Chapter 64: Tell Me Who, I’ll Follow Through

Derek stopped.

His hands stayed where they were. He didn’t pull back, didn’t drop them, didn’t apologize. He just stopped and waited until her eyes came back to his.

Then he kissed her neck. Soft. Right below her jaw where her pulse was doing things that would concern a healer.

Then her cheek. The unbruised one. Gentle enough that she felt it more than she heard it. Then her lips. Brief. Warm. The kind of kiss that exists to say I’m here and nothing else.

His hand found her hair, still damp, and moved it off her neck. His fingers lingered there a second longer than necessary.

Then he pressed his forehead against hers and stayed there, breathing the same air, close enough that his eyelashes could have touched hers if either of them blinked.

"Let me help you. Please."

The please hit different. He reached behind her, already pulling the zipper of her jumpsuit down with fingers that were careful in a way that contradicted everything she had seen him do tonight.

The suit was skin-tight. Soaked. No thermal regulation because slave-issued gear didn’t come with features, it came with the bare minimum and a receipt that someone else kept. The fabric clung to her like it had formed a personal relationship with her skin and was refusing to let go on principle.

He peeled it off her shoulders. Down her arms, pausing at each cuff because the silver wouldn’t fit through the sleeves without maneuvering. Then the torso, working the wet fabric away from her ribs with the practiced patience of a man removing something fragile from packaging that didn’t deserve it.

She still had her undergarments on. Black. Standard issue. Functional in the way that everything about her wardrobe had been designed to be functional and nothing else.

Her face was so red it could have guided ships to port.

He grabbed a towel from the stack the omega had brought and started drying her. Shoulders first. Arms. The backs of her hands, working around each cuff. Her hair, which he gathered in one hand and pressed the towel around with the other, squeezing the water out in sections.

Then the towel moved down her ribs and stopped.

She felt his thumb trace something on her left side. The touch was different. No longer drying. He was reading her skin the way you read damage on something you care about.

Then he pressed his lips against her ribs. Against the bruise that lived there, the one she had forgotten about because the list of bruises was long and this one had been outranked by the one on her face.

Then he looked up at her from his knees and the expression on his face was the expression of a man who wanted to know what happened to his mate.

"Who touched your face today?"

The question was quiet. The violence underneath it was not.

Nova opened her mouth. Shut it. The cuffs were still on her wrists. Derek’s offer that the elders accepted was for Nova to be Celeste’s slave, at least that was what she thought based on the conversation. Less than ideal, but she would survive. The man wanted her as his mate and not as something else and that was the thing that mattered.

But it didn’t change the fact that she was still Celeste’s slave, which meant silence about the people who owned you because speaking ill of your masters was punishable.

"Was it Kai or Alpha Starborne?" he pressed.

She shook her head once.

Something in his jaw shifted.

"Who was it? You can tell me, baby." He was drying her hair again, gentle, the towel moving through the white strands with a softness that made the question sound like a lullaby written by a man who was planning a homicide.

He was kneeling in front of her calling her baby and speaking to her like she was something precious and breakable and worth being gentle with and she didn’t know what to do with any of it. The tenderness was hitting her harder than the spasms. Harder than the priestess. Harder than the cigar room or Kai’s remote or the sacred fire.

Because nobody had ever done this for her. Nobody had ever looked at a bruise on her ribs and kissed it like the kiss could travel backwards through time and arrive before the fist.

Her chin trembled. Her eyes burned. The tear that fell was silent and fast and she hated it because she had cried enough today to fill the sacred fire pit and the quota should have been met by now but apparently her body had not received that memo.

"Hey, don’t cry." He dropped the towel and pulled her off the chair into his chest so fast the transition happened mid-tear. "Shit."

She was in his lap. On the leather armchair. His arms were around her and her face was in his neck and he was holding her the way mates hold each other, which she knew because she had seen it from the outside her entire life and had never once been on the inside of it and the difference between watching and feeling was the difference between reading about the ocean and swimming in it.

This was normal. This was what mates were supposed to do. She knew that. Tonight she had watched Wavecrest warriors carry their mates out of a clearing. She had watched the Thunderfang Beta dip Maria like a ballroom dance. She had watched a Nightbloom Alpha press his forehead against Estelle’s and close his eyes like he had found something he lost lifetimes ago.

This was that. She was inside it now. And she was completely, thoroughly, catastrophically overwhelmed because she didn’t know the choreography and her body was shaking and her eyes were leaking and the man holding her was rubbing circles on her back with his palm and murmuring into her hair and it was so much that she couldn’t separate the gratitude from the grief from the terror from the relief from the warmth and all of it was living in her chest at the same time fighting for the same square inch of space.

"Whoever gave you that is going to answer for it. Nobody touches you," he said into her hair, his voice low and steady and certain in a way that left zero room for doubt.