Page 76 of Taken By the Alien Killer
She gasps, hand at her mouth, eyes wide enough to make the fireflies ashamed of their wattage. “It’s hideous,” she teases, voice shaking like the dress she wore when we told an audience we were done lying. “Saints, Commander. Did you bribe a goblin?”
“I made it,” I say, and now my voice shakes because I’m not built for this kind of naked and I’m doing it on purpose. “Salvage from the storm we survived. Stone from the place you taught me to pronouncehome.It’s yours.”
She doesn’t reach for it immediately. She reaches for my face, palm warm, fingers sliding to the scar under my brow, the one she traces when she thinks I’m sleeping. “You got both knees dirty,” she says softly.
“Vakutan vows have weight,” I answer. “So I used both legs.”
“Standards,” she murmurs, laughing and crying at once, then holds out her left hand. “Put it on before I make fun of you in a way you never recover from.”
I slip the ring on. It looks better against her skin than it did on my workbench in the midnight after we fled and before we returned. The moonstone finds the line of her pulse and pretends it’s a star. The Reaper metal sits there like a promise that we will never pretend we earned this gently.
“I’ll wear it forever,” she says, none of the tease left in the words now, only the kind of vow that makes temples jealous. “And when someone asks me why it’s not pretty, I’ll tell them we didn’t marry pretty. We married true.”
“On our terms,” I say.
“On purpose,” she adds.
I rise because she pulls me up and because the earth has had me long enough and because I want to meet her mouth without bending the night out of shape. The kiss is not the armory’s frantic or the shuttle’s weightless; it’s slow, sun-warmed, the kind of kiss that teaches your bones where to go in a room that doesn’t deal in panic. Her hand on my chest is warm; mine at her back learns again that belonging is a verb you do with your whole palm.
When we part, breath threading between us like silk we forgot we owned, she leans her forehead to mine. “We’ll buildthe windows,” she says. “East-facing. Rings. Kettle that lies. Sneed lecturing the wind.”
“And a board,” I say. “For games that don’t end in funerals.”
“And a bed you can actually fit on,” she adds, wicked and right.
“And a door that sticks,” I say. “So we have an excuse to swear.”
She laughs, and the fig tree seems to approve, leaves clapping quietly over our heads. Far off, the house shifts in its sleep, old bones comfortable for the first time in a very long history. I lay my hand over hers where the ugly, holy band sits, and I feel the thump under the stone answer the thump under my ribs. The night goes on doing its job. We promise it we’ll do ours.
“Come home,” she says, and there are a thousand addresses she could mean and we both know she means all of them.
“With you,” I say, and we start walking.
CHAPTER 19
STAR
The observatory door is heavier at night, like the wood remembers every secret we’ve stuffed in here and wants to make sure we mean it. Rayek opens it with his easy, impossible quiet, and the smell rolls over us—cold glass, old paper, a thread of lemon from the hall that got lost up the stairs and never found its way back. The air is thin and clean; it tastes like I rinsed my mouth with starlight. The telescope tilts, patient as an old hound. Dust lifts in the lamplight, a slow bright snow. Through the dome’s slit, the sky pours itself in—fat stars, the faint spill of the rings like frost stretched taut across the dark, a meteor nicking the horizon like a strike of flint.
“Hi,” I whisper to the room, because we have history, and the room answers with silence that feels like it knows my name.
Rayek moves behind me, heat at my back, big hands hovering at my hips like he’s building the courage to touch a cathedral. I take his wrists and pull, settling his palms where they belong. His chest fits my spine. His breath ghosts my ear. The ring he gave me—ugly and holy—rests cool against my skin, the moonstone winking at the stars like it recognizes family.
“Look what we’ve done,” I say, and my voice is a laugh that changed its mind and became awe. “Look where we are.”
“Look what we’ll keep doing,” he murmurs, mouth at the soft place below my jaw, all gravel and reverence. He says it like a vow that doesn’t need a witness.
“Cocky,” I say, and my pulse betrays me by beating yes under the moonstone.
“Confident,” he corrects, smiling against my throat, and the smile lands hot as a seal.
We stand like that and let our bodies learn the room again. The floor is cool through the thin leather of my soles. The night wind pipes once through the crack at the dome and then hushes, as if it stuck its head in to check on us and decided we were fine. Somewhere deep in the house, the polite ghost in the pipes turns over and finds a more comfortable dream. Down in the gardens, something winged tries three notes and decides not to perform. Up here, everything is a held breath that doesn’t cost anything.
“Do you want to look?” he asks, chin tipping toward the telescope.
“At you?” I say.
“At the rings,” he deadpans, then laughs when I turn in his arms and feed him a kiss that says: both, obviously. He’s warm, always warmer than he looks, heat sunk in all that muscle like a banked fire. My hands slide up the ridged map of his back, over scars I know by taste and temper, my fingertips walking old roads. He exhales. One of his hands lifts to cradle my jaw; the other traces the edge of the ring on my finger. “It looks better on you than on my bench,” he says, a little surprised by his own handiwork.
