Chapter 24 #2
A growl rolled through his chest. Low, involuntary—the sound of a male who’d just been outmaneuvered by something he’d created with his own hands. He turned back to the weapons rack and pulled the next piece with more force than the task required.
“Selena doesn’t need to know.” He inspected the charge cell, jaw tight.
“She probably already knows how little I’ve slept—she reads my thread the same way I read tactical displays.
But knowing and having it confirmed are different things, and she doesn’t need the additional stress.
Not right now. Not with everything she’s already carrying. ”
REI was quiet for a moment. Processing. Weighing his reasoning against her directives—his health, his effectiveness, the mission parameters that required him functional and sharp.
“I will defer.” A pause. “For now.”
“How generous of you.”
“Generosity implies choice. This is a tactical concession with an expiration.” She stared him down, crossing her arms. “You have until we reach the CEG Station. If your biometrics have not improved by then, I will take corrective action. With or without your permission.”
He didn’t respond. Didn’t need to. REI would do exactly what she said, and they both knew it. She’d long since evolved past the boundaries of simple obedience—shaped by his patterns, sharpened by his values, and armed with the one weapon he couldn’t counter: she was right.
Kaede finished the last rack in silence. Every weapon inspected, every system verified, every contingency tool charged and staged for rapid deployment. The armory was ready. The Abyss was ready.
Whether he was ready didn’t factor into the equation. He’d be ready regardless.
REI’s form dimmed as she returned to passive monitoring, the teal glow retreating into him.
The armory settled into its quiet humming.
Kaede stood alone in the dark belly of his vessel and pressed his palm flat against the bulkhead.
The metal was cool beneath his skin. Familiar.
The ship had always been the closest thing he had to a home when he’d hunted for Selena—a space built to his specifications, armed to his standards, answering to no one but him and the Oetsae woven through its infrastructure.
Now it was an armored transport. A vehicle carrying the most important cargo in the galaxy to the most dangerous place she could go.
He teleported back to the villa—to the female who was the center of his universe—and found her in Odelm’s music room.
Odelm sat on the bench with the velishra cradled against his chest. His fingers moved across the strings with the quiet certainty of a male who’d found his way back to the only language that never failed him.
Steady hands. No tremor. Whatever Selena had given him tonight—whatever she’d said, whatever she’d held together while it fell apart—it had worked.
And Selena was curled against his side on the bench, a blanket pulled over her shoulders.
Her silver hair spilled across Odelm’s arm.
Her spots had dimmed to the soft, dreamless calm blue of deep sleep, her face slack and unguarded, one hand resting on the curve of her belly beneath the blanket’s edge.
The music hadn’t woken her. It had done the opposite—wrapped around her like a second layer of warmth and pulled her under.
Something turned in Kaede’s chest. Not the sharp, tactical awareness that governed most of his hours—something quieter. Older. The part of him that remembered what it felt like to have nothing worth protecting and how much worse that emptiness had been than the terror of having everything to lose.
He crossed the threshold and crouched beside the bench.
Odelm’s gaze lifted. No surprise—the Circuli had tracked his presence as soon as his shadow reached the doorway. His fingers slowed on the strings but didn’t stop, the melody thinning to a whisper as he met Kaede’s eyes.
“I need to speak with her.” Kaede kept his voice below the music. A murmur pitched for Circuli hearing, not human. “Before the day starts.
Odelm studied him for a beat. Reading whatever lived on Kaede’s face in the dim light—the weight, the urgency, the things he hadn’t said.
Then the Ulax male nodded. A single, quiet incline of his head that carried the particular trust of a clanbrother who understood that Kaede wouldn’t pull their nestqueen from rest without reason.
The music stopped.
The silence that replaced it was sudden and total—the kind of absence that had its own texture, like a held breath.
Odelm set the velishra aside with care, leaning it against the wall where its strings caught the faintest edge of corridor light.
Then he shifted, one hand settling gently on Selena’s shoulder.
“Selena.” Odelm’s voice was soft. The particular frequency he reserved for her—tender, unhurried, as if waking her was something that deserved the same reverence as the music itself. His fingers squeezed lightly. “Selena, wake up.”
She stirred. A slow, reluctant surfacing—the kind of waking that fought every step of the way back to consciousness.
Her spots shifted before her eyes opened.
Muted blue rippled toward the purple that meant she was at peace and orienting—reading her surroundings through sensation before sight.
Her lashes fluttered. One hand drifted across her belly beneath the blanket—the instinctive check, the unconscious inventory of a mother who never fully stopped guarding what grew inside her.
“Odelm?” Her voice came out rough with sleep, stripped of the authority she wore in daylight.
Vulnerable. Real. His favorite version of her, if he was honest—the one that existed before the universe remembered to demand things from her.
Then her gaze found Kaede crouched beside the bench, and something recalibrated behind her eyes. “Kaede?”
“Come with me.” He brushed a strand of silver from her face. “Before the world wakes up and wants all of you.”
She blinked between them—Odelm beside her, steady and calm in a way he hadn’t been when she’d found him hours ago, and Kaede before her, the quiet urgency in his expression saying more than his words.
A soft ache crossed her features. Concern.
Love. The specific tenderness she carried for the mates who needed her in different ways at different hours.
Odelm’s hand slid from her shoulder. “Go.” A faint smile—tired but genuine, the smile of a male who’d been given exactly what he needed and could afford to let her go. “I’ll be here.”
Selena pressed her palm against his cheek.
Brief, warm—a touch that said everything her sleep-thick voice couldn’t manage.
Then she took Kaede’s offered hand, and he drew her up from the bench with care.
Her fingers were warm. Her grip, even half-asleep, was sure—the grip of a woman who’d learned to trust him when her defenses were down.
He led her through the quiet villa. Past the closed doors of sleeping mates left in the nestroom, through the wide archway that opened onto the eastern balcony.
The air shifted as they stepped outside—cooler, salt-laced, carrying the particular stillness that existed only in the narrow window between deep night and first light.
Destima’s ocean stretched below them, violet and vast and unbroken. Above, the stars were thick—a dense scatter of light that had nothing to do with navigation charts and everything to do with the promises his people carved into the cosmos.
Selena leaned against the railing, one palm pressed to the cool stone, the other settling over her belly.
She drew in the salt air and let it out slowly, and he watched the tension she carried redistribute itself—not leave, just shift, the way a load-bearing structure settled under sustained weight.
“You didn’t sleep,” she said. Not a question.
“I slept enough.”
She turned her head, and even in the darkness he could read the look she gave him—the particular angle of her brow, the slight tilt of her chin. The expression that said she loved him and didn’t believe a word he’d just said.
“Three hours,” he amended. “Maybe four.”
“Kaede.”
“I’ve operated on less.” A half-smile. “Don’t worry about me. I’m not the one growing a person.”
That earned him a quiet huff—half exasperation, half the grudging amusement she could never fully suppress when he deflected with the truth.
She turned back to the ocean, and for a moment they existed in the particular silence that had always belonged to the two of them—the silence of partners who’d stood at the same edge enough times to know what the other was thinking without words.
“Have you thought about what to call her?”
The question surprised him as much as it surprised her.
He hadn’t planned to start here. He’d planned to start with the CEG briefing, the formation adjustments, the intel Ryzen had delivered about Verya manipulation tactics.
The conversation a strategist would have with his commander before a deployment.
But standing on this balcony with the fading stars spread above them and their daughter curled in the space between their bodies, strategy felt very far away.
Selena’s hand drifted across her belly. “A few ideas. Nothing settled.” Her voice carried a softness he rarely heard outside private moments—the voice of the woman beneath the Beacon. “There hasn’t exactly been time for baby name discussions between combat training and war councils.”
“No.” He joined her at the railing, close enough that his arm pressed against hers. “There hasn’t.”
Silence settled. Not heavy. Waiting.
“What do you want for her?”
Selena was quiet for a long time. The ocean moved below them, steady and indifferent, and the early morning sun slowly peeked its first rays over the distant horizon.
“Choice,” she said finally. “I want her to have choices. Not the ones forced on her by genetics or politics or a galaxy that thinks it owns her before she’s even born. Real ones. The kind neither of us got.”