Chapter 18 #2
"We might." I don't soften it. Don't offer false comfort wrapped in gentle lies. She deserves better than that, and we both know it.
"I'd like to not think about that for a while." Her eyes meet mine, and there's a vulnerability there that costs her something—I can see it in the slight tension at the corners of her mouth, the way her fingers curl tighter into my shirt. "I'd like to pretend, maybe. Just for tonight."
"What would you like to think about instead?" The question comes out almost rough, because I'm already moving forward, already closing the space between us, already imagining every possible answer and knowing that whatever she says, I'll give her. "Tell me."
Her fingers tighten in my shirt. She tilts her face up, and her mouth finds mine, and the kiss is slow enough to ache.
Not the desperate collision of our earlier encounters, not the combative push-pull of two people who wanted each other and resented it.
This is something else. Something that feels like the first time, if the first time came after you'd already survived each other.
I bring my hands up to her face. Cup her jaw.
Feel the delicate architecture of bone beneath skin, the pulse point under my thumb where her blood runs quick and close to the surface.
She's so precisely made. Every line of her deliberate, elegant, lethal in its beauty the way a blade is lethal.
And she's letting me hold her face in my hands like this, tilted up to me, eyes open.
"May I?" My thumbs trace her cheekbones.
"Yes."
I kiss her again. Deeper this time, slower, tasting the warmth of her mouth with a care I haven't shown anything in years.
I've handled explosives more carelessly than I'm handling her right now, and the strange thing is that the care doesn't feel like restraint.
It feels like the first honest thing my hands have done.
She pulls my shirt over my head. Her palms flatten against my chest, and I feel her fingers trace the scars there, the topography of every mission, every fight, every time I walked into something that should have killed me and walked out carrying new damage.
She knows them now. She's mapped them with her mouth on other nights.
But tonight she traces them like she's reading something written in a language she's only just learned.
"You're beautiful," she says, and I almost flinch because no one has ever said that to me and meant the scars too.
"Aura."
"Shut up. I'm telling you something."
I shut up. She pushes me back until my knees hit the bed and I sit, and she climbs into my lap, knees bracketing my hips, her weight settling against me in a way that makes my breath catch.
Her dress is some soft, unstructured thing she wears in private, nothing like the structured Consortium fashion.
I find the hem and slide my hands underneath it, up the warm skin of her thighs, and she shivers.
"May I take this off?"
"Yes." She lifts her arms and I pull the dress over her head, and she's bare underneath except for a thin band of fabric at her hips.
Starlight from the viewport catches on her skin, and I watch her in the blue-white light, the swell of her breasts, the line of her waist, the way her stomach tightens when my hands settle there.
"You're staring."
"I'm memorizing."
Something shifts in her eyes. The awareness of why I might need to memorize, the tomorrow of it pressing in at the edges.
She catches my face in her hands and kisses me with a fierceness that's grief and want braided together, and I let her, I open to it, I give her everything she's taking because it's hers. All of it.
I lay her back on the bed. She pulls me with her, legs wrapping around my waist as I settle over her, and the press of her body against mine through the remaining fabric is enough to make my vision blur.
I kiss her throat. The hollow at the base where her pulse drums against my lips.
The slope of her collarbone. The soft skin of her breast, and I take my time there, mouth closing over her nipple, tongue slow and deliberate while she arches under me with a sound that I want to record and keep in the dark part of my chest where nothing else survives.
"Ethan." My name in her voice, shaped by want. I will never stop being wrecked by the sound of it.
I work my way down her body. Kiss the flat of her stomach, the jut of her hip bone, the crease where her thigh meets her pelvis.
She's already trembling, and when I hook my fingers in the band of fabric and pull it down, she lifts her hips to help, and the trust in that small motion knocks something loose in me.
"May I?"
"God, yes. Stop asking and just..."
I put my mouth on her.
She tastes like salt and heat and something sweet underneath, and the sound she makes when my tongue slides through her folds is low and broken and mine.
I learn her again, the way I learn her every time, because every time she's a little different.
A little more open. A little more willing to let me hear the sounds she'd choke back with anyone else.
Tonight she doesn't hold anything back. Her fingers thread into my hair, and her hips roll against my mouth, and I give her everything, slow licks and deliberate pressure and the careful, ruinous attention of a man who knows this might be the last time.
Not the last time. I won't let it be the last time.
She comes with my name on her lips, her thighs shaking against my shoulders, and I stay with her through it, gentling my mouth as she rides out the aftershocks.
When I lift my head, she's looking at me with an expression that guts me.
Soft and wrecked and furious with tenderness, like loving me is something she has to fight through to get to.
"Come here." Her voice is raw. "I need you closer."
I strip off the rest of my clothes. She watches me, and there's no embarrassment in the watching, no coyness.
Just hunger and something deeper. Knowledge.
She knows this body. She knows what it's done, what it's capable of, what it becomes when she's underneath it.
She knows, and she's reaching for me anyway.
I settle between her thighs. The head of my cock presses against her entrance, and I hold there, watching her face, because this is the moment I always want to keep. The edge of it. The almost. Her pupils blown wide, her lips parted, her body tensing with anticipation.
"Yes," she says before I can ask. "Yes, Ethan, please."
I slide into her. Slow, so slow it's its own form of torture, and the feeling of her around me is something my body will remember after everything else is gone. Tight and warm and wet, her walls gripping me as I fill her, and she gasps and pulls me closer, nails digging into my back.
I set a rhythm that's nothing like the frantic collisions of our earlier encounters.
Slow rolls of my hips, deep and deliberate, each thrust a sentence in a conversation we're having with our bodies.
Her legs wrap tighter around me. Her hands slide up my back, over my shoulders, cup the back of my neck.
We're pressed together from chest to hip, and the friction of her skin against mine is its own devastation.
"Look at me," she says.
I look at her. In the dim light, her eyes are black, bottomless, holding galaxies I'll never fully chart.
My bioluminescent markings are glowing faintly along my arms and ribs, triggered by arousal, by emotion, by whatever mechanism my altered genetics decided was appropriate for this moment.
The soft blue-green light paints her skin in colors that belong on no human spectrum.
"You're glowing," she whispers.
"You do that to me."
Her laugh breaks into a moan as I shift my angle, and the sound is the most honest thing I've ever heard.
I press deeper, find the spot that makes her spine arch and her fingers claw, and I stay there, grinding into her with a precision that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with wanting to give her this, this feeling, this pleasure, this proof that my hands can do something other than damage.
She comes again, clenching around me so tight I have to bury my face in her neck and breathe through it, and her voice breaks on something that might be my name or might be a prayer in a language neither of us speaks.
I follow her over, spilling inside her with a groan that starts in my chest and ends somewhere in the foundations of who I thought I was.
The orgasm rearranges me. Takes apart the architecture I built to survive and leaves something rawer in its place.
We stay tangled together afterward. Her legs still around me, my face still in her neck, our breathing slowly synchronizing in the dark. My bioluminescence fades to a soft, steady glow, and she traces the patterns on my forearm with one finger, following the light like a map.
"I've never been fully honest with anyone," I say into the warm space between her neck and shoulder. "Before you."
"I know." Her finger follows a line of light from my wrist to my elbow. "That's why I married you."
"You married me for political advantage."
"I told myself that." Her hand stills on my arm. "It was a useful lie."
I lift my head and look at her. She's serious. The Consortium mask is nowhere in evidence, just Aura, stripped of everything but this moment and the truth of it.
"If we don't come back," I start.
"We're coming back."
"If we don't."
She puts her hand over my mouth. "Then it won't matter what we said tonight. But we will. So I'd rather talk about what happens when we do."
I kiss her palm. She lets me.
"When we come back," I say against her skin, "I'd like to be something other than a strategic acquisition."
"You already are." She replaces her hand with her mouth. The kiss is soft and certain and tastes like the future. "You already are."
The docking bay hums with the particular frequency of a ship being loaded for a journey no one can guarantee return from.
Crates of equipment, weapons, medical supplies, rations calculated for a crew of six and a mission of indeterminate length.
The ship itself is a Torrence mid-range cruiser, modified with the shielding I specified and the Consortium sensor arrays Aura negotiated into the alliance terms.
Zane oversees the loading with the quiet efficiency of a man who's done this before and expects to do it again.
Talia checks weapons systems with a focus that borders on devotion, her hands moving over console readouts with the same precision she applies to everything.
Elissa arrives last, a single bag over her shoulder, her face composed and still and older than it was when I met her.
Dexter stands with Astra near the bay entrance.
Staying behind. Someone has to run the station, guard the alliance, hold everything they've built while the rest of us fly into something that might eat us whole.
Dexter catches my eye and gives me a nod that carries the weight of everything we've been through and the faith that I'll bring his people back alive.
Astra's hand rests on his arm, and she watches Elissa board the ship with the expression of a teacher who has given her student everything she can and now has to trust it's enough.
Ky Zalt is there too, standing slightly apart, his hazel eyes clear and human in the bay's harsh light.
He watches Aura with the steady attention of someone committing a face to memory.
She walks to him, and they exchange words I don't hear, and then she boards the ship and takes her place beside me.
The final checks take twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of system confirmations and seal verifications and the small, unbearable bureaucracy of leaving.
Then Aura turns to me, and the bay noise fades, and there's just her face in the artificial light, her dark eyes, the set of her jaw.
"When this started," she says, "you were a strategic acquisition. A useful monster I could control."
"And now?"
"Now you're my monster." Her hand comes up to my face, palm against my cheek, fingers curving along my jaw. The touch is warm and certain and holds nothing back. "Mine. Whatever we find on the other side, you're mine."
The word settles into me like a key turning in a lock I forgot I had. Hers. Not Protocol's asset, not a tool shaped for someone else's purpose, not a chameleon cycling through identities in search of one that fits. Hers.
"Yours." I turn my head and press my lips to her palm. "Whatever it costs."
She smiles. Not the Consortium smile, not the political weapon. The real one, small and fierce and a little bit terrified. The one I'd burn worlds to see.
We take our seats. The ship seals. The docking clamps release with a sound like bones cracking, and Veridian-7 falls away beneath us, spinning slow and bright against the dark, the home we built out of crisis and compromise shrinking to a point of light among the stars.
Ahead, the anomaly.
I can see it growing in the viewport as we approach.
Not a hole, exactly. More like a wound in the fabric of the visible universe, edges ragged with light that bends wrong, stars behind it warped and doubled and scattered like reflections in shattered glass.
The readings on the console in front of me confirm what the probes suggested: stable spatial environment, breathable atmosphere, energy signatures that match nothing in any database I've ever accessed.
Strange light. Wrong stars. The unknown wearing the universe's face.
Aura's hand finds mine on the armrest between us. Her fingers lace through mine, and her grip is steady, and her presence beside me is the most real thing in a reality that's about to come apart at the seams.
I've spent my life being what others needed me to be.
A tool shaped by Protocol's hands. A weapon aimed at whoever they chose.
A chameleon changing colors to match rooms I never belonged in.
Every identity a mask, every relationship a mission, every version of myself a lie told in service of someone else's purpose.
Now I'm hers. Just hers. Whatever comes.
The anomaly fills the viewport. Light that has no name bends around the ship. The hull groans, a deep resonance I feel in my teeth and my sternum and the base of my skull. Aura's hand tightens in mine.
"Ready?" she asks.
"No." I squeeze her hand. "Let's do it anyway."
The ship plunges forward, and the wrong stars swallow us whole.