Page 79 of Starfighter’s Salvation

“Good. Stay that way.”

We ran. Lily blasted everything in front of us, Darius took the rear, and I stayed pinned to Corvan’s side with one hand clamped over his wrist. Enemy fire raked the ring behind us. The Salvation waited in the bay, ramp down, engines screaming.

Corvan lifted his head when he saw her. His ship. Flying without him. Returned for him. His face changed. Then his gaze left the ship and found me, and whatever was in it went straight through my armor to my heart. Hell, my soul. For one beat the firefight and the smoke and the burning dome fell away, and there was only the way this man looked at me, like I was the only thing that made surviving worth the trouble. Like he loved me. No one had ever looked at me like that. Not even my own mother.

“Maro scratched the port side,” he complained.

“You can yell at him later.” We stumbled up the ramp as Lily and Darius stood behind us like a living shield.

“I intend to.”

“Dekker, we’re loaded!” I shouted into comms. “Pull the Titans!”

“Already overhead,” Dekker answered. “Get out of my way.”

Rounds hammered the Salvation’s ramp. Priya’s voice cracked over the channel. “Dark Fleet reinforcements coming in hot on the east side. Ninety seconds.” Jamie’s fighter screamed low across the bay doors and tore the incoming squad apart. I shoved Corvan toward a stretcher at the top of the ramp. Dekker's drop ship dove through the breach with its cables out as Bantia and Ulixes showed up, their Titan's sprinting toward our position.

“Maro, engines now!”

“Ramp is still down.”

“I know!”

The Salvation lifted off the landing pad as the ramp rose. Maro took her through the broken cargo ring with one hand on the controls and Mia shouting corrections into his ear. Enemy rounds hit the outer armor.

Dekker hovered over the landing pad we'd just abandoned as the four Titans backed their machines into the hooks. He pulled them up like a fisherman reeling in his catch.

I watched them disappear inside the drop ship as the ramp finally closed and locked into place. I pushed Corvan into place with a stern look that very clearly meant I would fucking kill him myself if he argued with me now, and locked him into the first rack, one hand on him the whole time.

We cleared the dome, and Jamie’s fighters closed around us. Dekker’s drop ship swung into position with all four Titans safely aboard.

The flight to Arturri took forty minutes. I held his hand for all of them, my thumb settled over his pulse, half healer counting beats, half woman who could not stop touching the proof that he was still here. Alive. Mine.

I helped him out of his helmet and kissed him gently. The pain meds were working, and I had no idea if he even knew I was there—until he reached up and wrapped his hand around the side of my neck to kiss me harder.

"I love you, Georgina Reyes."

"I love you, too. So, don't you dare die on me."

He had the nerve to fucking laugh. I wanted to kiss him and kick him at the same time.

When we arrived back at base, a crowd waited in the landing bay.

The ramp hit the deck and the noise rolled in, boots and stretcher wheels and shouted orders, cold air knifing through the open hatch. Medics swarmed the Salvation before the engines finished spinning down. They took the stretcher from me in one practiced motion, and I let them. I walked beside it, one hand clamped around Corvan’s, down the ramp and into the light.

Captain Wroxxon stood at the bottom with his arms crossed.

“Your entire operations was too slow. Should have been out of there in half the time,” he scolded.

“He means he’s glad you’re alive,” I translated.

Corvan opened one eye. “I know. It is the nicest thing he has ever said to me.”

His joke had no business loosening the terror in my chest. It did anyway. My mate was alive and feeling well enough to be difficult. I could work with that.

Then the trauma team lifted the stretcher onto a wheeled runner and took off at a jog.

I ran with it. I couldn’t help it. I rattled off his vitals to the lead medic without looking at a single screen, because I had memorized every one of them. Gunshot through the shoulder, burns, cracked ribs, blood loss. Twenty minutes of pain meds, thirty-eight minutes ago. My hand never left his. The corridor blurred around me into a vague and completely irrelevant white light and shouting.