Chapter 38
Kaede
The CEG Space Station filled the viewport like a sun.
Kaede stood at the bridge observation window and watched it grow—a massive, gleaming structure rotating in the void between neutral star systems, its docking rings extending outward like the arms of something waiting to embrace them.
Or swallow them. The distinction had been bothering him for hours.
Neutral territory. The phrase was a diplomatic fiction. Nothing about this station was neutral—not the Quaww representatives who’d voted to exterminate Selena’s existence from the galactic record.
The Abyss slid into the berth with the smooth precision of his Oetsae team’s automated docking systems. Magnetic clamps engaged. The hull shuddered once—a deep, resonant thud that traveled up through Kaede’s boots and settled in his molars.
Locked in. Committed.
Around him, the bridge hummed with controlled efficiency.
Eshe at the tactical station, running final threat assessments.
The Royal Guard cycling through their positions in the corridors below—armed, armored, every one of them hand-selected for this mission.
REI’s teal presence flickered across every display, monitoring the station’s internal sensors for anomalies.
Everything proceeding exactly as planned.
Kaede didn’t trust it.
He still couldn’t shake the feeling they were missing something—that something was wrong.
Some variable he hadn’t accounted for, some angle of approach his contingencies hadn’t covered.
The prickle at the base of his skull—the one that had kept him alive through three decades of killing and being hunted—had been buzzing since they dropped out of FTL, and it hadn’t stopped.
He pressed two fingers to his neck. “REI. Final sweep.”
“Sweep complete. No anomalous energy signatures within docking range. Station security protocols are standard. Aldawi royal quarter access has been confirmed.” A beat. “Your cortisol levels are elevated.”
“Noted.”
“And dismissed, I assume.”
He didn’t answer. His gaze stayed on the station through the viewport—the lights, the structure, the gleaming expanse of metal and diplomacy and every lie the galaxy told itself about peace.
Time to collect his nestqueen.
He found her in the royal quarters.
Zyxel stood at her flank—demi-human form, armed, the obsidian dark of his horns catching the overhead light.
He’d been with her all day, as ordered. Good.
The Rkekh had taken his assignment with the seriousness Kaede had demanded, and the bond between them confirmed what his eyes already told him: Selena was rested, fed, steady.
As steady as she ever got before walking into something that could kill her.
She stood at the center of the room in the living suit’s royal configuration—sleek, dark, formal.
The smart fabric had shaped itself into something that split the difference between armor and diplomacy, hugging her frame in clean lines that announced what she was without screaming it.
Aldawi Beacon. Nestqueen. The woman many species were gambling their futures on.
Her silver hair was pulled back, exposing the line of her neck and the constellation of bioluminescent spots that traced her spine. They pulsed softly—orange, yellow, brown—the slow, rhythmic cycle that meant she was focused. Controlled.
Kaede opened his mouth to speak.
Selena reached for something at her hip.
He saw the blade first. Emerald. One of Ryzen’s spirit daggers, manifested and hovering near her open palm—its edge bright with spiritforce that pulsed in time with her heartbeat.
She pressed it to a spot on her forearm.
The dagger sank into her skin like water into sand.
Kaede froze.
Not a flinch. Not a stumble. A full-body arrest—every system locking down as he watched the emerald blade dissolve through the surface of her arm and disappear.
Her Beacon spots flared—not their usual nervous-worried cycle but emerald, bright and alien, pulsing once, twice, three times before fading back to their normal rhythm.
The dagger was gone. Inside her. Part of her.
She looked up at him.
Defiant. Ready. The expression of a woman who’d already made her decision and wasn’t interested in negotiating its reversal.
He knew that face. Had loved it and been gutted by it in equal measure for years.
Too late. She’d already done it. The weapon was inside her now, and they were out of time to discuss it. Out of time to argue about tactical communication, about the hundred conversations they should have had before she absorbed a spirit weapon into her body on the doorstep of hostile territory.
Through the bond, he felt her. Braced for his anger. Chin up. Spine straight. Willing to take whatever he threw at her because she’d decided this was necessary and Selena didn’t flinch from the consequences of her own choices.
She never had.
That was the thing about loving her. The same quality that made her magnificent made her impossible.
His jaw tightened. A hundred words pressed against the back of his teeth—every one of them true, every one of them useless right now.
The delegation awaited. The station was docked. The Royal Guard was in formation, and every second they spent in this room was a second wasted.
Timing. Always timing. She’d done it on purpose—absorbed the weapon at the last possible moment, when there was no margin left for the argument they both knew was coming. Smart. Infuriating. Tactically sound.
He’d trained her too well.
“We will talk about this.” Low. Quiet. The voice he used when the volume didn’t need to do the work because the intent carried all the weight.
Selena held his gaze. “I know.”
“Later.”
“Later,” she agreed.
The word hung between them—a promise and a threat and an admission that later was a luxury neither of them could guarantee.
Kaede crossed the distance between them in three strides.
His hand found her arm—the arm she’d just absorbed an emerald spirit dagger into—and his fingers pressed against the living suit where the blade had vanished.
Warm. Steady. No trace of the weapon except the faintest hum of spiritforce beneath the surface, like a pulse running parallel to her own.
She didn’t pull away.
He adjusted his grip. Tucked her arm through his. Drew her close enough that he could feel her heartbeat through the suit—fast, controlled, the rhythm of someone who was frightened and refusing to show it.
His star. His catastrophe.
Always.
“Stay close,” he said. Not to her. To all of them—Zyxel, who shifted to her other flank; Ryzen, who materialized from the corridor with spirit daggers hidden in his own skin; Eshe, who fell into position behind with the Royal Guard at her back.
Formation locked.
Kaede led them toward the airlock.
The Aldawi royal docking bay opened before them in a sweep of polished metal and recessed lighting—a wide corridor designed to impress, its architecture engineered to make arriving delegations feel simultaneously welcomed and watched.
Security alcoves at regular intervals. Sensors embedded in the walls at heights calibrated to scan every species in the known galaxy.
Kaede cataloged all of it. Exits. Choke points. Lines of fire.
The bridge stretched ahead—a long, enclosed walkway connecting the docking berth to the royal quarters deeper inside the station.
Transparent walls on either side offered a view of the station’s interior—other bays, other ships, the distant movement of personnel going about the business of interstellar neutrality.
Station officials lined the corridor. Uniformed, armed with ceremonial sidearms, standing at attention as the Aldawi delegation passed. They bowed as Selena walked by—deep, formal inclinations that acknowledged her status.
Kaede watched every one of them.
Hands. Eyes. Breathing patterns. The micro-tells that separated someone performing duty from someone performing deception. He’d spent a lifetime reading bodies the way other people read text, and right now every page was coming up clean.
Too clean.
The procession moved. Boots on polished decking. The near-silent tread of the Royal Guard behind them. Zyxel’s breathing—steady, controlled, the predator in his demi-human form coiled and ready.
Selena walked beside him with her chin up and her shoulders back and the weight of six bonded mates and an unborn daughter and two galaxies’ worth of hope pressing down on her like a crown made of gravity.
Through the bond, he felt her composure—thin, deliberate, maintained by sheer will and the particular stubbornness that had carried her through every impossible thing the universe had thrown at her.
Brave. Terrified. Beautiful.
He loved her so much it felt like a wound.
The bridge stretched on. Officials bowed. The royal quarters awaited at the far end—a set of reinforced doors that would close behind them and offer the first real security they’d had since leaving the Abyss.
Almost there.
The prickle at the base of his skull screamed.
Something was wrong. He could feel it—not through the bond, not through REI’s sensors, not through any system or scan or contingency he’d built. Instinct. The monstrous part of his brain that didn’t need data to know when the ground beneath him was about to give way.
His hand tightened on Selena’s arm.
She looked up at him. Those blue-green eyes—wide, searching, reading him the way she’d learned to over the year of loving a male who said more with his silence than most people said with speeches.
“Kaede?”
He opened his mouth.
Light.
White. Absolute. The kind of light that doesn’t illuminate—it obliterates. It ate the corridor, ate the walls, ate the officials and the guards and the transparent bridge and every carefully planned contingency Kaede had spent three days building.
Sound came after—a fraction of a second that felt like a lifetime.
A roar so deep it bypassed his ears entirely and went straight to his bones, his teeth, the marrow of him.
The bridge bucked beneath his feet. Metal shrieked.
The transparent walls shattered inward, and the world became a hurricane of shrapnel and pressure and heat so intense it registered not as pain but as information his body didn’t have time to process.
Force.
The deck erupted. Upward. Outward. The explosion ripped through the bridge from below—not a surface detonation, something planted, something embedded in the structure itself, designed to collapse the walkway and everyone on it into the void between the station’s inner hulls.
Kaede reached for Selena.
His hand—already on her arm, already holding her, already where it was supposed to be—closed on nothing. The force had torn her away from him. One second she was there, her heartbeat under his fingers, her bond burning against his shields—
Gone.
He reached through the bond.
Clawed for her the way he’d clawed for her a thousand times—through battles and separations and the nightmares that woke him gasping in the dark.
Reached with everything he had, every thread of psychic connection, every ounce of the love he locked away and the desperation he never showed and the raw, screaming need to find her, to feel her, to know she was—
Nothing.
Her golden thread—the bond that had been burning in his chest since the day they claimed each other, the tether that told him she was alive and breathing and his—
Dark.
Not muted. Not distant. Not stretched thin across light-years the way it had been when she’d been when she was on that blasted asteroid base.
Dark.
His knees hit something. Deck. Debris. He couldn’t tell. The world had become noise and heat and the taste of blood in his mouth, and somewhere in the wreckage his body was failing in ways his mind hadn’t cataloged yet, but none of it mattered.
None of it.
Because the place inside his chest where she lived—the golden, burning, eternal center of everything he was—
Empty.
Kaede’s vision fractured. Gray at the edges. Closing in. His body folding, the strength that had carried him through wars and assassinations and the impossible labor of loving Selena draining out of him like blood from a wound he couldn’t find.
He tried to say her name—tried to force it past his teeth, past the panic tightening his throat.
Nothing came.
The Darkness rose anyway, swallowing the sound, swallowing him whole.