Page 85 of Claimed By the Wraiths

Light pooled in the silver on my hands. I looked at them.

Light written into skin. The map of a bond I’d sworn I’d never have.

Jessa came in.

She’d been in the cargo bay, running an inventory of the supplies Maris had acquired at the last station.

She always ran inventories. Even when there was nothing urgent. Even when nobody asked.

Jessa’s knowing exactly what the ship had and what it needed was the foundation everything else was built on.

She went to the galley. Made two mugs.

She sat to my left. Set my mug in front of me.

I drank it without thanking her.

She opened her datapad. Fuel projections.

Same numbers as yesterday. She studied them like they’d say something new.

Then she looked at me.

“Still running assessments?” she asked.

“Different assessment.”

“What’s the conclusion?”

I looked at the crew around the table. At my hands. At her.

“The conclusion is that I don’t need to run it anymore.”

The corner of her mouth pulled. The same almost-smile from a hundred late watches, a thousand shared silences, all the late nights where we’d sat across from each other and pretended we didn’t know what was between us. Except now I knew what that mouth tasted like and she knew what the light under my skin felt like beneath her fingers and the pretending was over.

She reached across the table and touched my hand. Her fingers on the traces, light and brief. I turned my hand over so our palms met.

She went back to her fuel projections. I went back to watching the crew.

We didn’t need to fill it. We never had.

My hands were steady on the table. Not dark. The silver traces caught the light when I reached for the mug.

She was not alone. Neither was I.

EPILOGUE: JESSA

Six months after Nexus.

The Raptor smelled like Zevik’s terrible attempt at Tamzari flatbread and Maris’s corrective curry and the recycled air that had been home for longer than any address I’d ever had.

We were docked at Kaelsin Station, Mid-Rim, three days into a supply run that didn’t need three days but nobody was in a rush.

Maris’s trading network was profitable. Ressh and Alix’s intelligence work kept us useful enough that stations gave us priority berths without asking questions. Deyric had upgraded the sensor array again and the Raptor hummed at a frequency that was new and somehow still sounded like home.

The crew had scattered into the station the way they always did at port.

Zevik was somewhere that served alcohol and had a low standard for behavior. Maris and Thoryn had gone to a supply market and wouldn’t be back until Maris had negotiated every vendor into submission and Thoryn had carried everything she bought without complaint. Ressh and Alix were running a meeting that they described as “professional consultation” and Deyric described as “the galaxy’s most charming shakedown.” Solren had found a Rokavai medical library and wouldn’t surface for hours.