Dax glanced at him and then returned his attention to Veya.
“Can Rhen still pull you through it?”
“I don’t know.” She reached inward once more, but the narrow thread offered no answer. “I can sense that he exists. Nothing more.”
Relief moved through Dax’s anger, although his hold upon her did not loosen.
Veya opened her eyes fully.
The room remained unchanged: firelight, dark wood, Malakai standing guard, and Dax holding her as though releasing her had never occurred to him. Yet the silence inside her body belonged entirely to her for the first time since Rhen’s blood had dragged her back from death.
Her fingers closed around Dax’s shirt.
He looked down at her immediately.
“I’m here,” he said.
This time, no alien tether answered for her.
“I know.”
The wards gradually quieted around Rhen’s chamber.
The woman remained folded against him, her cheek resting over his chest while strength settled slowly back into her limbs. At the farthest edge of his awareness, an older drag upon his blood had receded into silence, but the change was too distant to hold his attention.
Everything inside him had narrowed to the woman in his arms.
She shifted and raised her head.
“What happened?”
“The bond completed.”
She searched his face.
“Can it be broken?”
“I do not know.”
“And if it cannot?”
Rhen’s gaze hardened, although his arm remained around her.
“Then we learn to live with what we chose.”
The words settled between them.
He lifted her carefully and laid her against the pillows before withdrawing from her body. She watched as he drew the sheetover her, and something in the ordinary care of the gesture brought uncertainty into her expression.
Rhen sat beside her.
The connection between them no longer pulled or demanded. It existed with quiet certainty, alive inside both of them.
He could feel her exhaustion, curiosity, and the first edge of fear returning now that desire no longer drowned it.
“You are going to answer my questions,” he said.
“I expected nothing less.”
