Page 48 of Alien Assassin's Heir

He groans, and that’s it. He lifts me like I weigh nothing, carries me toward the bedroom, his scales rasping lightly against my bare skin where my tunic has ridden up. The sensation sends shivers crawling across me, and I don’t fight it. Stars help me, I don’t want to fight it.

This time, it’s different. Not frantic, not desperate like that first night we fell back into each other’s orbit. No, this time it’s slow. Patient. Reverent.

He lays me down like I’m something breakable, like I’m not the woman who’s held a crying baby through sleepless nights, who’s worked sixteen-hour shifts just to keep food on the table. His claws trace my skin with a tenderness I didn’t realize I’d been starving for. Every touch is deliberate, every kiss placed like a vow.

“Luna,” he murmurs again and again, the syllables low and rough, like he’s carving them into my bones. “Luna.”

I answer without hesitation, my voice carrying the years of longing and the ache of everything we lost. “Kraj.”

The way he looks at me—it isn’t hunger alone. It’s reverence. Worship. I feel seen. Truly seen. Not as a failed aide to an IHC commander. Not as a woman banished to a frontier outpost. Not even as Solie’s mother. Just… me. Luna.

The rhythm we find is unhurried, like we both know we’ve been given back something stolen and we’re afraid to waste a single second of it. My nails dig into his shoulders, my body arching to meet his as though I’ve been waiting three years for this very moment. Because I have. Stars above, I have.

“Mine,” he breathes against my throat, not as a command but as a prayer.

“Yes,” I answer, the word ripped from somewhere deep, someplace too raw to deny. “Yours.”

When it finally crests—when the storm breaks—it isn’t the violent, desperate release I half-expected. It’s something softer. Deeper. A shattering made of light, not destruction. And when we collapse together, our limbs tangled, our breaths syncing in the hush of the small room, I feel… whole.

We lie there in the aftermath, heat clinging to our skin, the faint hum of the heater filling the silence. His arm is heavy and warm across my waist, his claws stroking lazy patterns over my forearm. I press my cheek to his chest, listening to the slow, steady drum of his heart, a sound I once thought I’d never hear again this close.

He whispers into my hair, voice thick with exhaustion and something softer. “Next weekend. The festival in the plaza—they’ll have music, food stalls. Take Solie. I’ll be there.”

He talks of weekends, of plans, of a future like it’s already ours. And I want to believe it. Stars, I want to. I want to imagine Solie laughing with him at the festival, her little hand tucked safely in his. I want to imagine us walking side by side, not hiding, not afraid.

But I know better.

The truth is a blade pressed to both our throats, waiting. The secret I’ve kept—our daughter, his daughter—lurks in every laugh, in every golden-eyed glance Solie throws his way. And when it comes out, when the truth finally tears through the fragile fabric of what we’re rebuilding… will it break us all over again?

I press my face deeper into his chest, letting his warmth soak into me, trying to bury the fear in the steady rhythm of his heartbeat.

“Luna?” he murmurs sleepily.

“Mm?”

“Don’t leave me again.”

My throat tightens. I want to promise him. I want to say the words and mean them. But the truth burns on my tongue, heavy and bitter, and all I can manage is a shaky whisper. “I don’t want to.”

He seems to accept it, because he sighs and pulls me tighter, his body cocooning mine, his warmth lulling me toward sleep.

But long after his breathing evens out, I lie awake, eyes fixed on the shadows dancing across the ceiling.

Because I know what’s coming.

And I’m terrified.