Chapter 5 #3
“About eight weeks now,” Quin replied, lowering the scanner wand to another section of my thigh. “Fighting. Hiding. Learning. The planet doesn’t just exist, it hunts. Everything here has evolved specifically to kill.”
“Like your Earth predators?”
“No. Nothing like Earth.” Quin shook her head. “The animals I study are majestic and kill for food and to protect themselves and their offspring.”
Her expression dimmed as she glanced toward the jungle beyond the cave entrance.
“The bio-spectral analyzer Mehr showed me how to use is the only reason we’ve survived this long.
It detects biological signatures, warns us about threats before they strike.
” Her hands stilled momentarily. “Without it, we’d all be dead. ”
The wand clicked off. In the quiet that followed, my gaze dropped to her shin, where her pant leg had torn back. A dark smear. Blood, dried in a trail from knee to ankle, the skin beneath raw and scraped.
“You’re injured,” I said, my ancillary heart accelerating at the sight of her wound. Without thinking, I reached down and scooped her up, trading places so she sat in my seat, and knelt between her legs.
“I fell running to the ship.” She glanced down as if noticing the injury for the first time. “I’m sure it’s just a scrape.”
“It needs cleaning.” I reached for the medical supplies she had used on me. “This world’s biological contaminants—“
“I know,” she interrupted, then sighed. “But it’s fine. I’ve had worse.”
“So have I,” I countered, echoing her earlier words. “That doesn’t mean it should be ignored.”
For a moment, she looked as though she might argue further. Then, to my surprise, she pulled up her pant leg, revealing her injury. “Fair enough.”
I took the silver canister in hand, my fingers dwarfing the container she had wielded so deftly.
When I leaned forward to examine her wound, I ran careful fingertips along the undamaged skin beside it, barely a touch, and she shivered.
I stilled. Beneath my thumb, her flesh was impossibly soft. No scales, no armor… just this.
An ancient, wordless instinct moved through me.
A Valosian warrior was built to withstand blades, claws, the crush of an enemy's grip, and here was a creature who had survived eight weeks on a killing world wrapped in nothing but fragile skin.
The realization did not diminish her. It honed my protective instincts to a fine, aching edge: the need to place myself between her and everything that had ever hurt her, and everything that ever would.
“This will sting,” I warned, deliberately repeating her earlier caution.
She nodded, watching me with those steady, pale eyes that seemed to see far more than I wanted to reveal. The mist hissed as it contacted her wound. She inhaled sharply but didn't flinch. The sealer wand looked absurdly delicate in my battle-worn hands as I passed it over her wound.
"Thanks," she breathed in relief. “That feels much better.”
“You’re most welcome.” I eased closer, using the pad of my thumb to wipe a smudge from her cheek.
I had not intended to linger, but her flesh was warm and impossibly soft beneath the rough pad of my thumb.
The air between us crackled like a storm ready to break.
My palm found her cheek before I had decided to move.
"What are you staring at?" she breathed.
I met her gaze, that pale, steady shade that had not flinched from mine even in that first moment on the ridge.
On Valose, the moons rose together in the darkness, one slightly larger than the other, and the light they cast was neither silver nor white but luminous between the two.
I had stood beneath that light a thousand times without ever finding a word for it. I had one now.
"The twin moons of Valose," I said. "When they rise together after the suns-fall, they cast a light unlike anything else in the sky. Quiet. Steady. Something a warrior learns to navigate by when all other light fails him." I held her gaze. "That is what your eyes remind me of."
A faint warmth moved across her cheeks. "Pickup lines, Valosian style.” She blinked and grinned. “You sure do have a way with words, making boring gray sound amazing.”
“Grraay,” I rolled the human term around on my tongue. My thumb grazed her cheekbone one last time as she leaned back, and I dropped my hand. “There is nothing boring them. You are... remarkably lovely, Quin—”
She raised the device between us. It hummed alive in her hand, its screen flooding with data as her fingers moved rapidly across it. "Your bioluminescence," she said, almost to herself, tapping again. "And your scales. The camouflage. How does it work? Is it involuntary, or can you control it?"
I didn’t understand why she didn’t feel the calling of her essence to mine, or the nascent thread growing between us. Instead of a spirit mate, she viewed me through the eyes of a scholar as if I were a specimen in need of studying.
Perhaps she could already see the damage inside me.
See beyond my scales and into the fractured male beneath.
A warrior worthy of his spirit mate should have been able to protect himself from capture, should have returned from Gorka whole instead of haunted by memories he could not escape.
Perhaps Quin sensed the darkness still clinging to my spirit and knew, with the same certainty I feared, that I was not worthy to be the male fate had chosen for her.