Chapter 34
Kaede
The living suit disk was warm in his palm. Smooth, no larger than a coin, humming faintly with the bio-signature Kaede had programmed himself. He rolled it between his thumb and forefinger—a slow, deliberate motion that kept his hands from doing something less productive. Like breaking things.
He sat in the only chair in Ryzen’s quarters. A rigid, utilitarian thing bolted to the deck—he made sure the furnishings were built for safety even though it lacked comfort. The room was sparse. Gray walls, gray floor, a single viewport showing stars he wasn’t watching.
His spirit daggers were scattered haphazardly across the floor. Eight emerald blades, dark and inert, strewn in a wide arc around the bed like shrapnel from an explosion only he’d missed.
On the bed, Selena lay collapsed across Ryzen’s chest.
Still tangled. Still naked. Still dead to the world in the particular way that told Kaede through their bond that she wasn’t just sleeping—she was gone.
Burned through every reserve she’d been hoarding and cratered into unconsciousness so deep that her mental presence was barely a flicker against his shields.
The Verya male hadn’t moved either. His arms locked around her, face buried in her hair, the emerald runes across his golden skin pulsing in a steady rhythm that matched Selena’s heartbeat.
Entangled. Merged. Whatever the fuck they’d done to each other, their bodies hadn’t gotten the message that it was over.
Kaede rolled the disk again.
He’d felt the moment it happened. Halfway through a tactical review with Eshe on the bridge, REI mid-sentence about docking protocols, and something had detonated through his bond with Selena.
Not pain. Not fear. Something hotter and brighter and more consuming than anything he’d ever felt from her—a cascade of pleasure and spiritforce and completion that had slammed into him like a shockwave and left him gripping the edge of the command console with white knuckles.
Eshe had noticed. Of course she had. She’d been trained by people who noticed things for a living.
“Commander?”
“Stand down. I need a moment.”
A moment. He’d needed an ishing moment because his nestqueen had just bonded with the Verya grief case and her orgasm had hit him like weapons fire.
Through the bond, even now, her thoughts bled through. Loud. Louder than usual, which was saying something because Selena’s mental voice had never learned the meaning of quiet. Fragments of satisfaction hummed against his shields like heat shimmer off the tarmac.
Complete.
The last star.
My constellation.
Kaede’s jaw tightened.
Two days. She’d been aboard the Abyss for two days, and she’d taken another mate. Bonded souls with the warrior she’d barely known, in a ritual his own species considered so dangerous they’d outlawed it generations ago.
Her living suit disk was warm in his hand because he’d been holding it since he walked in and found them like this.
Because she’d need it when she woke, and he’d be the one to give it to her, because that was his job.
That was always his job. Hold the pieces.
Stand ready. Be the one still upright when everyone else had burned themselves down to embers.
The disk turned between his fingers. Smooth. Warm. Steady.
He didn’t feel steady.
Golden light gathered at the edge of his vision.
Euouae materialized from Selena’s sleeping form like smoke rising from a banked fire—a golden, translucent figure pulling free of her body and solidifying into the shape the ancient Oetsae preferred.
Long hair swept up in a high ponytail, a sleeveless vest hanging open over a bare chest that flickered with internal light, baggy pants cinched at the ankles.
Ethereal. Ghost-like. A being of pure spiritforce wearing the silhouette of something human, his edges soft and luminous against the dim quarters.
He drifted to a stop beside the chair, his golden form casting no shadows. His ancient eyes found Kaede’s, and whatever he read there made him pause.
“She is safe,” Euouae said. His voice carried that particular resonance—felt more than heard, settling into the bones. “The bond is stable. She’s merely exhausted.”
“Merely.” Kaede didn’t look at him. His gaze stayed on the bed. On Selena’s bare back, the constellation of bioluminescent spots dimmed to dark blue along her spine. On Ryzen’s arms locked around her like she’d dissolve if he let go. “Explain to me what happened.”
Not a request.
Euouae’s ponytail swayed as he tilted his head. The gesture was almost human—a scholar considering how much truth a student could handle.
“She asked about spirit weapons,” the Oetsae began. “This morning when everyone was still asleep. She wanted to know if it was possible for her to wield one independently—without a Verya actively channeling it to her.”
Kaede’s thumb stilled on the disk.
“I told her the truth,” Euouae continued. “That the only way to wield Verya spirit weapons was through a spiritforce bond. A permanent merging of souls.” His golden form flickered, something almost apologetic in the ripple. “She asked Ryzen. He offered.”
“Just like that.” Flat. Controlled. The voice Kaede used when he was three decisions away from violence and needed all of them to be the right ones.
“She wanted to protect herself.” Euouae’s projection drifted closer, his translucent form hovering near the foot of the bed.
“The gap between an attack and her mates reaching her—she’s calculated it.
Obsessively. She knows exactly how many seconds she’d be defenseless if someone got past you, past Zyxel, past the guards—and ultimately, before I could take control. ”
Of course she had. Selena’s mind ran on threat assessment the way other people’s ran on oxygen. She cataloged vulnerabilities like a targeting system, and the one she couldn’t solve—the window where she was unarmed and her mates were too far—would have gnawed at her until she found an answer.
This was her answer.
If she was built under the same program as his sisters, the Fab Five, and himself, she would’ve fit in perfectly.
“She could have told me.” The words came out quieter than he intended. Rougher. “Discussed it. Let me weigh the tactical implications before she—”
“Before she made a decision about her own body and her own soul?” Euouae’s voice held no judgment. That was worse than judgment. “You told me yourself, Kaede. Her choices are sacred.”
His own words. Thrown back at him with perfect precision.
Kaede exhaled through his teeth.
He understood.
That was the part that ground against his ribs like Aldawi’s claws—he understood.
Selena wasn’t impulsive. She was practical, strategic, brutally clear-eyed about the math of survival in ways that most people couldn’t stomach.
Every decision she made passed through the same calculus: What keeps my people and those I love alive? What gives us the best odds?
Bonding with Ryzen was a tactical decision dressed in the language of fate. A weapon acquired. A vulnerability eliminated. She’d looked at the gap in her defenses, identified the solution, and executed. Clean. Efficient. The kind of operational thinking Kaede had trained into her himself.
He should be proud.
He wanted to put his fist through the bulkhead.
Not because of Ryzen. The male was broken in ways Kaede recognized—the hollow space where a twin bond had been ripped away, the careful distance of someone who’d lost everything and couldn’t afford to want again. Kaede had no quarrel with grief. Grief was honest.
What he hated—what sat like acid in his chest and corroded every rational thought he tried to layer over it—was that she’d felt forced.
That the galaxy had narrowed her options until bonding her soul to another male was the most logical choice.
That his nestqueen, carrying his daughter, walking into hostile territory surrounded by enemies who wanted her dead or controlled, had looked at her situation and decided she needed a weapon more than she needed another lover.
She deserved to choose mates because she wanted them. Not because she needed an arsenal.
And Ryzen—
Kaede watched the slow pulse of emerald runes against his golden skin. The warrior’s face pressed into Selena’s hair. The arms that held her with the desperate grip of someone who’d been drowning and finally found air.
Ryzen didn’t know how to love her. Not the way Kaede did, not the way his clanbrothers did—the years of learning her rhythms, cataloging her tells, understanding that her stubbornness was armor and her bravery was a psyknife she held to her own throat as often as she pointed it at enemies.
Ryzen knew her spiritforce. Knew the shape of her mind.
Knew the taste of her body after tonight.
He didn’t know that she cried in her sleep sometimes. Didn’t know she needed pressure across her hips when the pregnancy ached. Didn’t know she’d eat an entire plate of food before admitting she’d been starving for hours.
He’d learn. Or he wouldn’t. Either way, the bond was permanent now, and Kaede would deal with the reality of it the way he dealt with everything else.
By making it work.
Euouae had been watching him. The Oetsae’s golden form shimmered with patient light, his ancient presence steady.
“The bond is not what you fear,” Euouae said finally. His projection drifted back toward Kaede, ponytail trailing like spun gold. “It is not romantic. Not the way your bond is. What they share is… kinship. Purpose. A warrior’s oath made permanent.”
“I don’t care what it is.” A lie. They both knew it.
“Her spiritforce is stronger now. The emerald thread gives her access to his weapons—spirit daggers she can absorb and summon independently. In a confrontation at the CEG, that advantage could save her life.” Euouae paused, golden eyes steady. “Your daughter’s life.”
Low blow. Accurate, but low.
Kaede leaned back in the chair. The metal creaked beneath him—Verya engineering apparently prioritized function over silence. His gaze tracked the slow rise and fall of Selena’s breathing. The soft swell of her belly pressed against Ryzen’s abdomen.
His daughter. Growing inside the female he’d built his world around. Protected now by a bond with a broken Verya warrior and eight spirit daggers that lay scattered across the floor like forgotten promises.
“She’s sound?” he asked. Stripped the emotion from the question the way he’d strip a weapon. Clean. Functional. “No complications? The pregnancy, the bonding—no adverse effects?”
“None.” Euouae’s form brightened fractionally.
“The merging was clean. His spiritforce integrated with her existing web without disruption. Her shields are intact, her threads stable, and the baby’s neural development has actually—” He caught himself.
Recalibrated. “She is well, Kaede. Both of them are.”
Something unknotted in his chest. Fractionally. A tension he hadn’t acknowledged releasing its grip on his lungs just enough to let him breathe.
“And when she wakes?”
“She’ll be hungry.” A flicker of warmth in Euouae’s voice. Almost amused. “She’s always hungry these days.”
Kaede’s mouth twitched despite himself. A muscle memory of humor in a body that didn’t feel much like laughing.
“When it comes to her,” he said quietly, “there’s everything to worry about.”
Euouae studied him. The ancient Oetsae’s projection shimmered—gold rippling through gold, layers of consciousness older than most civilizations considering the male before him.
“You are a good mate,” Euouae said. Simply. Without qualification.
Kaede didn’t respond to that. Couldn’t. The words hit something raw that he refused to examine, and he buried it the way he buried everything that didn’t serve the mission—deep, locked, dealt with later.
Euouae’s golden form flickered once, then dissolved, sinking back into Selena’s body like sunlight absorbed by water. Gone. Returned to the spiritforce web where he resided, tethered to her consciousness the way all the Oetsae were tethered to their hosts.
The room settled into silence.
Just Kaede and the two sleeping figures on the bed and the dark spirit daggers scattered across the floor and the living suit disk turning, turning, turning between his fingers.
He pulled the chair closer to the bed.
Settled in.
And waited.
She would wake. She would look at him with those eyes—defiant and guilty and brave and exhausted and so ishing beautiful it still caught him off guard after all this time.
She would brace for his anger. His disappointment.
His lecture about tactical communication and operational security and the hundred other things he could say to make her feel small.
He wouldn’t say any of them.
He’d hand her the suit disk. Help her dress.
Walk her to food. And somewhere between the mess hall and whatever came next, he’d find the words for what he actually felt, buried beneath the frustration and the fear and the bone-deep exhaustion of loving someone who treated her own survival like an afterthought.
She was his star. His catastrophe. The axis his entire universe turned on.
He’d protect her from everything except herself. And apparently, that was the one threat he couldn’t counter.
The disk turned in his hand.
Kaede waited.