Page 27 of Accidentally Fearless

Because she had chosen to be there. Because when the safe option was destroyed, she had run toward the danger instead of away from it.

I fought my way to her side. Three hundred meters of active combat, blade and energy weapon exchanges, and warriors from both sides locked in the grinding close-quarters fighting that the Grand Melee always became. I fought on instinct—training taking over, my blade finding openings, my claws engaged, my scales absorbing impacts that would have ended most fighters.

I finally reached her. She was standing behind a rock formation, using it as cover while she directed the west flank's advance. There was a shallow cut on her left arm—the edge of a blade that had come too close. Blood was seeping between the fingers she had pressed against it. Human blood, red and vivid, on alien stone.

"Fall back," I ordered. My voice came out wrong—too rough, too raw.

"Not happening." She didn't look at me. Her eyes were on the battle. "West flank is closing. Krenix is overcommitted. I need you to push the center. Now."

"You are injured."

"It's a scratch. Push the center, Vrex. Now. Before he realizes we've recovered."

I looked at her. At the blood on her arm and the dust in her hair and the absolute, ferocious certainty in her eyes. She was not afraid. She was not hesitating. She was standing on a battlefield, bleeding, and her only concern was winning.

I pushed the center.

Our warriors pushed with me. And Rory, from behind her rock, directed the final phase of the engagement with nothing but hand signals and shouted commands—and the sheer gravitational force of her refusal to accept defeat.

Krenix's formation collapsed. His flanks, already compressed, buckled under the renewed center assault. His command flag wavered. His officers signaled retreat.

The withdrawal horn sounded—theirs, not ours.

The basin erupted with three hundred Velkorin voices, weapons raised—the sound of an army that had won its war. The sound carried across the valley and echoed off the mountains.

I did not hear any of it because I was already moving toward Rory.

She was leaning against the rock formation, her hand still pressed to her arm, her legs shaking. The adrenaline was leaving, and without it, the exhaustion of directing a battle on foot in the middle of combat was catching up.

I caught her as her knees buckled, lifting her—one arm under her knees, one supporting her back. She weighed almost nothing, this small, fierce, impossible creature who had just won my three-year war.

"We won," she said. Her voice was threadbare.

"You are injured."

"We won, though."

"You are injured."

"Vrex." She looked up at me. Despite the blood on her arm and the bone-deep exhaustion pulling at her features, she smiled. "We won."

I carried her off the field. Around us, soldiers parted—not in deference to rank, but something deeper. The story that was already forming in their minds was the human who ran into a Grand Melee unarmed, who directed a victory with her voice and her hands, who bled on their battlefield and did not leave.

The field medic assessed her quickly. A shallow laceration on her left arm. It was a clean cut—no arterial involvement. Contusion on her right temple. It was impact from debris, but there were no concussion indicators. Minor abrasions from the fall against the rock formation. All treatable. Nothing serious.

But the sight of her on the medical cot—pale under the medical bay's white light, still trying to issue tactical recommendations while the medic sealed her wound—tore at me. I could no longer suppress my emotion.

"Don't ever do that again," I said.

"We won, didn't we?"

"You could have died."

"But I didn't. And your people needed—"

"I needed—" The words tore free. "I needed you to be safe."

She went quiet. Her brown eyes searched my face, reading my scales the way she'd learned to read everything. She missed nothing. The markings along my arms were blazing in tavreni light—the color that only appears in the presence of a bonded mate.