Chapter 14
IRIS
Iknew he was here. Don’t ask me how, but I knew.
It was something I sensed, like pricked intuition in a bad situation.
Like the innate knowledge when you sense someone is watching you.
Baleck was nearby. He’d come for me. Lots of feelings hit me as I sat on the cold hard floor, and none of them made a lot of sense.
My training told me to focus on escape plans, exit strategies, the layout of this room. But my mind kept circling back to the certainty that Baleck was out there, somewhere in these ruins, looking for me.
I’d never had this before. This sense of another person. Like a compass needle swinging toward magnetic north, I could feel him getting closer. It should have terrified me. Instead, it settled something restless in my chest.
I shifted against the rough stone wall, testing the ropes around my wrists for the hundredth time.
Vax had retied them after dragging me to relieve myself in another crumbling room.
The bastard had made them tighter than before, clearly annoyed that I’d nearly worked free of the original knots. My fingers were going numb.
But that wasn’t what occupied my thoughts.
Baleck was coming for me. I’d never had someone rescue me before.
Not like this, anyway. In my line of work, if you got captured and you couldn’t extract yourself, a team came.
Rescue missions were risky and costly, but operatives were not abandoned.
This was not that kind of rescue mission.
Baleck wasn’t here because he was ordered to be. He was here because…
Because he needed to save me. Me. The thought made my throat tight.
I’d spent my entire adult life alone. Not lonely, just alone.
There was a difference. I didn’t make friends because friends became liabilities.
I didn’t form attachments because attachments got you killed or, worse, got them killed.
I ate in institutional cafeterias, slept in barracks or safe houses, and kept every interaction professional and brief.
It had worked for me. It kept me sharp, focused, alive.
But Baleck made me want something different. Something I didn’t have words for.
I thought about that night at the communal eating hall.
The way he’d listened when I talked about being sorted at six years old.
How he hadn’t pitied me or tried to fix it.
He’d just heard me. And when I’d warned him I wasn’t relationship material, he’d pushed back gently but firmly.
Like he saw through my walls and wasn’t intimidated by them.
I don’t plan to stop pursuing you. Unless you tell me flat out not to.
I hadn’t told him to stop. Couldn’t bring myself to say the words even though it would have been safer. Easier.
But nothing about Baleck felt easy. He made me feel exposed in a way that had nothing to do with combat or danger.
He looked at me and I swear he could see everything I’d buried deep.
The scared kid from the mining colony. The girl who’d lost everyone.
The woman who convinced herself she didn’t need anyone.
Except I did need him. That was the terrifying part.
I needed his warmth on cold mountain ridges. His easy humor that made me almost smile. The way his skin shifted colors with his emotions, broadcasting everything he felt without shame or hesitation. He was so open, so genuine, and it made me want to be the same.
More than that, I felt safe with him. Which was absurd because I was the one with extensive combat training and assassination skills.
I was supposed to be the dangerous one. But when I was with Baleck, something in me relaxed.
Like I could stop scanning for threats for just a moment. Like I could breathe.
It scared the hell out of me. But it also felt freeing, like something completely out of my control. Like gravity or the pull of a planet’s orbit.
I thought about Cleo and Rezor. The D’tran leader had had that haunted, lost look every time I’d seen him since Cleo left. The male was clearly miserable, wandering around his settlement like a ghost. And Cleo had pushed back against their bond, gotten scared, and left with Mierva and Zara.
For what? To prove she had a choice? To maintain control?
I understood the impulse. I really did, and in fairness, I didn’t have the whole story of what went down between them.
But looking at Rezor’s devastated face, I couldn’t see the point of denying a mate bond if that’s what was happening between Baleck and me.
Life was short and brutal enough without rejecting the one good thing the universe decided to throw your way.
If Baleck was my mate, if this pull I felt was real and not just attraction or proximity or some trauma response to being kidnapped, then I wasn’t going to run from it.
I’d faced down hostile forces, completed black ops missions, survived situations that should have killed me.
I could handle falling for a color-shifting alien with kind eyes and a smart mouth.
Probably.
Unless he didn’t want me. That thought hit like a punch to the gut.
What if he realized I was too damaged, too closed off, too fucked up from a childhood in group homes and a career built on violence? What if he saw all my scars and decided I wasn’t worth the effort?
I’d sustained a bad chemical burn during one of my first assignments.
Some asshole had rigged a trap with corrosive accelerant.
The doctors repaired my face, mostly. The skin on my left cheek would never be quite right, but it was passable.
The scarring on my shoulder, upper arm, and part of my chest was worse.
The tissue was uneven, discolored in places, shiny in others.
I’d never bothered with the follow-up regeneration procedures. They were painful, time-consuming, and honestly, I hadn’t cared. My body was a tool. Scars just proved the tool still worked.
But now I cared. Now I worried about what Baleck would think when he saw the mottled skin across my shoulder and chest. Would he be repulsed? Would he hide it well, try to be kind about it, but pull away?
The thought of him seeing me naked made my stomach clench with anxiety.
The thought of seeing him naked made my pulse quicken for entirely different reasons.
I let out a shaky breath. This was new territory. I’d had a boyfriend once, but it hadn’t lasted long and I’d never felt like this. Like my entire nervous system was rewiring itself around another person.
A sound outside the room made me freeze. Footsteps, but lighter than Vax or his guards. More careful.
I listened hard, wishing I had an enhanced ear to match my enhanced eye. My cybernetic eye could zoom and switch to night mode, but my hearing was depressingly human. Still, I strained to catch every tiny noise.
Fabric brushing against stone. The softest scrape of a boot. Someone was moving through the ruins with practiced stealth.
Baleck.
My heart hammered so hard I worried he’d hear it.
The door opened slowly, just a crack at first. Then Baleck slipped inside, and the entire world shifted.
I’d been holding myself together with discipline and training and sheer stubborn will. But seeing him there, silhouetted in the doorway with his zavat in hand and his skin rippling with cautious amber tones, something cracked wide open inside me.
It wasn’t just relief. It was bigger than that. Like a door I’d kept locked my entire life suddenly swung open and flooded me with light. With possibility. With the terrifying, exhilarating realization that I wasn’t alone anymore. That I didn’t have to be.
For the first time, I was the one being saved. And I wasn’t even mad about it.
Baleck seemed to have no idea about the seismic shift happening in my chest. He crossed to me quickly, dropping to his knees beside me. His fingers worked at the knots with focused efficiency.
“Are you hurt?” he whispered, his voice low and urgent.
I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak yet.
He got the first knot free and moved to the second. His skin shifted to warmer golds and oranges in the dim light. Relief. Joy. I could read him so easily now.
My hands came free. Circulation rushed back painfully, but I ignored it. Instead, I grabbed his face between my palms and kissed him.
He froze. For one awful second, I thought I’d read this wrong. That something had changed since the last time he’d kissed me in the valley to now and I’d just made a big mistake.
Then his arms came around me and he was kissing me back with a passion that stole my breath.
One hand cupped the back of my head, the other pressed against my lower back, pulling me closer.
He tasted like determination and something sweet I couldn’t name.
His lips were soft but insistent, and when his tongue swept against mine, I made a sound I’d never made before.
My fingers threaded through his shaggy hair. His skin was warm under my touch, colors rippling in waves I could feel as much as see. Every place we touched felt electric, alive. This wasn’t just attraction. This was recognition. Like my body knew his and had been waiting for this moment.
He pulled back, breathing hard. His eyes were molten amber and his skin glowed with vivid golds. “We can continue this later.”
“Promise?” The word came out rougher than I intended.
“Absolutely.” He helped me to my feet, keeping one hand on my elbow to steady me. “Can you walk?”
“I can run.” My legs were stiff from sitting but functional.
We moved to the door. Baleck checked the corridor with the same careful stealth I’d use on a mission. Seeing him in warrior mode did something to me. He carried his zavat with easy competence, his skin shifting to camouflage browns and grays to blend with the stone walls.
We slipped out into the corridor. The ruins were a maze of collapsed walls and shadowy passages. Ancient Destran script covered some of the walls. I filed that information away for later.
We’d made it maybe twenty meters when one of Vax’s guards stepped around a corner.
The male’s eyes went wide. His mouth opened to shout.
Baleck’s zavat was a blur. Energy strings hummed to life. A thin metal arrow shot through the air before the guard could make a sound.
The D’tran dropped, clutching his chest. Not a kill shot, but close. Close enough to make it too painful for that D’tran to call for help. Baleck was precise.
We ran past him, moving deeper into the ruins. Baleck kept his hand on my lower back, guiding me through turns I couldn’t have navigated alone.
“Sophie found you missing this morning,” he whispered as we hurried through a section where the ceiling had partially collapsed. “I used the Raycer’s interface and a scanner to find you, thanks to your tracker chip.”
“How many know I’m missing?”
“Sophie, Vash, Anker. We kept it quiet, like your admiral ordered.” He pulled me to the left, down another passage. “I had to come for you.”
Something warm expanded in my chest. “I know.”
He glanced at me, colors shifting with surprise. Then he smiled, quick and fierce.
We emerged into what must have been a plaza once. Ancient buildings rose on all sides, their walls crumbling but still impressive. The stars were bright overhead.
Then a new light cut through the darkness. Brilliant white searchlights stabbed down from above, sweeping across the ruins in methodical patterns.
I looked up and my stomach dropped. A ship hung in the air above us. Sleek, angular, unmistakably Brakken in design. Its searchlights carved through the night, and one of them was directly between us and where Baleck must have left the Raycer.
“Fuck,” I breathed.
Baleck hissed out a breath, grabbed my hand, and pulled me back into the ruins. We ran deeper into the ancient city, the searchlights chasing us through the shadows, as the Brakken ship descended lower over the lost Destran city.