Page 22 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

I wasn’t afraid she’d kill me; I was worried she’d find out I was scared. There’s a difference. A matter of pride. Vaelith heritage.

I set the table as if it mattered. The steak, real, not vat-grown, black-market provenance, acquired through the dangerous quid pro quo. The wine was vintage enough to get me court-martialed. And the jammer, battery already running hot, its red diode blinking like a heartbeat on the edge of panic.

The spread was a confession, an apology, a bribe, and I didn’t know which one Fern would taste first.

She arrived late, of course. She wore the same Accord civilian uniform from yesterday, but looser, as if she’d unbuttoned the structure out of it.

Hair in a tangle, face freshly scrubbed, the skin around her left eye still shadowed from an ancient bruise.

She looked, if possible, more dangerous out of context than in.

Like she’d taken off her armor just to see what it felt like to breathe.

She didn’t look at the food, or the wine, or me. She circled the room, slow, every movement a dare, as if waiting to see if I’d break before she did. She stopped by the window, stared out at the city, then at Vireleth’s silhouette blotting out the horizon.

Fern didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.

She leaned into the view, bracing both hands on the glass, and stared at Vireleth with such intense focus that, for a moment, it seemed they might collapse the intervening kilometers through sheer narrative gravity.

Her mythic resonance bled into the air, burning off emotional ozone and warping the containment shimmer to a hazy aurora, bands of color that crawled across her skin in geometric fractals.

The room picked up on her mood and vibrated with an almost-audible hum, as if physics itself had clocked in to bear witness.

She drew a breath that should have been impossible for any single pair of lungs, shuddering, hungry, cosmic, and exhaled a filament thread of raw mythfire that left a phosphorescent afterimage over my retinas.

The trail lingered in the air, shimmering like bioluminescent ink, then faded into nothing except the memory of brightness.

For one heartbeat, time stretched; Vireleth’s silhouette responded in kind, rearranging her orbit to throw a corona of false daylight through the window.

It was a courtship or a challenge, or both.

Fern’s gaze never wavered from her mythic twin above the city, but when she finally pivoted away from the window and locked eyes with me, I felt it in my teeth.

It was like staring into a searchlight: disorienting, hot, and impossible to look away from for any length of time.

She walked to the table, eyed the steak, the wine, then the jammer.

She grinned, not bothering to hide the teeth.

“Did you make this, or just pay off the cook?” she said.

“I made it,” I replied, and hated the way it sounded.

She sat, hands in her lap, then reached for the steak. No knife. Just the edge of her fork, carving through it like butter that had been waiting its whole life to be wanted. She tore off a bite, chewed slow, and—

Fern moaned.

Not loud, but the kind of sound that echoed anyway. Low, throat-slick, unfiltered. The lights overhead flickered. The jammer skipped a beat. Somewhere, outside, a security drone lost altitude and crashed into someone’s illegally rigged power line.

Her eyes never left mine, not even through the aftershock.

“This isn’t protocol,” she said after a swallow, her voice ruined and velvet and entirely too pleased. “If I had to guess, you’re supposed to be interrogating me right now. Or collecting a blood sample.”

I shook my head. “This is unofficial.”

“Bold,” she murmured, licking a trace of juice from her thumb. “Dangerous, even.”

She reached for the wine, poured a glass with the casual grace of someone who’d definitely never done it before, and took a sip.

Her throat worked, slow and deliberate, and I couldn’t help but watch the motion. Not watching wasn’t an option; her myth demanded witness.

She froze, eyes widening a fraction. Then she swallowed and let out a sound that barely qualified as a sigh, but it still made the air between us shift. Her fingers tapped once against the glass, knuckles whitening for a heartbeat like she was grounding herself.

“Holy shit,” she murmured. “That’s not bootleg. That’s sex in a bottle.”

Fern set the glass down with a clink, her eyes still locked onto mine. “So, Dyris, is this an interview, a seduction, or a firing squad?”

I felt my cheeks heat. Not fear, definitely not shame, but the slow, horrifying realization I’d completely lost control of the scene I’d set—every Director’s nightmare. “That depends on how you answer.”

She leaned forward, elbows on the table, that lazy grin returning, but her voice dropped half a register. Low. Sweet. Criminal. “Ask, then.”

I tried. I really did. I had a list of questions, none of which I could remember now. I forced myself to recall the first one: “Why did you let it escalate? You could have stopped the mythship, or run, or even surrendered. But you stayed.”

Fern’s eyes darkened. “Because running never worked for me.”

I waited. She waited longer. I gave in first.

“It’s not that simple,” I said. “If you were anyone else—”

“But I’m not,” she said, voice suddenly sharp. “I’m me. And you’re still trying to decide if that means I’m a threat or a trophy.”

The truth of it stung.

She took another bite, chewed, swallowed. “Want to know what I think?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

“I think you’re lonely,” Fern said. “Not just now. Always. I think the only reason you’re here, instead of hiding behind protocol, is because you wanted to see what would happen if you let yourself go off-script.”

She leaned in, closer. I could smell the steak, the wine, the faint ozone burn of the containment field around her skin. “You ever go off-script, Dyris?”

I bristled. “I am the script.”

Her laugh was a low, broken thing. “Sure.”

The meal proceeded in silence, punctuated by Fern’s small noises of appreciation for the steak and the wine. She ate with the slow relish of someone who’d gone hungry a long time, then decided to never be hungry again. I didn’t eat. I drank, but only enough to keep my hands from shaking.

When she finished, Fern wiped her mouth on a napkin and regarded me. “So. Was this your idea of a peace offering, or did you just want to see if I could be bribed with meat and nostalgia?”

“Neither,” I said. “I wanted to see if you’d accept.”

She stood, circled the table, and stopped behind me. I felt the heat of her body at my back, not touching but close enough that every hair on my arms stood up.

“I’m not the one who needs a peace offering,” she said, her breath warm in my ear.

I stiffened, but didn’t move. “What do you want, Fern?”

She set her hands on my shoulders, gentle, but the weight was absolute. “Want? I want to see how far you’ll go before you break.”

It was a challenge. Not a threat.

I stood, slow, brushing her hands off with deliberate force. I turned, found her staring at me with a mix of amusement and hunger that should have been beneath her, but wasn’t. For a moment, I thought about kissing her. Instead, I said, “I don’t break.”

Her smile widened, and she stepped back, giving me space.

“Maybe not,” she said. “But you bend.”

She walked to the couch and sprawled on it, letting her body fall open in a way that was both calculated and completely unselfconscious. “Come sit,” she said, patting the space beside her.

I hesitated, then did as she asked.

We sat in silence, the only sound the low hum of the jammer as it burned through its remaining battery. She reached for my hand, and I let her take it. Her fingers were warm, her touch almost clinical.

She traced a line up my wrist, to the inside of my elbow. “You’re not like the others,” she said.

I shook my head. “I’m not like anyone.”

“Wrong,” she said, softer. “You’re just like me.”

I shivered. “That’s not possible.”

She turned my hand over, palm up, and pressed her thumb into the hollow. “You don’t want to be here. You want to be free.”

“Is that what you think you are?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.

She nodded, slow. “I was. Once. Now I’m just… not contained.”

Her thumb pressed harder, then let go. She looked up, met my gaze, and held it.

I wanted to break the silence, to explain myself, to justify the entire disaster of this “meeting.” Instead, I asked, “Why did you come?”

Her eyes flicked over my face, searching for the answer. “Because I thought you might understand.”

I knew, in that split second where Fern paused and let the world settle around us, that I was in real trouble.

The kind that didn’t have a protocol or an after-action report, the kind that rewrote its own rules line by line.

There are moments when the future branches, when every possible outcome fans out into infinity, and you know with crystalline certainty that you’re about to step onto the branch you’ll remember for the rest of your life.

Or at least until someone edits your memory with a military-issue amnesia scalpel.

She closed the gap between us in an optical illusion, a slow stalk that felt like freefall.

The mythic hum in the air thickened and went sticky-sweet, as if someone had poured honey over the room’s nervous system.

Every sense sharpened: the whirr of containment filters in the wall, the high-and-lonesome whistle of city breezes scraping distant towers, my heartbeat thumping arrhythmia against my ribs.

Fern leaned so close her breath ghosted along my cheekbone. “You’re a coward, Dyris,” she whispered, as if reciting a sacred litany meant only for my mitochondria. “But you’re the bravest coward I’ve ever met.” My name sounded different on her tongue, like it belonged to someone who’d earned it.