20. Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty
MIRO
Zavin’s fingers remain wrapped around mine as we leave the maintenance bay. His grip never loosens, but I feel the faint tremor running through his hand. The heaviness in his step. The drop in his shoulders.
The enforcers drag Kazren past us. His head hangs forward, dark hair matted with blood, one boot scraping across the deck plating as they haul him towards the tunnels.
Maybe I should feel pity for the male, but it doesn’t come.
All I see is a male who would kill me and forget about me by dinner and a brother who chose power over blood.
Zavin doesn’t spare him a glance. His eyes remain fixed ahead, his expression unreadable to anyone who didn’t know him, but I see the weight of everything land on him. He hasn’t just ended a war. He’s buried the last of his family.
I squeeze his fingers, wanting him to know he isn’t standing in the aftermath alone. His thumb brushes once across the back of my hand before curling around it again, and something inside me settles.
I understand him. Not every choice he’s ever made.
Not every secret he’s kept. But the male beneath all of it.
The male who put a bullet in Tevan’s head and who now holds me so gently is the same male.
Fierce enough to do what no one else will.
Gentle enough to carry another person’s pain as though it belongs to him.
Helix had taught me that people were assets, liabilities, and variables to control.
House Sethrak had taught Zavin something even crueler.
It had taught him that love could be weaponized, that loyalty was earned through fear and that survival demanded blood.
We were both shaped by places that had tried to strip away the best parts of us.
The difference was that he’d fought his way back.
I don’t blame him for what he did.
I never will.
The elevator doors slide shut with a heavy clang, sealing us inside the small metal compartment.
The moment they do, every bruise, every cut and every place I’d ignored comes alive.
Pain surges through my shoulder in a brutal throb.
My ribs ache with every inhale. My split lip burns.
Even my knees protest beneath my weight, suddenly too weak to keep holding me upright.
The world around me spins. I reach for the wall and strong arms scoop me up before I can fall.
Zavin gathers me against the broad warmth of his chest, one arm beneath my knees, the other cradling my back as though I weigh nothing at all.
His grip is careful despite his own injuries, holding me with impossible gentleness.
“I’ve got you,” he murmurs, tightening his arms around me.
I sigh, clutch Percy against my chest and let my head settle beneath Zavin’s chin, closing my eyes as he carries me.
I lose all sense of where we are.
The corridors blur into the steady rhythm of his footsteps and the quiet rise and fall of his breathing beneath my cheek.
His arms never shift beneath my weight, never loosen, holding me with an effortless certainty that lets me stop thinking for the first time in...
I don’t even know how long. I breathe him in instead.
Warm scales. Gunpowder. Beneath the blood lingers the warm scent of his skin.
His masculine scent that has become as familiar to me as my own.
Somewhere behind us, House Sethrak keeps moving. Orders will be given. Bodies carried away. Floors scrubbed clean until no trace remains of the blood spilled tonight. Tomorrow the House will wake to a new lord and continue as though nothing has changed.
Everything has changed.
The thought settles quietly inside me as I listen to the steady beat of his hearts. This world is still brutal. It always will be. Vahiri hasn’t become kinder because one tyrant is dead. There will always be Houses hungry for power and people willing to destroy others to claim it.
But somehow, in the middle of all that brutality, Zavin and I found something gentle.
We built it one quiet conversation at a time. One shared meal. One impossible act of trust after another. Piece by fragile piece, we’d carved out a place where neither of us had to become the worst thing our worlds demanded.
I came to House Sethrak searching for a way off this planet. Every corridor I walked, every system I cracked and every map Percy and I built ended with the same question.
How do I escape?
There’s only one answer to that question now. I don’t want to leave. Not because there’s nowhere else to go. Because wherever Zavin is... that’s where I want to be.
If I’d asked him to find me a way off Vahiri tomorrow, he would have. He’d have put every resource House Sethrak possessed behind getting me safely away from this planet.
And my parents. This is the first time in two years remembering them hasn’t come wrapped in guilt. I can open the channel now.
I can tell them I’m alive.
A door hisses open somewhere nearby before Zavin’s voice rumbles softly above me. “We’re back.”
His quarters stretch out before us exactly as I’d first found them.
The broken furniture is gone. Fresh cushions sit neatly across the sofa, every shard of glass swept away, every trace of violence erased as though Father’s enforcers had never forced their way inside.
Only the faint scent of industrial cleaner lingers.
I frown up at Zavin. “How...?”
The corner of his mouth lifts just enough that I know he already understands the question. “I called it in.”
I search his face, trying to work out when he’d possibly found the time. We’d barely left the maintenance bay before he’d carried me here. “You called someone to clean your quarters?”
“I sent a message before we went to stop Kazren.” His thumb strokes across my side. “I wasn’t bringing you back to blood and broken furniture.”
His amber eyes hold mine. “There wasn’t another ending to tonight. Not one where I walked back into these rooms without you. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Miro. If protecting you means fighting every day for the rest of my life… Then I’ll do it. Willingly.”
I lift my hand to his cheek, my fingertips sliding over the warm scales of his jaw. They come away streaked with blood. His or Kazren’s, I honestly couldn’t say anymore. He leans into my touch with a quiet sound that melts something deep inside me.
Then I close the distance between us, pressing my lips to his because there aren’t words big enough for what he’s just given me. Safety. A future. Himself.
His mouth is warm, and softer than it has any right to be.
His lips part when mine do, a slow invitation rather than a demand.
His hand comes up to cradle the back of my head, claws threading carefully through my hair.
I taste salt and copper on his lips — blood and sweat and the long, punishing hours of this night — and underneath it, him.
His thumb traces the curve of my skull, back and forth, a rhythm that says I’m here, I’m not going anywhere, take what you need.
So I do. I kiss him until the shaking in my hands stills and the tightness in my chest loosens and the only thing I can feel is his mouth moving against mine like a promise he intends to keep.
When we finally part, he rests his forehead against mine for a long, quiet moment before a soft chuckle escapes him.
“As much as I’d like to keep doing that...” His gaze lingers over the blood drying across my skin before returning to my face. The corner of his mouth softens. “I think we should clean you up.”
Before I can answer, he slides one arm beneath my knees and the other around my back, lifting me effortlessly against his chest. I wrap an arm around his neck and let my head settle beneath his chin while he carries me through the apartment.
The bathroom door hisses open ahead of us, releasing a cloud of warm air scented faintly with citrus cleanser and steam.
He sets me carefully on the broad stone vanity, keeping one hand at my waist until he’s certain I’m steady enough to sit alone.
The female staring back from the mirror doesn’t look like me.
Dried blood streaks one side of my face and disappears into tangled locs.
My lower lip is swollen, the split crusted dark against my skin.
Bruises have already begun blooming beneath my collarbone and along my arms where Father’s enforcers held me down.
My shirt hangs in torn strips, stiff with blood, and the claw wound beneath it has bled through the fabric in an ugly rust-colored stain.
A tremor starts in my fingertips. I curl them into my palms, but it only spreads, travelling up my wrists, into my shoulders, down through my legs until every muscle shudders.
“I...” My voice catches. “Why can’t I stop shaking?”
Zavin takes both my hands in his, enclosing them so completely that my trembling fingers disappear between his larger ones. “You’re in shock. Your body’s finally realized it’s safe.”
I swallow hard, trying to force the shaking away. “I... I can’t stop.” The more I try to stop, the harder the shaking grows.
“Just think about this. Your hands in mine. My touch. We’re in the bathroom. The air is warm.”
The pads of his thumbs are smooth, and the pressure is impossibly gentle. I concentrate on that warmth, on the solid weight of him standing in front of me instead of the memories trying to drag me back into Father’s office.
“That’s it,” he murmurs. “Stay here with me.”
Another breath comes easier than the last. The shaking doesn’t vanish, but it loosens its grip. Only then does he reach for the ruined edge of my shirt. “Let’s get this off so I can see your wounds.”
He peels the torn fabric away from my shoulder a fraction at a time, making sure nothing catches against the wound beneath. As more of the injury comes into view, the warmth leaves his expression.
Heat blooms beneath the fine scales along his neck, and I recognize that dangerous stillness that settled over him when he walked into Father’s office.