Page 48 of Silver Slayer

"Who isthey, exactly?" Erin asked, laughing.

Around me, the conversation droned on about Valosian aesthetics with the enthusiasm of people deprived of normal human interaction for too long. My hand had found its way to my sternum without conscious thought, pressing flat against the two shirts I'd layered on that morning so the shawra's glow stayed hidden from curious eyes. I was grateful for the reprieve. Grateful to be incidental again, just another body sorting alien tech while the conversation flowed around me.

Beneath my own thoughts, I found him. Not his voice or his memories, just that quiet, steady thread that had become strangely familiar over the past two days. It wasn’t intrusive; it simply existed, like the distant warmth of sunlight filtering through closed curtains. The echo of him that now lived inside me.

At first, I’d hated the violation of it, the way it had arrived without permission, rewired something in me I hadn't agreed tochange. But somewhere along the way, without my noticing, the hatred had gone quiet.

It wasn't the psychic leash I'd braced for. It was subtler than that, more like registering a room's temperature the moment you walk in, not through touch, not through any deliberate awareness, just a knowing that settles into you. Vennox was somewhere below deck, working alongside the other males, and I could feel him down there the same way. Without trying. Without wanting to. Just there. The bond should have felt like the exact opposite of that—a tether, an anchor, a cage disguised as destiny. It didn’t feel like a cage. It felt like someone standing beside me in the dark.

I wished we had met somewhere else. A coffee shop in Tucson, a trailhead in the Chiricahuas, anywhere that wasn't a nightmare world where every sunrise carried the threat of something trying to eat us. Somewhere I could have chosen him without the universe choosing for me first. But we hadn't met on Earth, and the thread connecting us carried a weight I couldn't explain and couldn't put down.

I was growing attached to him. There was no point pretending otherwise. He looked at me like I was worth protecting, and the thought of leaving him behind no longer felt like someone else's tragedy. It had begun to feel like mine.

My eyes burned and my vision blurred. I blinked to clear it and tried to redirect my thoughts to my work.

I was going to break his heart… and mine.

Because I still planned to return to Earth. Nothing had changed about that. And Vennox would stay on Valose, where he belonged, with his people and his domed city and the Hurenjungle he’d described with such quiet reverence. He would stay, and I would go, and the bond between us would fade with time and distance until it was nothing but a scar on my chest and a memory neither of us could quite forget.

My vision blurred again, and I blinked hard to clear it.

Brooke was recounting some exaggerated tale about Truxxet’s combat prowess, her hands sketching wild gestures through the air, and the others were laughing, the sound bright and normal and achingly human when the women went quiet.

Suddenly, I was being swung into strong arms, cradled against the hard planes of a chest I knew all too well, and carried away from the women and off the command deck.

I wrapped my arms around Vennox’s neck and hung on tight, burying my face in the hollow of his throat and breathing in his unique, spicy musk. Burning him into my memory to draw on later once we separated, living worlds away from each other.

Chapter Seventeen

VENNOX

The reactor housing weighed almost as much as I did, and the warped plating along its eastern flank had fused to the deck in three places where the crash had driven the assembly sideways into the bulkhead. I braced my shoulder against the metalloid and drove my weight forward, scales scraping against the alloy as the housing groaned and shifted half a hand. Beside me, Truxxet matched my effort, his pointed ears flat against his skull with the strain, his silver scales flushed deep blue with exertion.

“Again,” Vala called from the raised platform where he oversaw the work with a calm that bordered on eerie. His reflective skin gleamed in the dimness, catching fractured light from a dozen angles. “The housing needs another four degrees before the coupling collar will seat.”

I planted my boots against the deck plating and shoved. Metalloid shrieked against metalloid as the housing lurched forward nearly a handspan.

"Hold it there!" Vala called.

Truxxet and I locked our arms against the massive assembly, straining to keep it from shifting back.

Tyrk crouched beside the opening, peering along the mounting rails while Ruze checked the alignment from the opposite side. Mehr darted between them with a measuring rod and a handful of tools, relaying Vala's instructions as the Nomadican studied the gap with narrowed eyes.

I didn’t understand the tech. Didn’t need to. My hands knew the weight of the housing, knew the burn of metalloid against my palms, and that was enough to keep them occupied. My head was another problem entirely.

She lived at the edges of all of it. In the heat of the compartment, under Vala’s clipped instructions, with Truxxet’s labored breathing and the shriek of a metalloid finding its place… she was there. The wisp of her essence carried like a frequency I couldn’t tune out, the familiar current of her turmoil, and beneath it, a longing she would never admit to.

I tightened my grip on the housing and held on despite the texture of her essence changing.

The echo of her conflict did not vanish. It simply sank beneath a heavier darkness, replaced by a thick current of sadness I was unprepared for. It carried weight and settled into the spaces between my ribs the way cold settles into stone, and I had to remind myself to breathe.

Her emotions darkened, and the hollow ache of it filled my chest like a physical thing. The walls she'd built inside herself had reached their limit, and they were collapsing now, somewhere above me on the command deck, while I stood here holding a piece of metalloid I no longer cared about.

Her despair reached a pitch that made my ancillary heart stutter in my chest, and I felt Quin coming apart.

“My spirit mate needs me,” I stated before dropping the housing.

The metalloid hit the deck with a sound that shook the entire compartment, a massive, resonant clang that brought every head turning in my direction. I was moving before the echo had faded, adrenalyne surging through my veins.