Page 21 of Accidentally Fearless

She turned to face me, cross-legged, her knees almost touching mine. In the low amber light, she looked nothing like the woman who had materialized in my receiving bay in cat pajamas two weeks ago. She looked like she belonged here.

"I'd like you to say what your scales are already saying," she said. "Because they've been saying it for days and you keep trying to dim them and it's not working."

I looked down. The markings along my forearms were glowing—not the rose-gold of desire, not the warm amber of affection, but both, the colors layered in a way I had never produced for anyone. No one had ever made me feel both things simultaneously.

"Among my people," I said, "the markings do not lie. They are the one thing a Velkorin cannot train away or suppress. They are considered—" I paused, searching for the word in her language. "Sacred. What my scales are showing you is not something I can take back. It is not temporary."

She was quiet for a long moment. Not the silence of hesitation—I was learning her silences, categorizing them the same way I applied tactical intelligence. She was receiving information and giving it the weight it deserved. Her eyes moved across my forearms, tracking the glow and understanding what I was telling her. Not just I want you. Something bigger that, in my culture, held the gravity of a vow.

"You're saying this is serious," she said. Not a question.

"I am saying that what my body is telling you, I cannot unsay. I would not choose to, even if I could." The honesty cost me a layer of control, the last armor between the world and what I really wanted. "But you should know what it means before—"

"Before I decide if I want it too."

"Yes."

She looked at me, her expression open in a way I had not seen before. Not the tactical advisor. Not the competent crisis manager. The woman underneath all of that, the one who had stopped believing she could want things and was deciding, in this very moment, to start again.

"Good," she said. "Because I want it too."

She reached for me—her hand on my jaw, her thumb tracing the edge of scales that blazed at her touch. I leaned into her palm. A sound I had never made before, a low, resonant vibration, escaped from deep in my chest.

I pulled her into my lap. She came easily, her legs folding around my waist, her hands finding the ridges along my skull that sent cascades of light down my spine. She was so small against me. I could span her waist with my hands, could feel the delicate architecture of her ribs beneath my palms, and the contrast between her softness and my own armored body made something inside me crack open.

"I have seventeen days," I said against her throat, where her pulse was racing. "Seventeen days and then you leave and I—"

"Don't." She pulled back enough to look at me. Her eyes were bright and determined, the same look she wore on the command platform when everything was going sideways and she was about to fix it anyway. "Don't count the days right now. Just be here."

I kissed her. Not the desperate collision of the corridor. This was slow and deliberate, heat and pressure and the slide of her tongue against mine. I ran my tongue along her lower lip. She made a small sound, an involuntary catch in her breathing. It ignited every marking on my body.

My hands moved up her back, under the hem of her jacket. Her skin was impossibly soft beneath my palms. The texture was nothing like scales, nothing like anything in my experience—smooth and yielding and alive with tiny muscles that jumped under my touch. She arched into my hands. I felt her racing heartbeat against my chest.

"Your quarters," she said against my mouth. "Not the armory floor."

I stood with her still wrapped around me. She weighed nothing—human mass was a fraction of Velkorin. Carrying her through the corridors should have been nothing, but the way she pressed against me, her face tucked into the curve of my neck, her breath hot against my scales, turned the short walk into a different kind of test.

My quarters, finally.

The door sealed behind us. I set her down, and she stood in front of me, her hair fully escaped from its band, her lips swollen from my teeth. Her hands went to the closures of her jacket.

"Wait," I said.

She paused.

"I want—" My voice was rough. The glow from my markings was casting the room in rose-gold, making her skin luminous. "Let me."

She dropped her hands. I stepped forward and slowly unfastened her jacket. It fell away. Beneath it, a simple undershirt, dark fabric that clung to her curves, and I traced the line of her collarbone with one claw—retracted to a blunt edge, safe against her fragile skin—watching her shiver.

"You're so warm," she whispered.

"You're so soft," I replied. The reverence in my own voice would have embarrassed me if I had any capacity left for it.

I pulled the undershirt over her head. She stood before me bare from the waist up, and I took her in, memorizing her body. The scar on her left hand. The scatter of small marks on her shoulders—freckles, she told me later, from a sun I had never seen. The rise and fall of her breathing. The way she didn't cover herself, didn't flinch, just stood and let me look, trusting me with every inch of her.

I cupped one breast in my palm, brushing the peak until it tightened under my touch. A low sound escaped her. The glow along my arms flared brighter, painting her in shifting rose and gold. I bent my head and tasted her there—slow, deliberate licks that made her hold me closer.

"Your turn," she said, her voice unsteady, hands finding the seals on my uniform.