A thought slipped out before she could catch it.
“Why don’t you take it off?”
The translator stone on the bedside table caught the words and delivered them back in perfect Vykan tones. She heard the provocation in them only after they had already left her mouth.
“That,” she added, her voice turning dry. “The mask. If your venom is not going to kill me, then why keep it on?”
He did not answer immediately.
For a moment there was only the quiet vibration of his chest against her, the faint rush of her own breath, the distant trickle of water from the garden beyond the archway.
Then he shook his head once, slow and final.
“Not yet.”
The refusal was not sharp. Not defensive. Simply absolute.
“Because you do not trust me?” she asked.
“Because I do not trust myself,” he said.
The honesty in it sent a strange shiver through her.
She wanted to mock him for that, to find some sharp line to throw back at him. All she managed was a weary exhale.
He held her without shifting, huge and solid and impossibly steady. No attempt to stroke her hair, no crude claim, no pressure beyond the fact that he was there and she was wrapped in his presence whether she liked it or not.
The warmth in her body rose again, not as violent as before but insistent, coiling through her blood like liquid heat. It settled low in her belly, in her chest, in every place that touched him.
He said he could hardly control himself.
The thought unfurled slowly, curling around her mind as her eyelids grew heavier. What did that mean, exactly? That he wanted her? That his instincts recognized her as something to claim, to keep, to reshape? That all of this would get worse before it became anything resembling safe?
What is going to happen to me?
Her anger remained, a hot coal in her chest. He had stolen her away from Earth. He had claimed her without permission, spoken about her fate as if she were an asset being allocated, not a person whose life had been ripped apart.
She should hate him.
She wanted to.
But her traitorous body recognized the way his presence steadied her, how the world stopped tilting when he was near, how the ache and panic and disorientation slipped back from a roar to a low, manageable hum.
It was not forgiveness.
It was not acceptance.
It was survival.
Her muscles loosened despite her will. Her head rested more fully against his chestplate. The rhythmic hum beneath the armor, the warmth, the sheer immovability of him drew her down toward sleep.
She held on to one last coil of resistance, promising herself she would fight harder tomorrow, that she would find a way to turn whatever this was to her advantage.
Then the heat and exhaustion claimed her, and she drifted under, falling asleep in the arms of a dangerous, deadly alien who had torn her from her life, claimed her without consent, and now held her as if she were the most natural thing in his world.
She knew she should hate him. She wanted to.
But in that moment, wrapped in his impossible steadiness, she could not.
