“I was mate mad, Suvi.”

I said it bluntly, my fingers at her jaw, forcing her to keep looking at me. I needed her to understand. I barely understood and remembered all of this myself, but what I did know, I had to communicate to her properly.

“I was mate mad,” I said again, my voice coming harsher. “It happens to my kind when we do not find our mates. We lose ourselves to darkness. And even now, I am still half-lost!”

Her round eyes widened.

“But you’re right here!”

“Do you not remember how I found you?” I hissed. “Did you not notice the state I was in? I was a beast! I was nothing but anger and bloodlust and pain in the shape of what once could have been called a man! I could barely see out of my eye! I used to have two, you know. Now one is gone and I don’t even know how I lost it! It’s been generations. Do you understand that? Hundreds of years lost inside the fading cage of my own mind!”

Her face was pale under the green of my fingers. She no longer looked angry, but shaken to her little human core. Good. I’d tried to protect her from what I’d gone through. Even tried, in a way, to protect myself. But now it came rushing back, and I wanted her to hear it all. To understand what I’d been through. What I’d done.

And how she’d saved me and half the blasted universe in turn.

“Who knows how many worlds I’ve smashed through?” I growled. “Who knows how many I have killed? I certainly do not! I was... I was an apocalypse, Suvi! A harrowing force no one and nothing could stop, not even me. Until you.”

Her breath snagged. Her eyes were very, very shiny. But she did not blink and she did not cry.

“Haven’t you ever wondered why I call you little star? It’s because you were the first light, the only light I could see! You were a beacon, blazing in that blackness. The first thing I was truly aware of in eons. The first thing I did not want to kill.” My fingers slid backwards from her jaw into her hair. “And now I know why. You’re my mate, Suvi. Only a stone sky god’s fated mate can pull him out of that kind of madness. Only my destined bride could have been a light in that kind of vicious, drowning dark.”

“You’ve... killed people.”

I’d killed people even before the mate madness, but I decided now was not the best of times to let her know that. I merely gave a deep rumble in affirmation.

“And, what, if I’m not with you you’ll go crazy and kill people again?” Her voice was rising higher and higher, as if every word was climbing up the back of her throat.

“Yes. I must remain with you.” I paused, then charged forward, because if I did not tell her now then when? “And I must mate you.”

Her face hardened.

“Just like that? I have no say in the matter? Doesn’t matter if I want it, want you or not? I have to be with you to keep you from going on some fucking rampage across the cosmos? How the hell am I supposed to do anything with this, Skallagrim?”

I tried to ignore the jab of her words. The words about not wanting me.

But they hurt nonetheless. And I was not proud of how that pain shaped what I said next.

“You may not want me now, but you will,” I seethed. “You will starburn for me, and I for you. And just as you were the only one who could keep me from the darkness, when you burn, I will be the only one who can help.”

“Starburn? What the hell is that?”

I frowned, trying to claw back memories that Aeshyr’s brief explanation had ignited.

“It’s like heat. Unbearable heat. You will have the urge to mate. With me,” I added with a hasty hiss, in case she got ideas about going to find some other male when she was wanting.

Not that I’d let another male get close. If they thought broken bones were bad when they would not let me past the gate...

“Heat. Oh, my God. I’m going to go into heat.” She tried to shake her head, then knocked my fingers away from her face so she could complete the movement. My instincts told me to hold her again, touch her, do anything not to let the cold distance metastasize between us. But I had at least some shred of cleverness left in me and it told me to remain still. Remain standing beside her bed to show her I could control myself, could restrain myself, could respect her wishes.

Even if her wishes did not involve my hands on her.

“Remember when we were talking about pets? And you asked why I’m not your pet because you’re taking care of me now? Well, shit, maybe I am nothing but a pet to you! Nothing but a dog. Heat!”

“I will experience the starburn, too,” I pointed out rather archly. “I will be in just as much need.”

“Great. Even better. So, we’re both fucking dogs then. Or dogs fucking, I guess. Wow.”

Tension throbbed between my wings and between my legs and between my eye and the place the other eye had been.

“I do not actually know what a dog is,” I said when she added nothing else.

“It’s an animal. Often kept as a pet by humans.”

She stared at the floor, appearing to chew on the inside of her cheek. Then her head snapped up and something like hope, or maybe relief, was clear in the set of her mouth.

All I could think when she spoke next was that I should have seen this coming.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Suvi

“But you don’t even have a penis!”

Skallagrim was very still for a moment before he jerked his snout in confirmation.

“You’re right.”

I seized on that, manic with relief. See! See! How can I be your mate when we aren’t even biologically –

But then he said something that made my thoughts, and the walls of the world all around me, entirely fall away.

“I have two.”

“No you don’t.” My reply was instant. A smack of denial quick as a slap across the face. Skallagrim didn’t have two dicks any more than I did. It wasn’t real. An impossibility confirmed by the lack of visible genitalia at the shining scales of his groin.

Lack of visible genitalia.

Oh...

Oh no.

“I can show you if you want.”

“No! No thank you!” I stammered. How did we go from teaching each other verb conjugations to him offering to show me his dick?

His two dicks! His two alien dicks!

“You’re going to rip me open!”

That was what came out of my mouth next. Not, “This will never happen,” or “You are absolutely insane, maybe even more insane than when you first found me.” Nope, somehow my practical, survival brain had skipped right forward to the actual act itself.

“I will not!” The ferocity of his reply, the biting boom of it, so much louder than he’d been speaking before, made me flinch and snap my mouth shut.

He began to pace, wings stretching inward and outward reflexively, like he wanted to fly right out of this room and only the constant movement of his feet on the ground prevented him.

“I am aware that this is all a shock to you. I am aware that perhaps I have not always been good to you. I could not help myself from taking you, but I accept that this has made you unhappy and I will have to work through the consequences of that. But Suvi!” He stopped his pacing, pinning me with a golden eye sharper than any blade. “I would never, ever, do anything to hurt you that way. I would die before that. No, do not scoff at me, Suvi!” He slammed a punishing hand against his chest. “I would die.”

His voice lowered somewhat, and he resumed his pacing.

“When your feet were injured, and they became infected, I thought I would, you know. I thought that if you died, this would all be over. Everything just... over. I have not felt a fear like that in my entire eternal life.” The next words felt like they were meant more for him than me. “I should have known who you were to me then.”