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She can hardly manage words, but this seems important. “Whatever…happens. You need…to know. I…aaahhh. I chose this. I chose you. My mate.”

“Mine,” he says, driving hard and deep inside her, and she has no more words to give him. Keening, incoherent, she’s barely human anymore, an entity of pure energy, pure sensation, and utterly, entirelyhis.

This time, when he spends himself inside her and they come together, she sees stars.

* * *

“Cassiel,”his mate says, a long time later. “What comes next?”

They’re lying together on the floor of the ship’s core, still joined. The frantic force of the first mating frenzy has loosened its hold, at least enough that they have breath to speak with.

Breath. It fascinates him, how quickly he’s acclimated to this shape, her shape, this body that fits her so well. And with it, how his will has strengthened, until he holds sway over the colony. It doesn’t rule him anymore. He rules it.

Some functions have accepted that easily. The ship-form responds to his every thought now without resistance, but other parts need more time to adjust. He has much to learn about what it means to choose for himself in this new form.

“You come next.” He rolls his hips lazily, drawing a gratifying noise from the human woman beneath him. He’s still buried deep within her, her body fluttering with orgasmic contractions around him. Her inner muscles grip him like she doesn’t want to let him go. “And then, maybe me again.”

“I’m serious,” she gasps, when they can speak once more. “I want to know what happens now.”

“That depends on you.” He says it into the soft skin at her neck, just to feel her shiver. “I meant every word, when I said we could go anywhere.”

“We can go anywhere, but I can never leave. Is that right?”

He stretches his awareness toward his greater whole, receiving a grudging answer. The colony doesn’t want her setting foot outside its reach, not after what happened last time. It wants control. But that belongs to him, now.

“I cannot be apart from you.” He says it with some uncertainty at first, but in speaking it, he can feel the truth in it. “But I won’t keep you here against your will.” He doesn’t like that much either, but she chose him once. Maybe she will again.

“I don’t want to leaveyou.” She strokes his back, his hair, with gentle fingers as if sensing his distress. “What if…would you come with me? Could you survive outside the ship?”

He rolls onto his back, pulling her with him and over him. The mating tendrils released their hold hours ago, satisfied by how well he’d filled her, as his seed spilled down her thighs in softly phosphorescent rivulets. He had gone on rutting her on this floor because she begged him to, because he wanted to, because it felt so good. Not biological imperative, but his choice and hers, together.

How far does his new freedom extend?

“I don’t know. We could try.” The colony likes this even less, flooding his mind with warnings about contamination, hostile environments, and violent planet-dwellers, but he ignores them. “It has never been done before, but we never mated with a human, either.”

“All right.” She grins up at him, a challenge and an invitation. “My place or yours?”

“If you want to visit Earth, we’re already in orbit.”

“We can start there.” Then she laughs. “At the very least, I should take you home to meet my mother.”

“Your…mother?” Honestly, that sounds terrifying. An alien planet, with alien customs, in an environment wholly out of his influence, on the home turf of his mate’s progenitor, and yet…

She’s been so brave for him. It seems right that he should do the same for her.

“I’d like that,” he says, and his courage begins with her kiss.