Page 29 of Claimed By the Vykan

“You will be taught attunement.”

“Attunement?” The word snapped from her tongue.

A scoff escaped before she could stop it. A sharp retort flared—there is no universe in which I would attune to you—but she swallowed it back. Some thread of self-preservation cut in just in time.

She stood before a Vykan.

One of seven.

A ruler of this world.

She did not understand the structure of power here or the laws that shaped it, but she understood authority when she felt it. His was not ceremonial. It lived in the air around him, in the certainty of his breathing, in the way the space bent to his presence.

Appearances, for once, did not lie.

And she had already pushed him. Hard. He hadn’t punished her or silenced her. He had answered, as truthfully as she could tell. His certainty had the same brutal clarity as his armor.

She would be a fool not to use that.

She’d always been good at drawing people out, at getting them to talk when they did not intend to. Years of listening to her mother’s quiet confessions had trained her to lean into silence and ask the right thing at the right time.

“What does it mean,” she asked slowly, “to be attuned to someone like you?”

Kyrax tilted his head a fraction. The faint rasp of his breath moved through the lower vents of his helm, barely audible, a mechanical-soft whisper that lifted the hairs along her arms. Heat pooled low in her abdomen at the thought of what the metal hid. A face shaped like hers? Something utterly alien? Something worse?

Something better?

She wanted to know. Desperately. She dreaded knowing just as much.

“This,” he said, voice layered as before—alien resonance beneath, translated clarity above. “You will know my rhythm, and I will know yours. You will give me your presence, and I will give you mine. And…” The red glow pulsed softly. “You will become immune to my venom.”

Her breath snagged. “Venom?”

He continued as if she had not spoken. “You will be the only living being permitted to see me not as Vykan, but as a Saelori male.”

Saelori. Venom.

The words collided in her mind. A species name. A hazard.

“That explains the mask,” she muttered before she could catch herself.

Her gaze flicked upward. “Are you dangerous to me now? Like this?”

“No,” he said. “Merely potent. Your body will adapt. It will develop tolerance.”

“What do you mean?—?”

His hand shifted again, still cradling her jaw with that unnerving mix of gentleness and iron control. Her pulse stuttered as he leaned closer, the warmth of the armor spilling into the scarce space between them.

Those burning eyes seemed impossibly near.

Then she felt it.

A soft exhale, a hiss slipping from the vents along the lower edge of his mask.

Warm air brushed her lips.

The faintest whisper of heat slid across her skin, a sensation that belonged to no human world she had ever known.