“Nothing that can’t wait.” She dropped a kiss to his shoulder—soft, almost absent, like she’d been doing it for years instead of days. “Junie has it handled. Theo and the pack are running patrols. Aero is monitoring the ley lines for any sign of the Hollow King’s fragment. Everyone has it handled, Hux. Everyone except you.”
He wanted to argue. The instinct was bone-deep—to take control, to manage, to be useful. But his body refused to cooperate, and the lion in his soul was purring at Lunaria’s proximity, and Hux found himself doing something he’d never done: letting go.
The next day was better.
He could sit up without his vision blurring. Could walk to the bathroom without needing the wall for support. Could eat actual food instead of the broth Lunaria had been spooning into him while he drifted in and out of consciousness.
The cottage was small—nothing like the sprawling Victorian he’d grown up in—but it felt more alive than any room in the Holt house. Celestial charts covered the walls. Dried flowers hung from the rafters in cascading bunches. Star-blooming plants lined every windowsill, their petals shifting colors as the light changed.
And everywhere, signs of Lunaria. Her boots by the door. Her overalls draped over a chair. A half-decoded journal on the kitchen table, covered in her cramped handwriting.
She’d been sleeping on the couch. He’d tried to protest—it was her bed, her cottage, her space—but she’d fixed him with that fierce dark stare and told him she’d carried him here from the gardens and she’d be damned if she was moving him now.
Stubborn,his lion observed approvingly. Fierce. Ours.
Hux didn’t have the energy to argue with either of them.
“The void left marks,” he said that afternoon, studying the dark lines on his chest in the bathroom mirror. They’d faded significantly since he first woke, but they were still visible—thin veins of shadow spreading from the impact point over his heart.
“They’re healing.” Lunaria appeared behind him, her reflection sliding into frame. Without hesitation, she wrapped her arms around his waist from behind, pressing her cheek against his shoulder blade. Her fingers traced the shadow-veins with deliberate gentleness. “Aero says you’re lucky. A direct void-strike usually kills. The fact that you’re standing here making faces at yourself is basically a miracle.”
“I don’t feel lucky.”
“What do you feel?”
Her hands were warm on his skin, her body pressed close behind him. Even weak and recovering, he responded—heat pooling low, his muscles tensing with awareness.
“Different,” he finally managed, fighting to focus on her question instead of the way her fingers were skimming his ribs. “The... the void. The one I’ve had my whole life.” He pressed his palm flat against his chest, over the fading marks. “It’s still there. But it has edges now. Before, it was just... endless. This vast nothing that went on forever. Now I can feel where it stops.”
“The starlight burned some of the curse away.” Her voice was quiet, her lips brushing his shoulder as she spoke. “When I channeled into you—when I was fighting the void—I could feel something giving. Not breaking entirely, but... cracking. Like ice in spring.”
“Is that possible?”
“I don’t know.” She met his eyes in the mirror, her arms tightening around him. “The journals talk about chosen bonds being resistant to the Hollow King. About wanting someonebadly enough that the curse can’t eat it. But they don’t explain how.”
He turned in her arms, her back pressing against the bathroom counter as he faced her properly. Her feet were bare, her toenails painted a chipped purple that made his chest twist.
“I want you.” The words came out rougher than he intended. “And the curse—whatever Cornelius fed to that thing—it hasn’t stopped me from wanting you.”
“Wanting and having are different things.” But her hands had slid up his bare chest, her fingers curling over his shoulders.
“Are they?”
She didn’t answer. But she also didn’t step back when he leaned down, didn’t flinch when his hands settled on her hips, didn’t do anything except tilt her face up to meet him.
“I should check on the gardens.” She breathed the words against his lips, not pulling away. “The orrery needs?—”
He kissed her.
Not soft. Not gentle. A claiming kiss—all heat and possession and the desperate relief of being alive to do this at all. She melted into him, her fingers fisting in his hair, her body arching against his in a way that made his vision blur for entirely different reasons.
When they finally broke apart, her lips were swollen, and her eyes were dark.
“The orrery can wait,” she decided, and pulled him back down.
TWENTY-FIVE
HUX
