Page 53 of Claimed By the Wraiths

I moved.

The door to Jessa’s cell was electronic, standard lock, same hardware as the service access panels I’d been bypassing.

But the bypass tool would trigger an entry log. Someone would see it. Not now, but later, when they reviewed the records and found a cell door opening during a patrol gap.

I didn’t use the door.

In a dead recess beside the frame, I cached everything the deeper state couldn’t carry: the blaster, Alix’s bypass strip, and the rigid tools I’d brought up from the service void. The flush comm against my skin stayed with me.

The seal between the door and the frame had a gap of approximately three centimeters. In full shadow-meld, with my body dark enough to compress into spaces that shouldn’t fit a person, three centimeters was enough.

It hurt. Not the slow dissolution of a sustained meld.

Physical compression, my body folding through a space too narrow for bones and muscle, the shadow-meld turning me into something closer to liquid than solid for two seconds that felt like twenty. I felt my ribs compress, my shoulders flatten, the darkness squeezing me through the gap the way water pushes through a crack in a pipe.

I materialized inside her cell.

Jessa was sitting on the bench. She looked up. I saw the moment she registered what she was seeing: luminous black eyes in a figure made of darkness, silver traces flickering through the shadow where a person should have been.

She didn’t flinch. She didn’t reach for a weapon. She stood, crossed the cell, and put her hand on my face.

The bond ignited.

I don’t have a word for what happened. “Ignited” is wrong.

Ignition implies a start. This wasn’t a start.

This was everything that had been building for years reaching the point where it couldn’t be contained. Not one memory. All of them.

The connection my biology had been mapping without my permission: every pathway, every circuit, every touch I’d forced myself not to lean into. All of it surfacing at once, too fast to separate into moments.

I couldn’t have named them if I’d tried. My body knew them. That was enough.

Light erupted across my skin. Not the faint flickers from the corridor.

Bright lines spreading from where her palm touched my jaw, streaking down my neck, across my chest, along my arms. Light pouring through the darkness, tracing in silver what the bond had built in secret.

Written on shadow-dark skin.

“Serak.” Her voice. My name.

Not the way she said it in briefings. Not the way she said it during negotiations over check-in schedules.

The way she’d said it on the Ghost when she told me to stop saying her name and do something about it.

I grabbed her. Both hands on her waist, pulling her against me. Our window was running and I didn’t care.

Four hours before an assault was an objectively bad time to lose control. The responsible choice was to stop before either of us forgot why I was in this cell.

I knew that. I did not stop.

Her mouth found mine and the kiss on the Ghost had been fire but this was past fire, past heat, past anything I had a comparison for. The bond was open. Every point of contact between us sent signals through the connection, her sensation and mine, feeding back, building.

Her hands were on my chest. She pressed harder and the sensation came back a half-beat behind itself, layered until I couldn’t tell which part began in her and which began in me.

“Off,” she said, pulling at my shirt. “I need to feel this.”

She braced against the wall. I pulled my shirt over my head.