Chapter 23
Odelm
The velishra sat across his lap like a body he’d forgotten how to hold.
Odelm stretched his regenerating tendrils. They shook. Not the fine tremor of exertion or the pleasant buzz that followed hours of playing—this was something deeper. Something rooted in the marrow of him, dragged up from a place he’d spent months trying to brick shut.
They were growing. Still painfully slow, but the progress was there. He hoped his bondbrother and Zyxel were right—that by the time their nestqueen, Selena gave birth to their daughter, he would have functional tentacles once again.
Tomorrow, V’dim and Z’fir would leave to take up position within the sol system, guarding Destima’s perimeter.
The same morning, Selena would board the Abyss with Kaede, Ryzen, Zyxel, and the Royal Guard.
The constellation would fracture—splitting in three directions, scattering the pieces of this family across the dark.
And he would be here.
In this room. In this villa. With Xylo and three cubs and the vast, yawning silence of a home built for a clan’s full constellation that was about to lose its center. Again.
His tendrils spasmed. A discordant note rang out, sharp and ugly in the pre-dawn quiet, and Odelm pulled his hands away from the instrument like it had burned him.
Music had always been refuge. The one constant in a life defined by loss—severed bonds, severed limbs, severed from everything that gave a Circuli male meaning. When words failed, when his body failed, when the universe stripped him down to nothing, the velishra had always answered.
Now his fingers refused.
They remembered.
The Quaww’s capture. Ryzen’s brother dragging Selena to an asteroid base in another galaxy, ripped from them without warning, without reason, without mercy.
The bond going dark. Not fading the way distance dimmed a thread—not the gentle attenuation of light years stretching their connection thin.
The void. Pure, absolute emptiness where Selena should have been, as if someone had carved out the center of his chest and left the wound open to the vacuum of space.
He’d stopped eating first. Then sleeping. Then caring whether the difference between the two mattered.
Now he knew that horrible feeling fell upon him and his nestbrothers because she was unconscious in another galaxy. He prayed to the Stars that he wouldn’t have to ever experience it ever again.
Odelm set the velishra on the bench beside him and stared at his trembling hands.
The new tendrils were still too short, still aching with growth, the delicate nerve endings oversensitive to every stimulus.
They’d been regrowing for months—slowly, painfully—and every twinge was a reminder of what he’d already survived.
What he wasn’t sure he could survive again.
The music room was dark. He’d come before the household stirred, before Xylo’s careful footsteps in the corridor, before the cubs’ voices echoed through the villa’s open spaces. Before anyone could look at him and see what was happening beneath the surface.
Through the bond, the villa breathed around him.
Xylo slept—his bondbrother’s teal thread steady and calm, the rhythm of a healer who’d disciplined himself into resting even when his mind cataloged every unfinished task.
The cubs slept, their small presences like embers banked for the night would soon burn brightly when they woke, ready for the day.
And Selena’s golden thread pulsed warm from her wing of the villa—alive, close, safe.
For now.
He’d promised himself he wouldn’t do this.
Sworn it to Xylo when his bondbrother had found him staring at the ceiling last night, heart racing, the phantom silence of the void pressing in from all sides.
Sworn it silently to Selena every time she’d smiled at him through their connection over the past days, that fierce bright warmth that said she was here, she was staying, she was real.
Not clingy. Not desperate. Not the male who couldn’t breathe without her.
And yet here he sat, three hours before dawn, unable to play a single clean chord because his hands remembered the void better than his mind remembered how to forget it.
Odelm curled his aching tendrils and pressed them against his back. The velishra waited on the bench beside him, patient as it had always been. Patient as music had always been, while the musician fell apart.
She found him anyway.
He didn’t hear her approach—the bond told him first. A shift in her thread, the particular quality of attention that meant she’d felt something through their connection and was already moving toward the source. His distress must have pulled her from sleep like a hand on her shoulder.
The door opened. Soft light from the corridor carved a line across the floor, and then she was there.
Selena stood in the doorway, hair loose and silver in the dimness, spots flickering between muted brown and the concerned orange that meant she was reading him.
Her belly curved gently beneath the loose sleep shift—Kaede’s daughter, growing, another miracle he’d never take for granted.
Even half-asleep, barefoot, blinking against the dark, she looked like the center of every orbit he’d ever known.
Odelm straightened. Forced the tremor from his hands by pressing them flat against his thighs. Smiled.
“Just practicing early.”
His voice cracked on the second word.
Selena said nothing. She crossed the room without hurry, bare feet silent on the cool tile floor, and lowered herself onto the bench beside him.
Close enough that their arms touched. Close enough that the warmth of her seeped through fabric and skin and settled against the cold thing coiling in his chest.
She didn’t ask.
She just sat there. Waiting. The way still water waited for whatever was beneath the surface to rise.
The silence stretched. Not uncomfortable—she’d learned that from over a year of loving Circuli males.
Learned that sometimes presence was louder than words.
That sitting beside someone while they fought not to break was its own kind of language, spoken in warmth and patience and the steady rhythm of shared breathing.
He could hold it. He would hold it. She was the one leaving.
She was the one walking into danger, carrying their unborn daughter inside her, facing political adversaries who wanted to use her or destroy her.
She needed him steady. She needed him to be the male she’d chosen—supportive, strong, the musician who played through pain because the alternative was drowning in it.
He could be that. He had to be that.
“Odelm.” Her voice was quiet. No demand. Just his name, shaped with the particular tenderness she reserved for the moments when she could feel exactly how much he was hiding. “Talk to me.”
“You have enough to carry.” The words came out rougher than he intended. He kept his gaze fixed on the velishra beside them, on the faint gleam of its strings in the dark. “You don’t need my—”
“Finish that sentence and I’ll be furious with you.”
No heat in her tone. Just certainty. The kind of certainty that Selena wielded like Kaede wielded his psydaggers—precise, unwavering, impossible to deflect.
Odelm closed his eyes.
“I’m supposed to be strong for you. That’s what a nestmate does. You’re about to leave, and I should be the one holding everything together while you’re gone, not the one falling apart before you’ve even—”
“I don’t need you to perform strength.” Her hand found his knee. Warm. Grounding. The touch of someone who refused to let him retreat. “I need you honest.”
The word honest cracked something.
Not the way glass cracked—clean, sharp, one decisive line. This was slower. Like watching ice give way under sustained pressure, fissures branching outward until the whole surface was webbed with fractures and there was no longer anywhere solid to stand.
“The last time you left—”
His voice broke. He tried again.
“The last time I couldn’t feel you—”
Gone. The words dissolved. His throat sealed shut around the memories clawing their way up—that dreaded day that changed their clan’s lives forever.
Days of searching. Weeks of silence. The bond going dark. Not fading, not dimming. Dark. As if someone had snuffed out the sun and forgotten to tell the planets they were supposed to stop orbiting.
He pressed his palm over his chest. The gesture was involuntary—an empath’s reflex, covering the place where the thread lived, as if he could protect it with flesh and bone.
“I almost died.”
The confession fell into the silence like a stone into deep water.
“When you disappeared, when the thread went silent…” He swallowed hard.
“My body started shutting down. All of us—every Circuli mate in the clan. Xylo. Me. Then V’dim and Z’fir, since they weren’t the ones injured.
The bond’s absence was killing us, one system at a time.
Our bodies weren’t built for that kind of severance. ”
Selena’s hand tightened on his knee. Her spots had gone pale—almost white, the color drained from them the way blood drained from a wound.
“Oeta saved us.” His voice dropped to something barely above breath.
“She recognized what was happening before we were too far gone. Put all of us—every Circuli in the clan—into medical stasis. Suspended between living and dying. Months, Selena. Months in the dark, not knowing if you were alive or dead or somewhere so far beyond our reach that the bond would never light up again.”
He opened his eyes. The music room was blurred, the edges of the velishra smeared by the wet heat building behind his lashes.
“I didn’t dream. Didn’t think. Just… nothing.
A void where you should have been, and the knowledge—somewhere deep, beneath the stasis, beneath everything Oeta did to keep us alive—that if you didn’t come back, the nothing would become permanent. ”