Page 5 of Fourth

Her mouth flooded with the heat of his blood—sharp, electric, wrong.

The ship’s projection system shorted for a single breath, unable to compensate for the sudden breach. His disguise collapsed.

And then her gaze locked onhim.

That was when she froze.

Riv’En didn’t move. He saw the exact moment her brain caught up to reason. Saw the disbelief crack and morph into something far from recognition. His height. His skin—dark, Vettian—tall, with long black hair falling past sharply angled shoulders, skin holding the faintest translucent shimmer from his mother’s people, the Elaroins, with their camouflage ability. His black eyes were flat and depthless, shadowed by inverted brows that arched like blades, and his pointed ears were unmistakably nonhuman.

There was no doubting what he was: alien. No part of him could pass as anything from her world. Not even remotely. He wasn’t just alien. He was beyond anything her world could’ve prepared her for. And she saw it infull.

The illusion had shattered the instant her teeth sank into him. Her jaw surged against his collarbone, her recoil just as fast, spitting as if she’d touched live current. He registered the instant shift in her vitals—shock, terror, heightened alertness—but his focus narrowed to a single fact: she had tasted him. His blood. Something ancient and innate recoiled at that contact, and yet another part of him froze in pure, animal stillness.

He’d become exposed in a way he hadn’t since his first kill, as if she had reached inside his defenses and torn open something primal he didn’t know how to sealshut.

He had bled in battle. He had bled in interrogation rooms. But never like this. Never for a captive. And never where it mattered.

She gazed at him with unmitigated fear.”What the hell are you?”

“I am Riv’En, Fourth of Alpha Legion and an Intergalactic Warrior. Iam half Elaroin on my mother’s side and half Vettian on my father’s.”

“You say that like it should mean something to me. It doesn’t.” She struggled against his hold, anguish filling her expression. “Let me go! Send me back home.”

Riv’En didn’t release her. But his grip shifted, tightened by compulsion, not training. It was not about restraint anymore. It was about connecting himself to something physical, something real, before the rest of him fractured around the pressure building inside. His breathing wasn’t steady anymore. And for the first time since she woke, something flickered behind hiseyes.

Not anger.

Not pain.

Recognition. Not of her face, but of something deeper. An echo. The primal kind that lived in his blood long before memory.

It pulsed through him now, quiet but relentless, alow-frequency signal he couldn’t block. It wasn’t understanding. It wasn’t even knowing. It was compulsion, bone-deep andancient, as if something inside him had already decided she mattered, that she belonged to him, even if he didn’t knowwhy.

He exhaled slowly, dragging his focus back to the present. To her. She was still watching him, chest rising in hard, uneven breaths, eyes furious with fear rippling behind that fury. He forced his gaze over her features like he might scan a field report—measured, objective, detached.

Blue eyes. Blown pupils. Atrace of his deep green blood clinging to her lips. Slight tremor racing through her body. Classic resistance profile. Nothing exceptional.

And yet, his gaze returned to her mouth, unable to lookaway.

The data told him she was unremarkable. Human. Contained.

His suspicions told a different story.

Still, he clung to the data like a lifeline. Numbers, metrics, labels, all the comfortable scaffolding of logic. Because if he let go of that, he was not sure what would rise in its place. Only that it would have teeth. And want. And hunger.

She glared at him, anger overcoming fear, chest heaving with the effort of holding herself together, appearing as though she could bite through steel. Her wrists strained against the bands, her muscles flexing in furious rhythm. The restraints groaned in protest, metal creaking under the tension.

Sharp red welts bloomed along her skin, stinging with each pull, asilent, searing testament to her refusal to yield. She wasn’t just resisting. She was branding herself with her defiance.

“What are you? Why am I here?” she demanded. “What do you want from me?”

This time, he spoke.

“As I said, Iam an Intergalactic Warrior. Adirective was issued. From Third.”

She blinked. “I don’t know what any of that means.”

He watched her. Still. Careful. Processing.

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