reframed. That didn't get forgiven. And yet… something in me refused to settle back into clean lines.
Refused to stay neatly in outrage. Because under the anger, under the violation, under the very real desire to put as much distance between us as possible, there was something else. Something quieter. More dangerous. Not trust. Definitely not that. But—
Attention.
Awareness.
The kind that didn't switch off when it should.
The kind that tracked him without permission.
The kind that noticed things I had no interest in noticing.
The way his control wasn't arrogance, it was necessity stretched thin.
The way his answers came without hesitation, without deflection.
The way he admitted to the violation without trying to excuse it.
That should have made him easier to hate. It didn't. Which was… unacceptable. I shifted slightly, irritated at myself now, the feeling sliding under my skin like something I couldn't quite reach.
This wasn't him. That was the important part. This wasn't him pushing into my mind. This wasn't influence. There was no pressure. No external force. Which meant, like it or not, this was me. My reaction.
My… whatever this was. And that made it worse. Because I couldn't shut it down. I didn't have a model for it. No framework. No clean category to drop it into and move on. My brain wanted to label it. To define it. To contain it.
It refused to be contained.
The sensation lingered, low, persistent, impossible to ignore. Curiosity.
Sharp. Focused. Relentless. The same instinct that had pulled me into astrophysics in the first place. The need to understand what didn't fit. And right now—he didn't fit. I exhaled slowly, tension coiling tighter instead of loosening.
I opened my eyes and stared at him, hard. "Next time, you don't get to decide what I can handle."
Something flickered in his eyes then, respect, sharp and reluctant. "We'll see."
I tried to figure out if that was a threat or a promise. He gave me the time I needed to recalibrate. To think. Finally, I asked, "They aren't chosen? You don't… just find one?"
"No," he said quietly. "You recognize one."
The room felt smaller all of a sudden. Heat pulsed through me. I folded my arms, grounding myself in the familiar pressure. "You're describing something that sounds less like romance and more like… quantum entanglement."
A faint curve touched his mouth. "If that helps you survive the explanation."
It did. "Two systems, separated but still correlated. Changes in one are reflected in the other, regardless of distance."
"Yes."
"And when reunited, the system stabilizes."
"Yes."
I leaned back, staring at the ceiling as the implications rippled outward.
Yin and yang. Not good and evil. Not male and female.
But balance. Necessary tension. A closed loop that corrected itself.
I can live with that, I tried to convince myself.
Yet, my body, traitorous as ever, chose that moment to remember the electricity of his touch.
The way my skin reacted before my mind could object.
I clenched my jaw. "So let me guess, this wasn't exactly something you were hoping for."
"No," Dravok admitted without hesitation. "It wasn't."
That answer surprised me. I looked at him again, not as a god, not as a captor, but as something ancient and… incomplete.
"And you're telling me all this," I asked slowly, "because…?"
"Because if you are what I believe you might be, then the Abyss will not stop reaching for you."
A thought surfaced, quiet at first, then loud enough to make my stomach twist. This wasn't about me.
Not really. This was about Nythor. The realization hit like cold water.
He thought I was Nythor's Aelyth. The idea repulsed me so strongly that my body reacted before my mind finished forming the sentence.
Heat flared, sharp and rejecting, like my entire system was screaming no.
Not him. Not that. Not someone else's missing half misfiled onto me like an administrative error.
I hated it.
I hated how much sense it made, and how wrong it felt.
"That's what this is, isn't it?" I accused tightly. "You think I belong to him."
Dravok frowned. Actually frowned. The confusion was immediate and genuine, like I'd just spoken a language he didn't recognize. "Him?"
"You think I'm Nythor's Aelyth," I specified.
"Nythor's Aelyth?" he repeated, dumbfounded, then he laughed, making my temper flare once again until I realized he wasn't laughing in mockery or out of cruelty, but in surprise. "No," he still sounded incredulous. "Absolutely not."
Relief flared, followed immediately by something far more dangerous. "Then whose?" I demanded.
He didn't answer right away. In that pause, something shifted between us. The words left his mouth as if neither of us had expected them. "You're mine."
We both froze. The silence that followed was…
total. He stared at me. I stared at him.
In that heartbeat, I realized something with startling clarity.
He hadn't meant to say that. Not consciously.
It wasn't strategy. It wasn't manipulation.
It was something he hadn't intended to allow himself to articulate.
"You're not happy about that," I observed quietly.
His expression hardened. "Happy?" he snapped, the word was edged with raw pain.
"No." He turned away, running a hand through his hair like he was restraining something far more volatile than anger.
"Over eons, I've accepted my fate. I learned discipline.
Control. I mastered my temper. I kept the Dark Abyss at bay when others couldn't."
He faced me again, and this time I knew I wasn't wrong when I saw amber sparks dancing in his eyes. "There is no room in that for an Aelyth," he continued. "No space for distraction. No allowance for… this." He gestured vaguely between us. "I don't fit with others. I never have."
I wasn't sure if I felt offended or relieved. "And yet," I couldn't help but challenge, "you kidnapped me."
His gaze locked onto mine.
"And yet," he agreed quietly, "I brought you with me."
This wasn't simple; this wasn't romantic. This was something far more dangerous.