“You believe what is between us is nothing more than a hormonal drive to mate? That I am manipulating you?”
Lily opened her mouth, searching for words, but before anything formed, Khar rose to his full height and loomed over her, continuing with a deliberate, measured intensity.
“Yes. That is true, in a way. I want you with every part of my being. If we ever have offspring, all the better, but I will never force you. I would do anything, absolutely anything, to keep you with me. I would kill for you, and I would probably enjoy it. Nothing else matters and nothing is sacred if it threatens losing you. As for manipulation…”
Khar tipped his head back and let out a bitter laugh.
“Yes. A firm yes. Of course I am manipulating you. Just as you are. Just as you do with everyone around you.”
“What?” Lily snapped, yanking her wrist free. “Me? Manipulating people around me?”
“Of course. Every interaction between two sapients becomes a game when something is at stake. And while we are on the subject, let me tell you something else you are not going to like. That ethereal love you keep talking about does not exist.”
His words made Lily retreat, slow and almost unconscious, as if physical distance could soften the blow.
“What are you talking about?”
“I am talking about how much change it would take for you to stop wanting me. What if I were smaller than you? Weaker? Sickly? What if my mind were damaged? Face it, Lily. Your body is part of desire. We are not two disembodied minds floating in sterile tanks, conversing through a console. Yes, the Divani imprinting process shapes me to you. And? Does that make me unworthy of your feelings because it was not chance or destiny that sculpted us into perfect mates before we ever even met? Between the two of us, I am not the one denying what is true, and the only thing in this cursed Cradle-born universe that is real.”
His voice had begun like cold logic, but now every syllable trembled on the edge of losing control.
And Lily could not bear it.
Not now.
Not with everything else fighting for space inside her chest.
She slapped the panel behind her to open the door and backed out of the bedroom.
“Khar… I… I can’t do this.”
She did not care that the words were messy, that they made little sense. Fucking hell, they didn’t make perfect sense to her either. It was just a gnawing feeling, poisoning her joy, her love, tainting it at the root. Was it even real, or just a biological compulsion fooling Khar—no, fooling both of them? She was exhausted from being toyed with. First Horos, now this. Nothing made sense anymore.
She did not care that it looked like running.
She was running.
She fled to the only being who had ever managed to calm her, no matter the circumstance.
Her feet carried her to Helios.
She knew where the Divani brothers had hidden the Colossus body that had become Helios’s new vessel, but she had no ideawhether he was awake, functional, or capable of speaking yet. She remembered something about him needing to recharge, something about a transformation underway, but she had no clue what she would find.
Still, she was certain of one thing.
His presence alone would help quell the storm devouring her from the inside out.
As she searched through the compartments large enough to hide the enormous synthetic shell Helios now inhabited, she felt the strangest echo of her own past.
It reminded her of the first time she had stepped onto this ship after her abduction, terrified and unprepared, wandering unfamiliar corridors in search of a single stable point in a collapsing world.
It felt like her life had come full circle, returning her again and again to the edges of herself, forcing her to confront something new every time.
She did not know what awaited her next.
But she did know one thing with absolute clarity.
The Lily walking these corridors now was no longer the same girl who had walked them then.
