Skye
Alex holds my gaze for several seconds. Two weeks of separation and the gravity of the last six hours crush the space between us, turning the rest of the world to nothing but static noise. He runs his fingers through his damp hair and nods to himself like he’s just made an executive decision.
Toby lingers just within view–waiting for the same thing I am.
Direction. Any kind of direction about how to move forward… for him. As a team. His friends. Me… whatever I am to him.
“Meet me in my office in an hour. If anyone asks, I’m going through the data about the collapse,” he tells Toby, who takes the command as the dismissal it is, and within the space of two thundering heartbeats, we’re alone.
“I wasn’t going to let you die,” I say, closing my arms around my middle, preparing for a fight. “I couldn’t. Not when I have the ability to… be anywhere, at any time. I found you.”
“I knew you’d come. I could feel you there, just like when I was a kid, and you found me in my dreams.”
I suck in a breath, my emotions tangled, and he moves toward me slowly, each step calculated and careful, like he’s worried about me turning and sprinting away. Like this situation is enough to finally scare me into seeing him as a monster and not the man I… love.
He takes my shoulders, his hands stroking down my arms. Into my hair, he says, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for everything. I wanted to keep you in the dark about Prince Kai. Being a vampire was already a mark against me.”
I press my face into the crook of his shoulder, breathing him in. “What happens now?”
“The lab is likely destroyed, is it not?”
I nod.
He sighs, his body closing around mine. He braces a hand against the wall at my back and leans his weight into mine like I’m the only thing keeping him anchored and calm, and maybe I am, because he relaxes when I wrap my arms around his middle and sink into his touch. “Dealing with the university after this will be the least of my worries.”
“But your research?”
“It’ll take another decade to rebuild the tunnels in a new location, if we’re lucky and find the funding within the next year or so. It’s over. And I… need to start making plans.”
I lean back to look up at him, noticing the pained expression casting shadows across his face.
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?”
“Not yet, but it’s something I have to consider.”
“No–no, you can’t. This isn’t over. I can–I can find this guy. I found you by scrying. I can do the same for him. It’s not that hard.”
“You’re freezing,” he says, shaking his head. “I can sense how weak you are.”
“I’ll be fine in a few days. Don’t jump to any conclusions yet.”
He steps away from me and leans his weight on the far wall, the snug hallway feeling suddenly like an ocean has opened up between us.
“I can’t continue this dance, Skye.”
“Then end it with him. Kill him if you must.”
“I mean with us.” He looks directly at me, bright blue eyes shining in the dim light filtering down the hallway from the living room. “I put you in a horrible position yesterday. I almost died, had my life's work crumble in a matter of seconds, and my only thought in my last seconds was you. Being with you. A far-fetched future with you, where we lived together doing what we loved–being scientists. It’s all I cared about in the end, and I’m at a crossroads now. I don’t want to keep running. Part of me wants to go home, if I’m being totally honest. I want to see my family again. I have to go home because I am the prince and heir of my parents’ kingdom, and one day, centuries from now, I’ll have to be who I was born to be, but as long as Kai is in the picture, I can’t return. And now, there’s you.”
He pushes off the wall, looking so determined that it sends a skitter down my spine.
“There isn’t a world where you and I make sense. A world where we end up together peacefully, and you’re not in Lunaria permanently, are you?”
I flinch, looking down at my toes.
Alex nods, taking a huge breath. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“About the fact that the mystics foretold me rising to power within their ranks? Because it doesn’t matter. It’s my decision.”
“The university gave you tenure knowing you had maybe five years here before you were called back to Moonrise.”
“How did you find out?”
“Alloway,” he says, closing his eyes for a moment. “I had a conversation with her when you were in Moonrise about our relationship. It was brief, but when I mentioned your name, she acted like my rejection of the position of dean of the biology department seemed to make perfect sense to her all of the sudden.”
I blink, furrowing my brows up at him. “She offered you the position of dean?”
“And she thought I wouldn’t take it because you have a time limit on how long you can be a physicist.”
I’ve never told anyone about the prophecies the mystics foretold about me. My dad technically leads their church, if that’s even the right name for it. They consider him a king, but my journey into my power majority shifted things in the timeline, and more and more, they lean toward my leadership. It’s me, according to those strange women in their crystal masks and white robes, who pulls the strings in our universe. Me, who speaks as the mouthpiece of the Goddess, and the stars who do Her bidding.
Me, who will one day have to return to that spooky orrery and be the goddess they intend for me to be.
“I didn’t think it mattered,” I tell him. “It didn’t matter until you.”
“Neither of us can stay in Lunaria,” he says almost absently, like it was an internal thought not meant for my ears.
“We’re still in control of our futures. I’m in control of mine. I have the choice. What I want to be, and who I want to be with, has always been my decision. I want love like my parents have. I hate that I don’t have a mate in my tether, but I have you, Alex. I get to choose you.”
“And you will sacrifice so much by doing so.”
“Because I’ll get old, and you won’t? Because we can only live in Lunaria? In secret?”
“Because I can’t give you the kind of life you deserve.”
“And what do I deserve? What do you want, Alex? Because you tell me what I want so easily!”
“I would love, more than anything, to marry you. To make you my wife. To take you home and introduce you to my parents–who would love you, my mother especially. I want to be the father of your future children, but hybrids are so rare, and a hybrid pregnancy is incredibly risky. I could get everything I want and still lose you,” he rasps, fire in his eyes so deeply rooted it’s been burning since he was a child.
“Do you know what I want?” I ask, stepping toward him, closing the distance between us again. “You. Just a shot at being with you, however that looks. Do you think just… deciding to go for this is the hardest thing we’ll have to do? We’ve both been pretending to be people we’re not for a decade at least, Alex. I’m tired of it. Aren’t you?” I look down at my hands and then hold them up for him to see. Violet starlight swirls between my fingertips. “I wore that bracelet practically my entire life. It was a safety net for the power I was afraid to stretch. I love physics. I love my weird brain. That will always be a part of who I am, but I met you, and that challenged everything I thought I knew, and when I had a vision that something was wrong, and it led me here, to you? That’s all the confirmation I needed to know that you and I were meant to meet. That we had dreams of the same place, of each other as children, for a reason. I’m done fighting it and trying to rationalize it. I’m done looking for answers in equations I’ll never figure out. There’s no reason for this other than fate.”
He holds my gaze, so still. So different from me in so many ways. I can barely keep my hands from fidgeting–always moving. He reaches out and takes my fingers, curling his hand over mine. My light shines through the gaps in our joined fingers before settling.
“I want to help you be able to go home again. I want you to see your parents again, and the last thing I want you to do is worry about me, because I think I might be in love with you,” I admit.
“You think?”
“I haven’t–I might have tried my hand at… writing a formula about… laws of attraction and risk, but…”
I look up, and he’s right in front of me. I can hear his heart beating faster than ever before, and for a moment, he’s like me. All flesh and heat. All feeling and instinct.
Maybe we’re not so different.
His kiss sweeps me off my feet and officially ends our suffering, answering every question we have thoroughly and neatly, leaving no room for interpretation.
He picks me up and carries me into my bedroom, kicking the door closed behind us. It’s fast and messy the way we take our clothes off and fall into bed together. Alex whispers promises on my skin that sink and spread like golden tattoos–similar, I imagine, to what a mate bond snapping into place would feel like. He nudges my legs apart and sinks through my folds in a single thrust. I gasp, arching my neck back, panting as he grinds his hips against mine again and again until we’re both crying out.
But just as my body succumbs to release, and pleasure rolls through me, I open my eyes to his.
“I love you,” he says against my lips and kisses me so tenderly it untangles something long knotted in my brain. Something I’m not sure was in the stars for me.
Now, I understand it–why my dad did everything he had to do, even when my mom kept him at arm’s length for so long. And if there’s one thing my dad and I have in common, it’s being extraordinarily territorial over what we believe belongs to us. He has my mom.
I have my rocks… and Alex.
And Kai, whoever the fuck he is, has hell to pay, because I will find that bastard if it’s the last thing I do.
* * *
I lean my weight against the wall in Alex’s office, flipping through a binder of scribbles I found on his bookshelf. He’s enraptured by a conversation with Toby, who has been going over the data in the lab just before the accident.
Abby isn’t here, and I know the only reason I’m here is because facing her wrath is the last thing I want to do. Knowing Abby as long as I have, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s better to let her work things out on her own and calm down before trying to apologize to her.
She does, unfortunately, live for dramatics, and today has been dramatic enough.
A sharp knock sounds on Alex’s office door.
“Come in,” he says gruffly and looks up just as President Alloway and several board members walk in, their faces washed in emotions I struggle to understand. Concern, for sure. Losing the lab is a financial hit to the university, but no one got hurt.
“I’m glad to see you’re in one piece, Dr. Scarlett,” Alloway says tersely, but she’s wringing her hands.
“We’re going over the data right now about the collapse and the events leading up to it–” Toby begins, but Alex slowly rises, sensing the same kind of tension I can feel flooding the room like poisonous gas.
“A rescue team has just returned from what remains of the lab.”
Toby arches a brow. “Why?”
She produces a piece of paper–a printed email. I try to discreetly catch a glimpse, but Alex takes it, scanning the contents, his eyes narrowing.
“Dr. Kanten emailed me yesterday saying he was going to your lab last night to check on the sensor issue himself after I brought it up,” she says pointedly, fuming. “He never returned from your lab, Dr. Scarlett.”
“He was never in the lab,” Alex says slowly, shaking his head. “We had over forty people in the lab last night for a drilling operation, and he was not part of it. I kept a list of everyone who enters and exits my lab for safety reasons–”
“Be that as it may, a rescue team was sent down this morning and recovered his body.”
“What?” Toby and Alex ask in unison, and I’m frozen in place.
Alloway steels her expression and says, “The authorities in Aurorium are now involved. Dr. Kanten was murdered.” Her eyes land on Alex’s face, full of suspicion.