Page 49 of Silver Slayer

“Fucking Helios!” Truxxet cursed as he took the full weight of the housing.

“Vennox!” Tyrk’s voice followed me. “Get your ass back here.”

I took the ladder to the deck above two rungs at a time, my boots striking the metalloid with a rhythm that matched the hammering of my hearts.

I could already smell her tears before I burst through the doorway onto the command deck. Five heads whipped toward me in unison from where the females sat gathered around the crates of salvaged components, but the work had stilled in their hands.

Quin sat among them, a component held loosely in one hand. Her shoulders trembled slightly, tears tracking silently down her cheeks, making no attempt to explain them to anyone.

No one spoke. The command deck held its breath as I crossed the deck in three strides. When I reached Quin, I dropped to one knee before her, the impact driving a dull thud through the deck plating, echoing in the silence.

I reached for her with both hands, sliding one arm beneath her knees and the other around her shoulders, and lifted her from the deck the way you lift something you fear losing.

Her body melted into my arms, a perfect, pliant weight that settled against my chest as if she’d been made to fit there. Before I’d even found my footing, her arms were locked around my neck, fingers digging into my scales as if I were the only solid thing in a world coming undone.

She buried her face in the hollow of my throat, her breath hitching in ragged, wet bursts that ghosted across my flesh. I could feel the hot spill of her tears against me, each one a small scalding brand, and I held her tighter. She sobbed, silent and relentless, until the very beat of my hearts seemed to answer the rhythm of her grief.

A low, steady resonance rose from someplace deep within me. The thrumming did what words could not. Her next breath came slower, the one after that slower still, the desperate clutch of her fingers at my neck loosening by degrees until her grip softened into what felt less like drowning and more like holding on.

I rose with Quin in my arms. She weighed almost nothing, a fact that stirred the protective instinct that lived at the core of my being. Her body settled against my chest with the trust of a spirit mate who had found shelter. Uri had broken something inside me that I had not yet found a name for, and I was humbled anew by how Quin reached for me in her time of distress.

I carried her from the command deck. My footsteps echoed in the empty corridor, measured and deliberate, each stride carrying us away from the eyes of others.

The first crew quarters I found stood empty, the interior dark and still. I carried Quin across the threshold, the hatch sealing behind us. I crossed to the bunk, lowered myself onto its edge, and settled Quin in my lap. The weight adjusted until she was cradled securely against my chest. Her knees tucked against myside, her face still pressed into the hollow of my throat, her arms still wrapped securely around my neck.

We sat in the quiet. The only sound was the distant, muted groan of the ship settling around us and the softer sound of Quin’s breathing, steady and measured, the rhythm of someone who had weathered a storm and was taking stock of the damage.

“How long?” Her voice was quiet. Hoarse from crying, but steady. “If we never... if we don’t mate again. How long until it fades?”

My spirit twisted in rebellion. The very thought of denying the bond opened a raw and ragged wound in my chest.

“I do not know for certain,” I said. The truth, offered without embellishment. “I was only a youngling when our females succumbed to the germ meant for the Gretolics. No bonded pair ever chose to deny the call of their spirit to its complement. There is no precedent for it.”

“Will it always hurt this much? The... hollow feeling. Will that get better, or is this just how it’s going to be?”

"Before my abduction, there was a warrior in Clan Huren named Draggar." The name felt solid in my mouth, an anchor to a world I had nearly forgotten. "Nakkia, his first spirit mate, was killed by a floratrap. A carnivorous plant not so dissimilar to what is on this world.”

Quin's breath caught. A wisp of a sympathetic ache, the horror of imagining what I described.

“Once his spirit mate entered the Realm of the Spirits, Draggar became a shadow of the warrior I had admired. He spoke less. He fought with a recklessness that bordered on self-destruction.But he endured, and he learned to live with the loss just like all the other males who have lost their mates.”

“This whole spirit mate thing sounds like a terrible ordeal.” Quin lifted her head from my shoulder and met my eyes. “Mourning the loss of a spouse is one thing, but what you describe sounds horrific.”

"Draggar endures because he knows the bond does not end at death. When his suns-rises in this world are done, he will find be reunited with her in the next realm. Spirit mates are not separated by death. They are only separated by time."

"You truly believe there's another realm waiting for you?" she asked. "That spirit mates find each other again?"

“I do,” I said, clinging to a thread of optimism. “After I returned to Valose after Gorka, I saw something I had not believed possible. Draggar's shawra glowed again. Not the stain of a dead shawra. A living glow. The Spirits had blessed him with a second spirit mate. A human female named Marie. When you return to your world, there might still be a second chance for happiness. For both of us.”

Quin flinched as though I had struck her, her eyes widening. A wave, hot and sharp, shot through me. Jealousy, pure and visceral.

Quin slid from my lap and began to pace. Three steps toward the bulkhead, turn, three steps back. Her boots struck the deck plating with a rhythm that betrayed her agitation. “This would all be so much easier if I didn’t like you so much.” The words burst from her as though she had been holding them behind her teeth. “If you were an asshole, or controlling, or—or anythingother than what you are. Then I could walk away, and it would hurt less.”

An unguarded surge of joy bloomed in my chest at the raw honesty of her words. Her resistance was not born of indifference but of care too deep to safely carry. Quin stiffened mid-stride.

“Stop that.” She wheeled to face me, pointing a finger at my shawra. “Stop projecting your… your warm and fuzzies into me. I’m trying to be angry, and you’re making it impossible.”

I laughed. The sound surprised us both, a genuine, unrestrained laugh that fractured the tension between us like ice under a spring thaw. Quin’s mouth twitched. The corner of her lip curved upward despite her obvious efforts to prevent it, and for a moment, the hollow in her chest that I had carried since the engine compartment felt less like a wound and more like a space waiting to be filled.