Page 80 of Starfighter’s Salvation

The surgery doors rose ahead of us.

My stride broke.

Every instinct I owned dug in its heels. Follow. Supervise. Check the monitors. Check the hands holding the scalpel. Make certain they do everything right. I knew exactly what waited on the other side. I knew what they would cut, what they would clamp, what could go wrong in the quiet minutes after the anesthesia took hold. I could have done every step with my eyes closed.

But these were not my doors, and he was not my patient.

He was the man I loved. That was exactly why I could not go through them.

“Starfighter Reyes.” The medic met my eyes. Not unkind. “We have him. I promise you, we'll take good care of him.”

My fingers tightened around Corvan’s until my knuckles turned white. The bond burned at the nape of my neck, bright and steady and hot, and the thought of what it would do when those doors closed made my stomach turn.

I looked down at him, my mate. The man I loved. The man I was willing to die for, and kill for. "Don't you dare die on me now."

His eyes were closing. The meds had finally won. His lashes lay dark against his gray skin, and for one terrible second the stillness of his face was exactly the thing I had feared for a day and a night.

“Gina.” A whisper. His thumb stroked once across my knuckles. “I'm fine. Go get something to eat. Let them work.”

I couldn’t make my hand open. He was trying to take care of me? Of course he was.

I leaned over and kissed him on the lips. "I'll be here when they're done with you."

"I know." He squeezed my hand and let go.

Priya stepped up on one side of me. Jamie took the other. Neither of them touched me, not yet. They just stood there, close and solid, a wall at my back. Friends. A support system I'd never had before.

“We’ll take good care of her.” Priya's words were not for me.

I let go. I made my fingers uncurl one at a time. His hand slid out of mine, warm, then cooler, then gone. The medics rolled him through the doors, and I watched his dark head disappear between the panels, watched the doors seal with a soft, final hiss.

The heat at my neck dimmed.

Not gone. Never gone. But thinner, distant, behind a wall, and the silence it left in my chest felt like thunder under my ribs.

My knees gave out.

Jamie caught one arm. Priya caught the other. They lowered me to the floor against the wall outside the surgery, still in my armor, his blood drying on my gloves, and Priya wrapped both arms around my shoulders while I stared at the doors.

I had walked through hell for him.

Now I sat in a hallway, and waited, and trusted other hands to bring him back to me.

Logically, I knew he was going to be all right. Still, letting him go was the hardest thing I had ever done.

20

Gina, Moon Base Arturri, Three Nights Later

* * *

Three nights after we came home from the rescue mission in Dome Erys, medical let me take him home. He slept like a man who had been shot, which was to say badly, and I slept like a nurse, with one ear open.

I woke once in the dark because Corvan's breathing changed. Even asleep, I was tuned to him now, the way a monitor stays tuned to a patient, and the change in his breath pulled me straight up out of sleep.

One sharp inhale beside me, too quiet to wake a roommate across a hospital bay, followed by a terrible stillness that filled my mind with all kinds of dark scenarios. Was he in pain? Bleeding? Dizzy? Dying? Shit.

I moved closer, as close as I could get in our bed without touching him. He stole my caution by reaching over, wrapping an arm around me, and pulling me so that our bodies touched from head to toe.