I knew the exact weight of her in my arms.
I knew the sound she made when she gave up control.
I knew what it felt like to bury my cock deep.Steal her soft cries with a kiss.Fill her with my power and my seed at the same time.
That knowledge lived in my hands.My chest.My cock.My storm nodes with a permanence that no amount of wishful thinking or ignoring would ever take from me.If she decided to leave me behind, I would mourn her loss for the rest of my life.Never bond with another.We were one flesh now.One frequency.Bonded and complete.Two halves of one whole.My skin remembered hers with a precision that made the space between us feel like an open wound.
Ineededto touch her.
The need was not new.It had been there since the storm, since her ship crashed.Since the first moment I felt her presence.it solidified the first time I saw her, was close enough to sense her unique electrical signature move through my nodes.That moment, my entire nervous system reoriented around her like a compass finding north.
Fucking her, claiming her, had shifted things.The current running between us was different now.Before the cave, I’d fought the need to be close to her.To protect her.To touch her.But I had been able to fight those urges.Control myself.The initial stages of the new Skybond had been recognition.The bone-deep certainty of the bond forming.The pull of destiny.Fate.Her.
Now?She was part of me.My need was constant.Hungry.Relentless.
I could not stop looking at her.Could not stop wanting.Watching.Obsessing.
Since the cave I was — I had no word for what I was.Changed was too small a word.Remade was closer.The Skybond had done what the elders described, what the bonded warriors of Sol'Virex had tried to prepare me for.My mate’s energy had reorganized something fundamental in my body.My mind.My entire system.Had taken what I was before and given me a new center of gravity.
Her.
I had read about other worlds.Studied the archives.My people had crossed the dark between stars before my grandfather's grandfather drew breath.Had walked on foreign ground under foreign stars and catalogued what they found there.We had looked at what the universe offered.
We had chosen to come home.
Chosen this ground.Chosen the storm.Realized we were one with our home world and the planetary consciousness that ran through our nodes like breath.Our ancestors traveled the stars.Our people had seen other worlds and found nothing that mattered as much as our home.Our way of life.
I understood that choice differently now.
Her heartbeat was the first thing I'd registered when I woke.The first thing I checked now was her position on the cliff.I could feel her marks from here — the slow warm pulse of them moving through the bond between us like a second heartbeat running alongside mine.
I needed to touch her the way I needed air to breathe.Water to drink.
Not want.Not preference.
Need.
Fundamental.Physiological.No amount of discipline could conquer the fire that burned in me.For her.Only her.My years of warrior's training held me in check — barely.I felt the cost of my restraint in my clenched jaw, my trembling hands and the nodes along my spine that pulsed their awareness with every beat of her heart.
She climbed above me.
Unprotected.Exposed.
Every energy surge that moved through this cliff between her boots and the valley floor was a variable I could not control.Fear for her pressed against the inside of my ribs with a force that had no true name.It was not a warrior's calculation.It was older than that.More fundamental.The primal compulsion of a bonded male whose female was too far above him on an electrified cliff face and moving further away with every hold she took.
I managed it.Barely.For her.
I thought about her ship.Wrecked in the valley below.I thought about her people — their technology, their salvage crews, the beacon she spoke of counting down to a response I had not yet found a way to prevent.My people had built ships once.Had solved the problems her people still worked toward.I knew what their technology could do.I also knew, with the calm certainty of a man who had spent eleven years assessing threats to this valley, that knowing what something could do was the first step toward knowing what it could not.
I needed to speak with the other warriors.
I needed to see her ship.
I needed her to trust me.Give me time.
She hadn't agreed to that yet.But she would.Because the alternative was leaving.Because I had felt her nervous system against mine in the dark.Because I knew — with the same bone-deep certainty with which I knew this cliff, this valley, the electrical signature of every storm that had ever moved through this rock — that she did not want to leave.
She was afraid.That I understood.