The chamber glowed around them, teal light swirling through the water as their bodies moved together: urgent, fluid, and impossibly intimate.
He shifted her in his arms, angling her hips, lifting her just enough…
Pleasure detonated.
She cried out, head tilting back, spine arching as she shattered against him. The orgasm hit hard, rushing through her like a shockwave, tightening around him so fiercely he hissed her name.
He followed her over the edge moments later, thrusting deep, burying himself fully as the bond ignited between them in a flash of heat and light. She felt him come undone inside her: felt the force of it, the surrender, the raw devotion threaded into every pulse.
They clung to each other as the intensity ebbed, breath mingling, bodies trembling in the glowing pool.
She rested her forehead against his, still shaking, still full of him, still wrapped in his arms.
Somewhere in the bond, a quiet truth settled with absolute clarity.
Whatever she had been before… it ended here.
With him—claimed, bound, irrevocably joined—she became something new.
Something more.
CHAPTER 32
Time passed differently after the attunement.
She knew—because Raeska had explained it gently—that two full months had passed in Earth terms. Here, in Kyrax’s bastion, it had moved in a slow, liquid way, as though the planet itself wanted her to settle before she noticed the days collecting in her hands. The mornings were cool and soft with mist. The afternoons were humid and lush, humming with distant life. Nights carried a fragrance she couldn’t name—something green, sweet, and almost nostalgic despite belonging to another world entirely.
In that span of days, she changed more than she had in years.
The Saelori language came naturally to her now. After the bond, syntax and cadence had slipped into her mind like a memory she’d always possessed. Customs followed. Rituals. The meaning behind their gestures. Even the unspoken rules that flowed beneath their society—respect, reciprocity, interdependence layered beneath a veneer of serenity.
And she learned about Kyrax.
His place among the Vykan.
His dominion over the Inner Veil.
His reputation for ruthlessness and precision—a legend both feared and admired throughout the galaxies.
More surprising were the politics: even among his own kind, he was something of an outsider. An unpredictable force, the one who diverged from ancient patterns, the one who pushed boundaries they balanced carefully upon. And now, after the attack on his bastion, the others kept their distance. They had accepted the bond, but wariness clung to them. No one had tested Kyrax’s temper since Isshyr’s attempted trespass.
Kyrax, for his part, guarded his territory—and her—more fiercely than ever.
Yet privately, with her, he was… astonishingly accommodating.
That was how she found herself aboard his sleek transport vessel, bound for Earth. He’d given her the choice without hesitation.
Gather what you wish. Bring what you want. Anything you need—on Earth, across the galaxy—I will acquire for you.
She still didn’t know what to do with the gentleness hidden underneath all that lethal power.
They traveled in silence as the ship cut through layers of space, then slowed as Earth drew near—a small blue sphere turning slowly beneath the shroud of night. A second, smaller craft detached from the main vessel: a stealth skimmer shaped like a dark crescent, nearly invisible to human eyes.
Only she, Kyrax, and a silent Saelori pilot boarded. The pilot’s presence blurred into the background, trained to stillness.
The descent was smooth. The ship dissolved into the night sky over California, slipping through cloud cover like a shadow. Somewhere in the darkness below lay the world she had lived in, the life she once knew.
Kyrax stood beside her, fully armored, fully masked, his presence a steady pulse of strength she could feel through thebond. His mask kept his venom contained, but she imagined she caught it anyway—the faintest trace beneath the metal, a subtle warmth that touched only her. The bond recognized him, welcomed him.
