Chapter 29
Sometimes Pain Is the First Herald of Healing
Lily
“Cami, I think about you so much. How are you? What do you do with your days? Are you happy without me… I hope you are. I hope it doesn’t hurt anymore that I vanished.
And if you could see me now, what would you say about your sister who always pined after bad boys but never had the nerve to actually get tangled up with one? Cami, I think you’d be proud of me.”
Lily, thinking of her sister, Camille
Lily could not have said exactly what happened during the next hours.
When Khar survived, the relief hit her so hard her legs simply gave out, and it was the Colossus—no, Helios—who kept her upright.
She remembered that clearly. She remembered Khar running to her, gathering her into his arms, refusing to let go.
The universe felt balanced again, as if belonging in Khar’s embrace was the most natural state of existence.
After that, perhaps she was taken to the medical station. She is not certain. All she can recall is the sensation of burying her face against Khar’s chest and sobbing freely, until there was nothing left inside her to spill.
Somehow she ended up back on Helios, yet the familiar voice never greeted her again.
Only mechanical status reports echoed through the cabin, a cold inventory of systems functioning without the mind that once guided them.
It was a testament to the absence of the intelligence she had known. That was the moment Lily truly woke.
“Where is Helios?”
“Do not worry. Ikar is bringing him aboard. We need to erase the evidence before the authorities arrive.”
Lily did not understand, but she had no strength left to argue. She trusted Khar and his brothers. Khar would not lie to her.
Khar guided her into the cleansing alcove and triggered a program that whisked away every trace of dirt from their bodies in a heartbeat, followed by a perfectly heated mist that loosened every muscle in Lily’s frame. It felt like sinking into a steam bath, warm and safe and quiet.
She was already drifting at the edge of sleep when Khar carried her to their bed. She had so many questions, but exhaustion folded over her mind like an impenetrable fog. She could not be sure she even managed to say the words she intended, or if she only dreamed them.
“Thank you for coming for me, Khar.”
“No. Thank you, you singular, extraordinary little female,” he murmured. “You endured where others would have broken. I love you, Lily. You saved us.”
His answer washed through her like divine absolution, lifting the pain and confusion of the present and surrendering her thoughts to healing sleep. For the first time in weeks, Lily’s dreams were deep and untroubled.
When she woke, she had no idea where she was. Her thoughts moved as if wading through a swamp, thick and slow, but one thing reached her long before anything else: Khar. The heavy arms wrapped around her even in sleep were the safest place in the universe.
Once she realized she was on her own ship again, her body loosened with relief, but some needs could not wait.
She slipped carefully from the bed, doing everything she could not to wake him, and made her way to the bathroom.
When she returned, a glass of water was already waiting on the nightstand, courtesy of Khar.
The taste told her it was not just water but a mineral-rich electrolyte blend, the one she usually drank when her body had been pushed past its limits.
How thoughtful of Khar to remember even this. Lily smiled to herself at the gesture, so perfectly in line with the Divani instinct for foresight.
She nestled back against his enormous frame, and Khar immediately drew her in. His sleep-rough voice wrapped around her senses like a sedative balm.
“Sleep, Lily. We have time for everything.”
So she did. And this time, she even dared to dream.
When she woke again, Khar was not beside her, but he appeared in the doorway the moment she shifted.
Fresh from a shower, gleaming with health.
Lily, who was certain she looked far less presentable, briefly considered throwing a pillow at him.
Instead, she tossed the blanket aside. His smile widened and he moved with feline ease, dropping onto the bed next to her.
For a long moment they simply looked at each other, committing every detail of the other’s face to memory. Lily felt impossibly happy, finally whole, finally with him. But as the seconds stretched, another awareness crept in. Horos. What he had done.
Then tears rose, hot and sudden.
Khar reacted instantly and pulled her into his arms.
“Lily. You’re safe. It’s over. Let it out. Let it hurt. But you’re here, and you are not alone.”
Lily had no idea how to tell Khar what had happened.
He had sacrificed everything for her, if what Horos said was even true, yet she was no longer the same girl she had been when she was taken.
What if all of Khar’s sacrifices had been for nothing, and there was nothing she could do to make it right?
What if this changed everything between them?
And why had Khar done it in the first place?
The weight of it pressed on her like a stone.
So Lily cried and cried. When she finally calmed again (for what felt like the hundredth time in the past hours), she looked up at Khar with red eyes and a swollen face.
He cupped her cheek and handed her a soft cloth.
Lily blew her nose loudly and felt like the least attractive woman in existence.
After a long, contemplative silence, Khar finally spoke.
“Oh, Lily. You always give me the most impossible dilemmas. I cannot decide whether I should comfort you first and then take you to bed, or take you to bed so thoroughly that you forget everything, and then comfort you afterward just to be safe.”
Lily could not form a single word, too stunned to react, but it seemed Khar had not been waiting for an answer.
“No,” he decided, voice firm. “First, you get better.”
He pressed his forehead to hers, skin to skin, with just a hint of rough horn brushing her. His luminescent eyes filled her vision, but his voice was soft and almost reverent.
“Come. Eat something with me,” he asked.
At that exact moment her stomach growled in betrayal, but she knew she could not eat until she said what weighed on her heart.
“Khar… close your eyes. I am going blind.”
Khar let out a low chuckle and closed his eyes, but he did not move away. Lily drew a deep breath and forced herself to begin. It was easier this way, without his gaze on her, though his nearness still wrapped around her like a protective shield.
“I have to tell you something.”
Khar did not speak. He only made a quiet sound, a gentle hum that told her he was listening.
“When Horos stepped onto Vitro… I already sensed something was wrong. He said we were going to Vegrun, but when I tried to initiate a call to Vegrun, he… he made a sound. I have never heard anything like it. It felt like he tore me apart with nothing but soundwaves. I… could not defend myself. I fell, and it was like having a seizure. I just shook. And Horos… he cuffed me and locked me inside Suite B.”
She felt Khar go rigid at Horos’s name, but he didn’t interrupt.
She was grateful, because she didn’t think she had the strength to begin again if she stopped now.
“He came in more than once. Twice he used that sound again. He didn’t really touch me. Not in the way that would be unforgivable. But what he did was worse.”
Her voice broke. She clenched her hands in the blanket.
“Khar, he said the Corvus cry could change me. Make me like him. So he could mate with me. And if I resisted, my cognitive functions would degrade. But I couldn’t resist. I couldn’t. And…”
The sound that cut her off was fabric tearing.
Khar’s claws ripped through the sheet in a single, violent motion. His breathing turned harsh, as if it took all his will not to leap up and start breaking the universe with his bare hands.
He opened his eyes a fraction. Then, when he saw Lily wasn’t recoiling, he looked at her fully.
Lily felt as if she were standing in divine light. Everything ugly and guilty inside her was exposed, and yet, in that exposure, she could breathe. She had said it. Now the weight of the decision was no longer hers alone.
“Lily, there is nothing Horos could change in you that has anything to do with who you are. Nothing that matters,” Khar began, but the words sparked a flare of anger in her.
“That’s easy for you to say!”
Khar did not flinch at her outburst. His voice did not waver, his gaze did not shift as he continued.
“Yes. I was not there with you, and I will regret that until my last breath. You endured something monstrous and you faced it alone. And even so, I am right. No one survives life without scars. But only you can decide what those scars mean.”
Lily froze under the weight of his words, then pushed away from him. It was easier to speak with some distance between them.
“Maybe that is true. But it is not what I feel right now. Do you not understand that I may not be compatible with you anymore? And that Horos forced this on me? It is not enough that he kidnapped me, he had to shape me into something else, something that will always remind me of what he did?”
The look Khar gave her was as if she had struck him.
“I know exactly what the Corvus cry does. I am not saying what you suffered is forgivable. If I could, I would bleed that nobody out piece by piece for daring to harm you. But how can you believe we would not be compatible? There is nothing in this entire raging universe for me except you!”
Khar’s cool composure shattered as he worked himself up, yet somehow his rising fury steadied her. It was as if he had taken the sharpest edge of her pain into himself, clearing her mind enough to think again.
“Khar, I need the truth. I will need a deep scan. Helios… the ship will have my previous data. I will see exactly what happened.”
Khar rose at once and started toward the door. His broad back was still magnificent, but Lily saw the stiffness in his posture, the subtle tremor in his movement, the way he hid the sadness bleeding through. At the doorway he turned back to her.
“I will wait outside. Take the time you need.”
Not long ago it would have felt strange that Khar saw her bare. Now, as he stepped out and the hatch sealed behind him, his absence left a hollow space in the room.
They walked toward the medical station in silence, but at some point Khar’s warm hand found hers and held it, steadying her. Lily lay down beneath the arch of the scanners, and Khar took his place by the control console.
“Shall we begin?”
Lily nodded.
“I am ready.”
Not long after the scan began, she passed out, the same way she had the first time.
Last time, she had met Helios, and her life had changed completely. She had become stronger, more independent, more whole, because of herself, yes, but also because of Helios and Khar.
Without them, the shifts that reached into her core would never have happened.
So what would this next chapter of her fate demand?
As her consciousness went dark, Lily’s final thought was a spark of hope.
Please, let me keep them.
The two irreplaceable presences without whom her life was unimaginable.