Chapter 26 Freya
FREYA
The door to our quarters—what’s left of them—doesn’t so much open as fall inward.
The panel hangs crooked on its track, hinges warped from the blast that rocked this wing earlier.
When Vokar and I stumble through, the smell of smoke and scorched polymer follows us like a second skin.
The air inside is hazy, gritty with floating dust motes that shimmer in the weak emergency lights.
I can barely stand. My legs tremble in that way adrenaline shakes you after it’s burnt itself out.
My ribs feel like they’ve been used as percussion instruments.
There’s dried blood along my arms, some of it mine, some of it absolutely not.
Even my hair feels stiff, like it’s been shellacked with sweat and ash.
Vokar’s hand stays rooted at my lower back, guiding me, steadying me even as he sways on his feet.
He’s a silhouette of ruin—shirt gone, bone-spurs cracked, skin torn open in a dozen places.
But he’s warm. Alive. Breathing. His presence throws off a heat that seeps into me, chasing off the cold that’s been slowly spreading under my skin since the moment he was hauled away during the coup.
He shuts the broken door with his foot. It slams shut, rattling in its frame. Dust drifts from the ceiling.
For a long, breathless moment, we just stand there.
His chest rises and falls in harsh, uneven bursts. Mine matches it, my breaths coming too fast, almost panicked. But when I look up into his face—into those burning red eyes gone dark and soft around the edges—I feel something unspool inside me. Something tight and knotted.
“You came back,” I whisper.
The words scrape out of me, cracked and vulnerable. I didn’t intend for them to come out sounding like a confession. I didn’t intend to sound so small.
His gaze sharpens. Like the words hit him somewhere deep.
“I told you,” he murmurs, voice rough gravel and heat, “I will always come back to you.”
His hand lifts—slowly, like he’s afraid any sudden movement might frighten me off. When his fingers touch my cheek, I swear my knees almost give out. His thumb traces the line of a bruise, feather-light, reverent in a way Reapers aren’t supposed to know how to be.
I lean into him. I can’t help it. My body moves on instinct, on relief so profound it borders on aching.
Then he bends down.
And kisses me.
Not like before—not hungry or demanding or claiming. This kiss is soft. Slow. Almost… disbelieving. His lips brush mine like he’s cataloging the fact that I’m here, that I’m whole, that I’m breathing. The heat of him pours into me, melting the last shards of fear lodged under my ribs.
When he pulls back, the world tilts. I didn’t realize how much I’d been shaking until he steadies me again with both hands on my waist.
“Sit,” he murmurs.
“No,” I breathe. “Not yet.”
My palms slide up the planes of his chest, over scorched skin and broken spurs and the sticky warmth of half-dried blood. I shouldn’t touch him. Not like this. He needs a medic. He needs rest. He needs anything other than me pressing into every wound like an idiot.
But he doesn’t flinch. If anything, he shudders under my touch, chest rumbling in a low sound that feels like recognition. Like relief. Like need.
He cups my jaw with both hands, lowering his forehead against mine. His skin is hot, almost feverish, and his breath fans across my lips.
“I thought I lost you,” he whispers.
“You didn’t.” I touch the side of his face, trace the line of a crack in his spur. “You never did.”
His lips part on something like a gasp. Or maybe it’s a growl. It’s both. It’s neither. It’s the sound of a dam breaking.
Then his mouth is on me again.
This time it isn’t soft.
This time it’s everything we’ve been holding back.
His kiss is deep, desperate, a pull like gravity dragging me closer until I’m pressed against the scorching heat of him. His arms wrap around my waist and lift me—effortless, urgent—carrying me the last few steps toward the bed that’s half collapsed, sheets torn and dust-covered.
He lowers us into the wreckage, pulling me onto his lap with a sound that makes every nerve in my body snap awake. His hands roam my back, my arms, my waist, shaking slightly with the force of trying not to crush me.
I break the kiss only when my lungs start to burn. I drag in a breath that tastes like him—iron, smoke, sweat, and something uniquely Vokar.
“You’re hurt,” I whisper.
“So are you.” His thumb brushes my lower lip. “We live.”
A shiver runs through me. Because that’s what this is—this moment, this closeness—it’s proof. We lived. We survived.
But survival isn’t enough. Not anymore.
I lean forward and kiss the cut at the corner of his mouth. Then I kiss the bruise forming along his jaw. The ridge of his cheekbone. The line of his neck.
Every touch draws a deeper sound from him, low and rough and almost… stunned.
“Freya,” he breathes, voice barely holding together, “tell me to stop.”
“Never.”
He meets my eyes.
Something in him breaks completely.
What happens next isn’t dominance. It isn’t claiming. It isn’t any of the things that defined us before the world caught fire. This is different. Raw. Human. Reaper. Everything in between.
He touches me like I’m the only soft thing left in the galaxy.
His mouth traces every bruise he can find, slow kisses laid over each one—like he’s erasing them, rewriting them, giving them meaning beyond pain. His hands explore me gently first, reverent, mapping where I hurt, where I don’t, listening to every hitch of breath I give him.
But there’s hunger there too—buried under the tenderness. A hunger that mirrors mine. The kind that comes after surviving death, after watching everything you built crumble and still somehow managing to hold the one thing that matters.
I touch his chest, feel the violent thud of both hearts under my palm. His breath catches.
“You’re real,” I whisper. “You’re here.”
He presses my hand tighter to his chest.
“Always.”
When our mouths meet again, it’s different. Slower. But deeper. Like we’re trying to memorize each other. Like our lips are speaking truths our throats haven’t figured out yet.
He lays me back against what remains of the pillow, dust rising around us like falling stars. He hovers over me, eyes searching my face as though confirming, again and again, that I’m not a hallucination clawed out of a nightmare.
His fingers skim my ribs, careful. Too careful.
“I won’t break,” I say, breathless.
“You almost did,” he answers.
“So did you.”
He closes his eyes—just for a moment. When they open again, there’s a shine there I’ve never seen from him. Not even in battle. Not even in the darkest moments.
“Let me have this,” he murmurs.
“You already do.”
He lowers his mouth to mine—not hungry, not frantic, but with the quiet, aching devotion of someone who crawled out of a grave to get back here.
His lips trail down my throat, across the pulse fluttering wildly under my skin.
Each kiss feels like an oath. A promise.
A reclaiming of something neither of us realized we could lose.
My hands slide up his back, tracing the deep grooves of his shoulder blades, the warm lines of muscle that tremble under my fingertips. He shudders into me, a full-body exhale that feels like surrender.
Not to me.
To us.
The world outside continues to burn, collapsing in on itself with distant booms and flickering light. But here—here in the ruins of the room where he first said “mine” and I first believed him—there is only this:
His breath.
My heartbeat.
The tremble of his fingers on my skin.
The desperate, reverent way he holds me.
There’s no dominance now. No power struggle. No claiming. Only mutual gravity, pulling us into each other like stars collapsing into the same orbit.
He whispers my name against my collarbone—like it hurts to say, like it heals him anyway. I whisper his back, fingers threading through his hair, drawing him closer, anchoring us both.
We’re not gentle.
We’re not careful.
We’re alive.
And for tonight—after everything we’ve lost, everything we’ve fought, everything we almost didn’t survive—being alive together is the fiercest act of love either of us can give.
Later, the world around us lies broken, scarred, spent — but in this room, in the hollow shell of what once was our quarters, time feels slow, soft, as if it’s catching its breath with us.
The fires outside gutter down to smoldering embers.
Smoke drifts through cracked walls in lazy curls, carrying the scent of charred wood, molten metal, and ash.
But inside these walls, there’s warmth. Not from lamps or power, but from skin pressed to skin, breath mingling, hearts pounding in unison.
Vokar lies beside me on the collapsed bed, his body half-shuddered with exhaustion, limbs heavy, ribs rising and falling in a rhythm that aches with every shallow breath.
The sheet — scorched and stained — is bunched beneath us.
Dust motes float in the dim glow of emergency lights, drifting like slow, drifting stars suspended in a shattered universe.
I reach out, fingertips trembling, trace along his ribs — careful, slow — feeling the ridges and valleys of scars and new wounds, the hardness of hardened bone-spurs under skin, remnants of battle still embedded in muscle and sinew.
I press gently at a tender curve where flesh pulls tight over healing bone. My thumb scrolls over the fresh scar, a thin pink line already knit over dark crusted blood. I whisper softly, half to him, half to the memory of the blade that cut him.
“Another one for the collection,” I murmur.
He chuckles — low, half-groan, half-rumble — a sound that vibrates in his chest and straight through mine. It’s ragged with pain, but also alive.
“Only if you name it,” he rasps, voice rough as sandpaper, but also warm, intimate.