Chapter 20 #2
“We both know how to fight,” he said. “Z’fir and I both understand fleet tactics, unit coordination, what it means to hold a position while everything tries to move around you.
The Yarrkins War taught us that much.” He turned to look at her.
“What I’m afraid of is that it also taught us how long these things last. How much they take.
How quickly eight years can pass when you’re watching from inside.
How many things can go irreparably wrong in eight years. ”
“V’dim…”
“And while that happens,” he continued, his voice dropping lower, “you’ll be at the CEG Space Station.
Walking into a room full of people who want to use you, with the Quaww on one side and their supporters on the other and Kaede at your back because I can’t be there.
” His tentacle tightened against the railing.
“That is what keeps me awake at night. Not whether Z’fir and I can hold Lunkai’s system—we can.
Not whether the fleet will follow orders—they will.
You. Alone at that Station with our daughter in your belly and a target drawn on you since the day you first were introduced to the galaxy, and light-years of void between us with no guarantee the bond doesn’t thin to something I can’t trust.”
The admission stripped something bare in the air between them.
He hadn’t planned to say all of it. But she deserved the whole truth, not the edited version. That was the Ulax prince in him—the one who had spent his entire career managing other people’s feelings—setting something down. She’d earned that much.
Selena crossed to him.
He felt her hands before he processed the movement—both palms flat against his chest, warm and grounding and unmistakably present.
She looked up at him with that expression he’d catalogued in a hundred different contexts by now, the one that meant she was about to say something she needed him to actually hear.
“Kaede won’t be alone at my back,” she said. “Ryzen will be there. Zyxel. Eshe and the Royal Guard. You know what that team looks like when it moves together. You’ve watched them train.”
“I know.”
“And I won’t be passive at the Chamber. This isn’t the Beacon walking into a room to be delivered—it’s the Beacon walking in with her eyes open, knowing the terrain, knowing the trap. Every move planned. Every contingency mapped.” Her hands pressed a little harder. “I’m not walking in blind.”
He covered her hands with his own. “I know that too.”
“Then what do you need from me?”
The question hit him somewhere unguarded.
What did he need? He’d spent two days cataloguing his fears and not enough time thinking about that specific question.
“Your voice,” he said, finally. “If something goes wrong—if the bond goes thin, if the distance does something to the connection—I need to know you’ll push through. That you’ll reach, even when it’s hard.”
“I reached Zirene,” she said. “While awake. Across active space lanes.”
“Reaching and holding are different.”
“I know.” Her thumb moved against his hand, a small deliberate press. “I’ll hold. V’dim. I promise you I’ll hold.”
He stared at her for a long moment.
Then she rose onto her toes and kissed him.
Not soft. Not reverent. Fierce—like she was making a vow with her mouth, like the promise wasn’t complete until he felt it at the bone.
He put his arms around her immediately, using two tentacles to pull her close, sliding a third into her hair, and wrapping a fourth around the curve of her lower back with careful, deliberate pressure.
She made a sound against his lips. Not distress. The opposite.
He poured everything into it. All the helpless fear.
All the love that had nowhere else to go when she was about to leave.
All the bone-deep pride in her, the awe that the Fates had put her in his path at all—this impossible, extraordinary human female who had walked into their lives and remade everything without trying.
When they broke apart, both of them were breathing harder than the effort warranted.
“The moment I feel you call,” he murmured against her temple, “nothing stops me. Not orders. Not fleet command. Not the Stars themselves. I will come.”
She pulled back just enough to see his face. Something fierce in her expression—and something that looked, quietly, like relief.
“And in return,” he said, “you trust Kaede. You trust your team. You don’t do anything reckless because you’re afraid we can’t get to you in time.”
She smirked. “Define reckless.”
His tentacle flicked lightly against her shoulder.
She laughed—small and warm and exactly what he’d needed.
The laughter faded slowly, the way warm things do when the air cools around them.
He kept her close. Couldn’t bring himself to put distance between them, not tonight, with the hours counting down and the bond carrying so much of his heartbeat into her and hers back into him that the boundary between them felt more like a suggestion than a fact.
One tentacle traced the line of her jaw.
Another moved to her shoulder, slow and deliberate, mapping the curve of it with the particular attention he gave things he was trying to memorize.
She let him. She always let him. That was one of the gifts she’d given them without ever making it feel like a gift—the patience of her stillness when they needed to learn her again, to press against her warmth and remind themselves that she was real and present and theirs.
He mapped her. The line of her collarbone. The angle of her shoulder where it sloped toward her neck. The soft hollow beneath her ear where her pulse lived close to the surface and he could feel it against his tentacle tip like a small, steady argument against all his fears.
Still here. Still alive. Still his.
Selena reached up and covered the tentacle at her jaw with her palm.
“V’dim.”
“I’m memorizing you.”
“I noticed.” Soft. “I’m right here.”
“You are now.” His fingers found the line of her waist and settled there. “You’ll be across the void in two days. Humor me.”
She turned her head and pressed her lips to the curve of his tentacle still cradled in her hand.
The sensation moved through him like a current.
Not heat, exactly—deeper than that, something he felt in the bond more than the skin.
Her warmth. The faint flutter of their connection acknowledging the touch and giving it back, amplified.
He felt her affection clearly—felt the shape of it, the layered sincerity of it, the way it sat without condition or calculation.
He pressed his forehead down to rest against hers—that particular closeness, shared breathing, the bond stretching between them warm and luminous and more real than anything else in this moment.
He could feel her the way he felt the Destima web: present, layered, complex.
But unlike the web, unlike the population’s collective unease pressing at her shields, Selena’s thread in him was not anxiety.
It was home.
His hand slid from her waist. Moved lower. Came to rest, slow and reverent, against the slight swell of her belly.
Still small. Just beginning to be visible—the curve of it barely discernible beneath the fabric of her evening clothes.
He spread his palm wide, feeling for the warmth of it.
Feeling for the faint, barely-there flutter he’d found twice before.
The biological miracle of new life curled inside her—Kaede’s daughter who was also their daughter, who was also the clan’s daughter.
She belonged to all of them and none of them, singularly and everything to every single one of them regardless.
Selena covered his hand with both of hers.
Neither of them spoke.
There was too much to say and not enough language for any of it.
That was the Circuli’s private irony: the species that felt more than any other, that processed emotion with a depth and granularity that most species couldn’t match, and still couldn’t manage to put the largest of it into words.
Z’fir had the grace to stop trying entirely.
V’dim had spent decades crafting the language anyway—sentence by careful sentence, occasion by occasion—because he believed that feeling and expressing were not the same act, and that the people he loved deserved to have the feeling named.
But tonight the words fell short. Fell short of the enormity of this: her warm hands over his, the small heartbeat of new life between them, the darkening sky and Lunkai massive on the horizon and two days left before everything separated.
He pulled her back into his arms instead.
She came without hesitation.
He held her with everything he had—tentacles and arms and the full weight of his devotion pressed against her back—and felt her exhale into it, the last of her own tension bleeding out, both of them suspended in the specific peace that came only from this.
From the physical reality of being in the same place at the same time with someone who knew the truth of you and didn’t flinch.
He kissed her again, slower this time. Less desperate. More thorough. She slid her hands into his hair, and she kissed him back the same way—deliberate, unhurried, present—as if neither of them had a reason to be anywhere else.
The bond sang between them.
When they finally separated, the last trace of sunset had dissolved entirely.
The sky above Destima had gone the deep luminous purple-black that came just before the stars emerged.
Around them, the observation deck stood quiet—the household below settling into the rhythms of evening, the steady twin threads of Z’fir and Selena’s other mates like embers banked low against the dark.
V’dim felt every one of them.
His whole constellation, whole for tonight. For two more days, intact.
Selena stood at the railing beside him, shoulders touching, both of them looking out over Destima’s darkening terrain toward the horizon where the sky met the moon-plains. He watched her silver hair instead of the stars.
“There.”
He extended one tentacle—gentle, pointing—toward the massive marbled form still dominant on the horizon.
Lunkai. Purple and black and silver, its surface catching some last refracted light in patterns that had been forming for millions of years before either of them existed.
The empire’s new capital. The place they had been assigned to hold.
“Lunkai,” Selena said quietly.
“We stay in its system.” He kept his tentacle extended—a line between them and the planet’s bulk. “We protect Destima from the outer edge, and we protect Liskta—the origin world, in Lunkai’s orbit—from any approach. We don’t go beyond the system. We stay close.”
She was quiet for a moment. “That’s close. Relatively.”
“Close enough that if the situation here changed—if you needed us back—the transit is measured in hours, not days.” He lowered his tentacle. “I wanted you to know that.”
Selena turned to look at him.
He held her gaze.
“When you need me,” he said, “look at Lunkai. When you return home, all you have to do is look up. I’ll be looking back.”
Something moved across her face. Something that had nothing to do with strategy or logistics or the cold calculus of war.
She stepped into him again—not kissing this time, just pressing her face against his shoulder, her arms around him, holding on with that particular grip. The one that said she wasn’t going anywhere yet.
“I’ll find Lunkai,” she murmured.
His tentacles wrapped her close.
Above them, the first stars emerged—bright and endless and indifferent to everything below. And in Destima’s sky, enormous and close and already watching, Lunkai turned in its orbit.
And tomorrow it would still be there and every day after, no matter what the Fates and Stars had planned for them.