Page 16

CHAPTER 16

S he broke.

Not with silence. Not with tears.

With fury .

Kyhin stood motionless as she burst, voice rising, ragged and raw. A torrent of sharp, tangled syllables poured from her lips in that strange, stuttering language of hers. No translation reached him. The collar she wore was passive—only for containment, not communication. Her meaning was locked inside her throat, sealed in a language he did not speak.

And still, he understood.

Emotion.

So much of it. Wild, unfiltered, spilling out of her like blood from a wound.

She was vibrating with it. Face flushed, limbs tight with tension, eyes bright with fury. Her hands clenched as if they wanted to strike. Her stance—defiant. She did not retreat. She stood in front of him and howled.

He didn’t flinch.

If she had been Hvrok, she would already be dead.

He had ended warriors for less than the challenge now echoing from her lungs. Insubordination. Disrespect. Insolence. Among his kind, those were not words. They were death sentences.

And yet…

He watched her.

And felt no anger.

Only fascination.

The sounds she made—loud, chaotic, rapid-fire—were nonsensical. But they were also… vivid. Alive. She shouted in a voice too high-pitched for his hearing to fully relax into, a shrill burst of vowels and consonants that clashed against the sterile silence of the chamber like a weapon she didn’t know how to use.

It was absurd.

It was undignified .

It was human.

And something inside him responded.

She had no understanding of her position. She didn’t grasp the insult she offered him with every uncontrolled gesture, every word hurled in his direction. She didn’t know the laws of the galaxy. That her life was his to claim or end. That she stood before a weapon wrapped in a name.

He had no obligation to tolerate her.

And yet, he did.

Because she was his . And because she didn’t know better.

Not yet.

The scent of the trading station clung to her, sour and thick. Worse— Dukkar residue . It crawled over her skin, layered in the fabric of that offensively thin clothing. Kyhin could smell them—every hand that had passed too close, every trace of their sickly pheromones. The reek of the auction cage hadn’t faded.

He wanted it gone.

The clothes. The scent. The memory of what had touched her before he had.

She needed to be cleansed. Stripped. Scrubbed raw if necessary.

That garment—if it could even be called that—offended him. Not because it exposed too much. But because it spoke of weakness. Of a world that did not value its own.

He would burn it the moment it left her body.

He imagined her washed, scented properly, dressed in garments of his choosing. Something dark. Sharp. Worthy.

She had not earned it.

But he would grant it anyway.

She raged on, body shaking with every breath. Her voice—a sound without shape, meaning, or logic—struck him like storm wind. Loud. Pointless. Beautiful.

She was trying to fight him.

With sound .

She didn’t understand.

But she would.

This was a test.

For her, yes—but more so, for him.

Could he make her yield without breaking her?

Could he force her to accept what she could never defeat?

Could he hold this flickering, irrational fire in his grasp— without snuffing it out ?

He didn’t move.

He didn’t speak.

He simply waited.

She would tire. Eventually. And when she did… the lesson would begin.

Because she was human.

And soon, she would understand what that meant.