Page 19 of Mated to the Monster God
“I mean it. If you wish to keep your distance, I will respect it. But I cannot change what I feel.”
Her jaw tightens. “What do you feel?”
The answer is immediate. “Drawn. Anchored. Protective. Possessive.”
“That last one doesn’t sound super healthy,” she mutters, but her voice has lost its edge.
“I do not claim your will,” I say, “but I will destroy anything that tries to harm you.”
She turns, silhouetted by the tiny flames she’s coaxed into life. “You mean that, don’t you?”
I meet her gaze, letting the bond between us pulse with sincerity. “With everything I am.”
Her silence stretches, heavy and full of unspoken thoughts. Then she exhales slowly and sinks down beside the fire, curling her arms around her knees.
“Okay,” she says. “But you sleep onthatside of the rock.”
“Understood.”
She smiles, and this one is small but real.
I let the silence settle, let the fire crackle and throw shadows on the stone. Her scent is softer now. Not arousal. Not fear. Something else.
Trust.
She lays her head on her pack and shifts onto her side, facing the flame. Her eyes flicker closed.
I do not sleep, not in the human sense. But I lower myself to the stone and allow my systems to enter a semi-restful state. My mind remains active—cataloguing stimuli, mapping escape routes, calculating probabilities of attack.
But most of my attention stays on her.
I watch her breathe. Listen to the fragile, steady rhythm of her heart. Her lashes flutter once, and her lips part in a soft murmur I can’t decipher.
She dreams.
And I ache.
Not just for her safety or even for her touch. But for herpresence. I crave it like oxygen, like heat in the cold. I want her to wake up and smile at me. I want her to look at me the way she did when she called me beautiful—disbelieving, surprised, butopen.
And I want to be worthy of that look.
CHAPTER 5
ESME
The trees thin out faster than I expect. One moment, I’m wading through knee-high jungle grass and dodging razor-vine tangles, and the next, I catch a glint of something metallic between the swaying branches. That glint shreds my insides like broken glass. I know what it means before my brain catches up.
I step forward and the treeline opens like a curtain, revealing the valley below.
Smoke.
Thick, curling tendrils of it spiral up from beyond the colony perimeter, smeared across the sky like charcoal strokes. I smell it before I really see it—burned fuel, ionized ozone, and the bitter tang of scorched earth. My pulse kicks like a startled bird in my throat. That’s not cooking fire smoke. That’s ship smoke. Lots of them.
“Oh hell,” I whisper.
Sagax steps up behind me, casting a long shadow that falls across the backs of my boots. I feel the heat of him without turning. His gaze scans the valley, calculating and cold in a way mine can't be.
“There are three new ships,” he murmurs, voice low and steady, but I feel the shift in him, like the stillness of a predator before it lunges. “One is a Baragon battle crawler. The others are scout class. They’re reinforcing their presence.”
