Page 52 of Silver Slayer

When the last wave finally receded, I had nothing left. My arms dropped. My legs stopped shaking only because they stopped doing anything at all. Vennox raised his head slowly, and I felt his gaze on me before I could find the will to meet it, that silver stare carrying an openness so complete I had to look away first.

He moved up beside me without a word, the bunk groaning under the shift of his weight, and I didn’t resist when his arm came around me, and I turned into his side.

His thrumming had gentled to that low, soothing frequency that made my eyelids grow heavy, and his hand traced slow, idle patterns along my spine, fingers moving with a tenderness that made my throat tight.

My body was liquid, every muscle loose and spent, and the warmth of him against me was too perfect. I pressed closer, breathing him in, the spice and musk and the clean scent that lingered beneath both, and let my eyes fall closed.

Chapter Nineteen

VENNOX

She slept against my chest like something carved to fit there, her breath warm and even against the hollow of my throat, her dark hair spilling across my scales in waves that caught the soft blue light of our shawras. I had not dared move. The weight of her was perfect, and I would sooner have surrendered a limb than disturb her.

The ship groaned around us. A deeper sound than the settling creaks that had become familiar over the past suns-rises, with purpose behind it: systems cycling, reactors warming, the vibration of a vessel waking from its long silence.

I still did not move.

Quin stirred. A small sound escaped her, half-sigh, half-moan, her fingers curling against my chest where the shawra pulsed its steady blue. Her eyes opened slowly, gray and soft with the vulnerability of someone surfacing from deep sleep. For one breath, she looked at me without walls. Her palm flattened against my sternum, fingers tracing the swirling design as though memorizing it by touch.

Then the Yulineon’s booming voice cut through the ship’s comms, stealing the comfort of our sanctuary.

“Everyone to the command deck. Repairs are complete. We depart in fifteen mims.”

Quin went still. Her hand remained on my chest, but I saw the shift behind her eyes as the walls rose, not all at once, but piece by piece, the careful architecture of restraint reassembling itself. I felt the echo of it before I saw it: the conflict, bright and sharp, the longing for home, and beneath that, an emotion she was trying to suppress.

“We should go,” she said, and her voice carried none of the warmth her body had given me through the dark hurs.

I released her. Not because I wanted to, but because holding on when she needed to stand would have been its own kind of cage. She slid from the bunk and gathered her clothes from the deck where they had been hastily discarded.

I could not bear to watch her dress, as if each layer she donned was armor rather than fabric. She did not look at me as I dressed in silence. My kiltus settled around my hips with a familiar weight, the thing that belonged to the male I had been before captivity had fractured the very essence of what animated me.

Quin stood by the hatch, one hand on the release. She looked back at me once, her gray eyes holding mine for a breath that stretched between us, laden with the pleasure we had shared, and the words we could not bear to utter aloud.

Then she palmed the release, and the corridor swallowed us both.

The ship had transformed. What had been a wounded, listless hulk now hummed with purpose. Light spilled from reopened conduits, the air carrying the sharp tang of active systems and the vibration of engines cycling below deck.

We moved through the passage that felt narrower somehow, charged with the anticipation of bodies in motion, and everywhere the sound of readiness: hatches sealing, restraints testing, voices calling coordinates and status reports with the clipped precision of people who had waited too long for this moment.

The command deck opened before us, and the change was immediate. Two seats occupied the control console at its center, and Vala filled one of them, his reflective skin catching fractured light from a dozen displays, his luminous eyes tracking data with the calm intensity of a predator assessing terrain.

Tyrk sat at his side, his massive frame bent over the controls with that same focused stillness, black horns catching the overhead light as he adjusted settings with fingers that moved with surprising delicacy.

The women occupied the passenger seats along the far wall of the command deck, already strapping in. Brooke and Lila sat side by side. Their postures mirrored each other: spines straight, hands flat on their thighs, the practiced stillness of survivors. Erin and Kira flanked them, Kira’s dark eyes wide with a mixture of excitement and terror.

Elizabeth sat alone, her gaze fixed on the floor. My ears cupped and perked to the low rumble of her mates’ voices drifting up from the engine compartment below.

“Where’s Mara?” Quin asked, moving to the few remaining seats.

“With Truxxet and Brunnex in the med bay,” Erin said.

I followed Quin, the distance between us measured in steps I counted against the rhythm of my ancillary heart and took the seat beside her. The restraint harness settled across my chest with a click that felt final, and before the sound had faded, my hand was moving toward hers.

Quin's fingers found mine before the engines rumbled to life. She laced them through mine with a grip that carried none of the reluctance echoing through me, and the contradiction of it, of her walls rising even as her hand held mine, lodged in my chest like a blade I could not remove.

Vala tapped a finger on the comm. “How are we doing, Mehr?”

“Rillium loaded,” Mehr's voice came through the comm. “Junction conduit nominal." A pause. "She's ready when you are."