Chapter 62: Take Two: Hi, I’m Derek

Nova swallowed against the pressure in her throat and blinked until the sting faded.

She had no claim to this feeling. She didn’t know Maverick. But it hurt and that image of his face would sit behind her eyes like a bruise for as long as she lived.

"MY BLADE, 7709," Kai shouted from behind them.

Another spasm hit, the worst one yet. Her entire body seized so hard, the blade fell from her fingers.

"Hang on, honey."

Derek broke into a sprint. She felt the impact of each step against his chest, but her vision went dark before the treeline did.

When she opened her eyes, the rain was gone. She blinked. Once for consciousness. Twice for location. Three times because the first two hadn’t fully convinced her that she was no longer in a thunderstorm. Amber lighting. Dark leather. Climate control. A hover yacht. A nice one.

Derek sat down with Nova in his lap, identical to how Alpha Thunderfang did it earlier in the arena, before she knew he was the Alpha.

The coincidence should have been unsettling. It wasn’t. It was the safest she had felt all day, and the fact that "safe" now had a lap and a heartbeat attached to it was something she was going to have to unpack when her brain had more than twelve percent to work with.

Astra was already there, moving with the efficiency of a healer who had been paged mid-crisis and arrived mid-stride.

"Nova. I knew we would meet again soon."

"Again," Derek repeated.

"Alpha Thunderfang brought her to me earlier."

Derek went still behind Nova. His arms didn’t move but the energy in them changed, like a current switching direction. She turned to look at him and found an expression she couldn’t read before he buried it. Then his lips were at her ear and her brain stopped trying to solve him.

Nova’s face turned the color of a pomegranate.

"How much earlier?" he asked.

"Thirty minutes before the results were announced."

Astra’s hands found Nova’s wrist, her neck, her forehead, each touch fast and diagnostic and completely devoid of the bedside manner she had already warned Nova she didn’t have.

"And no one told me," he said.

Astra paused, looking up at him. "No, because you were gone. And Nova wasn’t assigned to you yet. Congratulations by the way on getting a mate."

She looked at Nova. "To him. To you my sincerest condolences."

Nova exhaled something that was almost a laugh.

Derek scoffed behind her. "Don’t laugh. She feeds on it."

"He’s not wrong," Astra said, still examining Nova’s wrist. "The spasms are from the silver. But they are accelerating in a pattern that doesn’t match long term exposure." She stood. "I’ll be right back."

The door closed behind her and the yacht went still. Just rain on the windows and Derek’s breathing.

For ten seconds it was that. Then Derek was moving.

Nova hadn’t realized she was still shivering until he was unclasping the cloak. It was fully soaked. He peeled it off her and dropped it on the floor. Then he reached for the blanket on the couch and draped it over them. His arms closed around her again underneath.

She settled against him without deciding to. Her body just did it. Shoulders dropping, spine curving into his chest, her head finding the hollow below his collarbone like it had been measured for it. For three seconds, she let herself have it.

Then the guilt arrived, quiet and precise, because the last chest she had been pressed against belonged to a man standing in the rain watching her leave. Maverick’s face still lived behind her eyelids.

Gratitude, guilt, and grief had no business sharing the same breath but she was breathing all three.

She let it hurt. There was nothing else to do with it. Then his arms trembled around her and the hurt made room for something else.

She realized he was shivering too. He probably had been shivering all night. The man had given her his cloak hours ago, stood in a freezing thunderstorm, sprinted through lightning carrying her, and was now shivering on his own hover yacht instead of getting warm because he was waiting for the healer with her.

She wanted to thank him for his cloak, for all of it. But when she opened her mouth to say something, he spoke first.

"I’m going to get these cuffs off of you, baby. Tonight."

The statement and endearment both caught her off guard. Then he stiffened and she wasn’t sure what had happened.

"Are you alright?" she asked softly.

Silence. The unsettling kind that she didn’t understand. All she knew was he was tense behind her.

She moved to twist off of him. But she didn’t get very far. Immediately, his arms tightened around her.

"Stay."

One word. And her whole body listened to it like it had been waiting for someone to say it her entire life. What the hell was happening to her?

Without any kind of warning, he kissed her on the lips, but jolted the second they made contact.

First Maverick, now Derek. What was with Alphas doing that? She had been surprised kissed twice today. Both times the men had jolted the second they made contact like they’d been electrocuted and she hadn’t felt a thing.

His lips were warm against hers in a way that didn’t match the rain or the cold or the night or anything else that had happened. It was brief. Soft. Over before her brain had finished registering that it started. But the warmth of it stayed on her lips like a fingerprint, and her pulse did something it had no business doing for a man she had met six hours ago.

He pressed his forehead to hers.

"I’m Derek by the way. We skipped that step."

He told her his name after a literal kiss like she didn’t already know. Most people would have led with that but apparently Derek Thunderfang was not most people.

The ridiculousness of that made Nova smile.

"For the record," he continued. "I had a very detailed, very impressive introduction planned. Witty. Charming. Eye contact. The whole thing. Instead, I bought you at an impromptu auction on sacred ground after a sword fight and we ran through a monsoon. So. I get a redo."