10. Rhykor #4
"Cassia," her name scrapes out of me like gravel clawed from deep underground, a warning and a plea acting as a raw declaration tangled into a single word I'm too far gone to disguise.
"I know," she whispers. Her hands stay where they are, her stare burning into mine. And in the warm light of the med bay, with her hands palming the sacred network of old wounds of my people and her pulse hammering fast enough that I feel it through her gloves, her remaining walls turn to ash.
I move before the thought completes. My hand catches the back of her neck, gently, carefully, the claws curling away from her skin, and I pull her forward until her forehead rests against mine.
The contact is electric. Her breath catches, warm against my mouth, and my other hand finds her waist, fingers spanning the arch of her hip through the thin fabric of her jacket.
She's small against me—impossibly, maddeningly small—and the fragility of her frame against my hands makes the protective fury inside of me coil tighter and hotter, growing ever more desperate.
Fingers curl against the battle scars mapping my chest. Shallow breaths rattle in her throat. That rapid, erratic pulse transfers through her palms, matching the uncontrolled tempo of my own heart.
My mouth hovers above hers, near enough to feel the shape of her breath. So close, I can taste her breath.
I pull away.
The separation is violent with a full-body wrench that tears her hands from my chest, scalding air rushing in where her warmth was.
I'm on my feet before the pallet stops rocking, my back to her, my hands radiating enough heat to warp the metal shelving six feet away.
The marks on my chest burn where her palms were—phantom pressure and phantom warmth, leaving a ghost of her touch that sears deeper than the original carvings.
"Rhykor—"
"I can't." Two words of ground glass and molten iron. “If I stay in this room, it goes past a forehead. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
Fast, unsteady breaths punctuate the air between us, marking the exact moment her composure strips bare. I can smell the spike of adrenaline cutting through her scent, sharpening it like ozone and making my claws extend involuntarily.
"I understand," she whispers.
I walk out of the med bay looking straight ahead.
The corridor blurs past—night-shift crew cramming themselves as close to the walls at the sight of my face—and then the elevated walkway opens up around me, cold air hitting my bare chest, doing absolutely nothing to cool the inferno raging within my skin.
Gripping the walkway railing, I let the heat pour out of me, with my palms scorching the metal and the structural supports groaning, sending steam rising from the contact points into the night air.
The ceremonial markings pulse with residual warmth, and I can still feel her hands caressing them, her fingers tracing the history of my violence with a tenderness that unmakes me more thoroughly than any enemy ever has.
She is my fated mate. The ancient tether echoes through my skull with Mother Serak's papery absolute truth, and my resistance finally collapses, yielding to the gravity of them.
This woman is mine, for the bond has spoken, and my very blood and body have fallen into alignment with that truth.
Between the ceremonies etched into my skin and the oaths sworn over spilled blood, my entire existence is defined by the territories I have claimed and defended, bleeding for them.
All of it pales beside the gravitational certainty of what I feel when Cassia Ward places her hands beneath my chest and whispers I know.
The railing melts against my grip, and I let it.
And I am out here in the cold because staying means losing what little control I have left, and some part of me, beneath the fury and the instinctual resonance screaming through my blood, knows that crossing that line before she’s ready will make me the monster she once feared.
Staring out across the burning skyline of District Seventeen, I grip the railing until my knuckles crack.
My very blood hums with the need to go back in there, a resonance that grows louder with every heartbeat I spend out here.
My entire body, down to the very nerves and the scars on my chest where her hands touched, pulls toward that door like gravity.
And I am standing here, fighting it, because fighting is the only language I've ever been fluent in, even when the enemy is my own blood.
The railing drips molten metal onto the walkway grating, and I stand there until the heat fades and my hands stop glowing, letting the compound settle into the deep quiet of a district holding its breath.
Then I go back inside and walk past her door—ignoring it entirely—before spending the remaining hours of the night on the observation deck with my wings spread against the cold, watching the dark for anything that might threaten the woman sleeping thirty feet below me.
I promised myself I'd stop pacing, but some promises are easier to make than keep.