Chapter 35
Ryzen
Ryzen surfaced from sleep the way he’d surfaced from every unconscious moment for three hundred years—spiritforce reaching outward before his eyes opened, scanning for threats with the autonomic efficiency of a warrior who’d survived too many ambushes to wake gently.
His daggers answered first.
All eight erupted from their discarded position on the floor in a silent detonation of emerald light, snapping into attack formation before his conscious mind had finished registering the room.
They fanned outward in a lethal corona—blades orienting, edges brightening, spiritforce humming through each one with the focused aggression of weapons that had been dormant too long.
They found the threat immediately.
A figure in the chair. Close. Too close.
Sitting in the dark with the coiled stillness of a predator who’d been watching for hours, and every spirit dagger locked onto the silhouette with killing precision—eight points of emerald light converging on the male’s throat, chest, and temples in a pattern designed to end a fight before it began.
Kaede didn’t move.
Slitted neon-green eyes stared back at him through the ring of blades, utterly unimpressed.
One leg crossed over the other. Arms folded.
Something small and round turning between his fingers—Selena’s living suit disk, Ryzen realized.
Rolling it across his knuckles with the absent precision of a male who’d been sitting in that chair long enough to develop a habit.
Not a threat. Selena’s most dangerous mate, yes. Her most protective. The male who would gut him with a psydagger and feel nothing but mild satisfaction if Ryzen gave him sufficient reason.
But not a threat. Not right now.
Ryzen exhaled and pulled his spiritforce inward.
The daggers responded—not reluctantly, not with the chaotic delay they’d shown last night when the bond had scattered them across the floor like spent ammunition.
They retracted cleanly, edges dimming, blades dissolving back into the runes mapped across his skin one by one until the room’s only light was the faint emerald pulse of his own markings and the steady green glow of Kaede’s eyes.
No threats. No fight. And the last thing he needed was to accidentally start a war with the assassin who’d claimed Selena first and hardest.
The room settled.
And then Ryzen felt it.
Weight on his chest. Warmth pressed against his bare skin from collar to hip—a body curled into him with the boneless trust of someone who’d fallen asleep mid-collapse and hadn’t moved since. Fingers tangled loosely in his hair. A heartbeat tapping against his ribs in a rhythm that wasn’t his own.
Selena.
Still naked. Still draped over him, her cheek pressed to the flat of his chest, her breath warm and even against the rune above his heart. Her glowing spots had dimmed to a faint pulse—blue, pink, violet—cycling with her sleep like bioluminescence at low tide.
And inside his mind—
Stars.
She was everywhere.
Her spiritforce threaded through his consciousness like roots through ancient stone—golden, warm, impossibly present.
He could feel her dreaming. Not the content, but the texture of it—something soft and unhurried, edged with the particular peace of a mind that had finally stopped running.
Her thoughts brushed his in her sleep, absent and familiar, as if they’d always been there.
As if this was how his mind had always been meant to feel.
The void where Xenak’s twin bond had been ached a fraction less.
Not filled. Not replaced. He would never insult his brother’s memory with that kind of erasure. But the hemorrhaging had slowed. The wound had company now—something golden pressed against it, not healing, but holding.
He’d done the forbidden thing. Bonded. Merged souls with someone outside his kind, outside his galaxy, outside every law his people had carved into culture before he was born.
And now he could feel her dreaming against his consciousness like a second heartbeat, and the sound of it was the steadiest thing he’d known since Xenak was taken.
“What should I expect from this.”
Kaede’s voice cut through the dim quarters—low, controlled, stripped of everything except precision. Not a question. A demand shaped like one.
Ryzen considered the male across from him. The rolling disk. The unblinking stare. The absolute stillness that Ryzen had learned, over weeks of shared training and proximity, was Kaede’s version of barely contained fury.
He’d been sitting there all night. Had probably felt the moment the bond snapped into place through his own connection to Selena—the new thread weaving itself into the web that tied her to her constellation.
And instead of breaking down the door, instead of driving a psydagger through Ryzen’s spine while he lay unconscious and exposed, Kaede had pulled up a chair.
Sat down.
Waited.
That restraint was more terrifying than violence would have been.
Ryzen shifted beneath Selena’s weight, careful, deliberate—easing her off his chest and onto the mattress without jarring her awake. She made a sound. Low, protesting. Her fingers tightened in his hair for a breath before relaxing, her body curling instinctively toward the warmth he’d left behind.
Through the bond, her dreaming rippled. Then settled.
He sat up. Swung his legs over the edge of the bed and stood.
Nude. Exposed. No armor, no daggers manifested, no spiritforce barrier between himself and the most lethal male he’d ever met. He stood anyway, because modesty was a luxury he’d forfeited the moment he’d let Selena climb into his lap and shatter every rule his people had ever built.
Kaede’s gaze didn’t waver. Didn’t drop. The disk kept turning between his fingers.
“We’re tied together now.” Ryzen’s voice came out rough. Raw. Like something had scraped his throat from the inside out—and maybe it had. The bonding had taken more from him than he’d anticipated. More than the old texts had described. “Permanently.”
“How.”
“Spiritforce merging. My people called it soul-braiding before they outlawed it.” He met Kaede’s eyes without flinching.
Owed him that much. “Her spiritforce is threaded through mine. Mine through hers. The bond is wider than what she shares with her mates—different in nature. I can feel her thoughts. She’ll feel mine, once she learns to manage the connection. ”
Silence. The disk turned.
“And the daggers.”
“She can absorb them now. Any I give her, she can take into herself—store them the way I store them, in the runes. In her case...” He paused, searching for the right framework. “In her spots. They’ll respond to her spiritforce as if they were her own.”
“Summon them.”
“Yes. Call them. Wield them. Dismiss them. The spiritforce bond gives her access to everything a soul-braided partner would share among my kind.” His jaw tightened.
“It’s why the Verya outlawed the practice.
Shared spiritforce is shared power. Shared vulnerability.
A bonded pair is stronger together but devastating to each other if the bond is severed. ”
Something shifted behind Kaede’s eyes. The first crack in the mask—not anger, not jealousy. Calculation. The tactical mind behind those slitted pupils was already running scenarios. Already mapping how spirit daggers in Selena’s hands changed the defensive calculus for the CEG station.
“So she got what she wanted.” Flat. Quiet.
“She got what she asked for. Whether it’s what she wanted...” Ryzen let the sentence hang. Because the truth was more complicated than a weapon. He could feel it even now—the bond humming between them, alive and restless, threaded with undercurrents neither of them had bargained for.
Kaede uncrossed his legs. Leaned forward. The disk stopped turning.
“Then why.”
Two words. But Ryzen heard every question buried beneath them. Why her. Why now. Why this instead of a simpler arrangement—training, proximity, protection without the permanent entanglement of merged souls.
He’d asked himself the same questions in the seconds before the bond sealed. Had found answers that weren’t clean, weren’t simple, weren’t the kind of thing a warrior who’d spent three centuries avoiding exactly this could justify with logic alone.
“Because she asked.” He started with the easiest truth.
“Because I could help. Because my brother needs rescuing and she’s the only one willing to make it happen.
” His voice dropped. “And because she deserves to protect herself. She shouldn’t have to rely on anyone reaching her in time.
Not when there’s a weapon I can give her that can’t be stripped away. ”
Kaede studied him. Long. Unblinking. Reading him the way the assassin read everything—not just the words but the micro-expressions, the breath patterns, the spiritforce fluctuations that Ryzen couldn’t fully conceal even if he’d wanted to.
“You care for her.”
Not a question.
“I won’t pretend otherwise.” Ryzen held his ground.
“But it’s not love. Not the kind she has with you.
With your clanbrothers.” The word felt foreign in his mouth—a concept from a culture he was still learning to navigate.
“What I feel is... gratitude. Respect. Something warm I don’t have a name for yet.
She filled a place in me that’s been empty since Xenak was taken, and I won’t dishonor that by calling it something it isn’t. ”
The silence stretched. Ship’s engines hummed through the bulkhead—a low, constant vibration Ryzen had grown accustomed to in the last three days aboard the Abyss.
“I’m not trying to replace anyone.” He said it plainly, without deference, because deference would have been an insult to them both.
“I’m not competing for a position in her constellation.
She offered friendship and mutual protection.
I accepted. The soul-braid doesn’t require romance, and I won’t manufacture it to ease anyone’s expectations—hers or mine. ”
Kaede’s expression didn’t change. But something in his posture shifted—a fraction of the coiled tension releasing from his shoulders. Not acceptance. Not yet. But the absence of escalation, which from this male was practically an embrace.
“If you hurt her—”
“You’ll kill me. I know.” Ryzen almost smiled. “You won’t need to. If this bond damages her in any way, I’ll sever it myself. Whatever that costs.”
The disk started turning again.
“That would kill you.”
“Yes.”
Kaede stared at him for a beat longer. Then nodded once—a sharp, minimal motion that carried more weight than any verbal agreement from him.
Enough. For now, enough.
Movement behind him.
A shift of weight on the mattress, sheets rustling, and then—
The bond detonated.
Not the controlled hum of her sleeping consciousness.
A flood. Selena’s thoughts slammed through the connection like a dam breaking—sensation, emotion, fragments of half-formed awareness crashing into him with the subtlety of a hull breach.
Warmth and confusion and the particular disorientation of waking in an unfamiliar bed, and underneath it all, a bone-deep satisfaction that resonated through every thread of the soul-braid like a struck chord.
Ryzen staggered.
One step sideways, hand catching the edge of his sparse desk as her consciousness battered against his—too much, too loud, too present. He’d spent three centuries behind walls that no longer existed, and her mind in the morning was apparently a force of nature that operated without volume control.
He’d need to learn to manage this. Build new filters. Teach her to build them too, before one of them accidentally broadcast something neither was prepared to share.
A stretch. A sound—low, pleased, a purr that wasn’t quite a purr. More human than that. Warmer.
He turned.
Selena lay on her side, silver hair spilling across his pillow, one hand drifting over the warm indent where his body had been.
Her spots pulsed—pink, blue, violet—cycling brighter as consciousness returned.
Through the bond he felt her awareness sharpen, felt her spiritforce reach for his with the instinctive certainty of someone who’d done this before. Many times. With many mates.
She had practice at this. The waking. The reaching. The finding.
He was the one who had everything to learn.
Her eyes opened. Found him standing at the desk, naked and disoriented and gripping furniture for balance because her mind had hit him like a detonation.
She smiled.
Sleepy. Unguarded. The kind of smile that had no calculation behind it, no diplomacy, no burden of titles or war—just a woman waking up and being glad of the face she’d found.
Something in his chest turned over. Hard.
It’s not love, he told himself. It was too soon for that. Too raw. Too undefined. But it was something. Something warm. Something worth carrying.
Her gaze shifted. Past him. To the chair.
“I knew you’d be here.”
Kaede’s expression didn’t crack. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.”
She stretched again—slow, unconcerned, the sheets pooling at her waist—and the bond pulsed with affection so fierce it nearly knocked Ryzen sideways a second time.
Not directed at him. At Kaede. A love so deeply rooted and thoroughly certain that feeling even the edges of it through the soul-braid made Ryzen’s breath catch.
That was what she had with her mates. That impossible, gravitational certainty.
He wasn’t jealous. He was awed.
“Love me,” Selena said.
Two words. Simple as breathing. Said with the quiet confidence of a woman who already knew the answer and asked anyway because she liked hearing the silence that followed—the silence where Kaede’s entire body said what his mouth refused to.
The disk stopped turning.
Ryzen looked away. Gave them the moment. Found his pants folded on the desk—Kaede’s doing, probably, because Ryzen certainly hadn’t folded them—and pulled them on while the quiet between mates filled the room with something too intimate for a third party to witness.
Through the bond, Selena’s consciousness brushed his. Light. Deliberate this time.
Gratitude. And something that felt like welcome.
He let it settle. Didn’t name it. Didn’t chase it.
One day left until the CEG. One day to figure out what they’d built last night, and whether it would be enough to survive what was coming. This evening, they would arrive.
The bond pulsed between them. Emerald and gold. Steady. New.
He’d carry her light. She’d carry his.
Whatever came next, they wouldn’t face it alone.