Page 27 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

I handed her the file. It was all there: Kaela’s secondment order, my new job description (“narrative liaison,” as if there were any narrative left to liaise), even the part where Fern was supposed to sign off on my full-time assignment as “Sexretary.” The last bit was underlined in VR-bold, like Kaela expected I’d miss the joke if she didn’t annotate it.

Fern took the slate, scrolled through all fifteen pages with one brutal flick, and tossed it onto the bench beside us. She didn’t even look where it landed.

“So, I own you for real now?” She cocked her head just enough to make her hair slide over one eye; on any other mythic, it’d be calculated; on her, it was just physics. Like gravity had picked her as its favorite toy.

My mouth was dry. “If you want.”

For a second, she just looked at me. No masks, no weaponized smile, just something old and starving waking up behind the gaze of the most consuming woman I’d ever met. I knew in that instant that every previous cycle of my existence had been prep work for this moment of being devoured alive.

“Good,” she said. The word hit like an event horizon.

Then Fern kissed me. Not gentle or cruel or even theatrical, just total, like she wanted to see what else in me could collapse.

Her hands found my collar and yanked me down into her orbit (yes, literally; yes, my toes left the ground), and her mouth burned wild against mine with all the subtlety of a star going nova.

In another life, I would have counted: three seconds until loss of breath, five until complete dissociation from reality, eight before surrender took over completely.

But here it wasn’t about numbers or power curves or mythic escalation, it was about how much of myself I could pour into a single point of contact before my own legend ran dry.

I let her.

I let her drag me into the present tense, tasted the sweat and static off her skin, felt her hands thread through my hair, and clench like she could pull out every memory of anyone who came before her.

There were sensors everywhere in this garden; half a hundred feeds would be flagging this as “inappropriate,” “not suitable for security review,” “potentially hazardous to galactic morale.” Let them watch.

Let them broadcast every second of it across three spiral arms. For once in my office-caste life, I was exactly where I needed to be:

Under someone else’s thumb, mouth, will, or name.

When she let go (or maybe when I remembered how lungs worked), we stumbled back against the cold glass wall and stood panting there for a minute while the sky rotated silently above us.

I meant to say something scathing or clever about power dynamics or public relations, but instead what came out was: “You’re really not afraid of anything anymore.”

Fern smiled with her whole face, a wild, stupid grin nobody would ever believe unless they saw it up close, and said, “Do you know what it means when you run out of things to lose?”

I shook my head; she smelled like ozone and truth serum.

“It means you start making your own rules.”

“You’ve still got things you could lose, Fern. Your parents. A sentient coffee-pot. Me.” I countered.

Something ancient, dark, and terrible, older than consequence, deeper than reckoning, rippled through the air as Fern’s eyes changed.

“Not happening,” Fern said, low, certain, dangerous.

“Besides, like EternaDiamonds…” She leaned in, breath warm against my ear, her tongue micrometers from contact as she enunciated each word.

Somehow, I almost heard an old HoloNet jingle playing throughout the garden, Fern’s mythic narrative grasping the garden and shaking the music out of it.

“Sexretaries are forever.”

We both laughed then, because what else could you do?

The joke wasn’t on us; we were the punchline baked into every Accord protocol from here to whatever endgame waited outside causality’s reach.

For the first time, I understood: I wasn’t just hers to ruin, I was hers to keep.

I had signed up for the long haul, signature still wet, scrawled messily with a pen made of red flags.

And honestly? You’d have done the same.

The garden’s perimeter alarm went off at that exact moment, a polite chime that somehow failed to diminish our mutual intoxication by even one photon, and Fern reached past me to grab the still-warm file slate off the bench.

She tucked it into her waistband without breaking eye contact. “So, what’s next? You're going to try to talk me into compliance? Guilt me with House duty?”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” I said honestly (and hated how true it sounded).

She came closer again, not for kissing this time but so close our foreheads touched, and whispered, “Then let’s go break something important.”

It wasn’t an impulse. It was a new law of motion.

We left together through three layers of security field (all sufficiently distracted), ducked under two redundant surveillance drones (one of which Fern disabled by flicking a pebble at its lens), and made it halfway across Glimmer’s upper deck before either of us realized we’d forgotten our shoes.

She didn’t slow down; neither did I.