Page 37 of Claimed By the Alien Assassin
A beat.
Then we share the kind of kiss that tears apart science and superstition. I taste noodles, wine, steel, and starlight. I taste home—and wild.
He pulls back, breath loud in the dim glow. “I never told anyone.”
“Nobody I would burn on sight,” I admit, voice soft though my heart’s beating like drums.
“Why not?” he asks, quiet thunder.
I smile so hard it hurts. “Because you’reyou. Scales, claws, four-eyed anomaly—you’re mine.”
His jaw works. Tears glint—not tears, exactly, but something like relief. “Mine too.”
We lean back, foreheads touching. The noodles go cold. Wine grows sharper.
Outside, a dawn bird sings somewhere—a trill so foreign I forgot planets still birthed that.
He whispers, “Together?”
“Together,” I echo, voice steady.
And for the first time, I feel how deep this could go—across myth, war, galaxies.
Because secrets aren’t always poison.
Sometimes they’re the spark that binds souls.
Morning light filters through the dusty holo-screen, painting Dayn’s face in soft gold. My heart tugs, tangled and real, and I feel my breath catch in my throat. He’s lying beside me—bare, vulnerable—image inducer discarded on the table, skin cobalt and scaled, eyes closed but peaceful.
My chest tightens. Iamin love with someone my colony’s textbooks would call a monster—something children are warned against viewing in nightmares. But horrors are not roots, and I am not afraid anymore.
I trace the line of his jaw, smooth transitions between alien texture and pure humanity. There is no dissonance, only harmony. His breathing is velvet, steady. I cup his cheek. That dark curve of his reeds in my palm is softer than starlight and stronger than steel.
The hunger for normalcy bleeds out of me. I think of Snowblossom—the fear, the silence, the surrender—and of him, who didn’t give in. Heheld back. Hechoseto fight on behalf of everyone else. Every damn drop of restraint was wood chiseling a pillar of honor in a world that expected monsters to destroy rather than protect.
The scent of him—smoke, oil, ancient earth—wraps around me like a promise.
He twitches, eyelashes flick open. His gaze meets mine—four eyes, unconditional. One human pair, one deeper set, glowing faint silver in the morning haze. My whole world sways with it.
“Hey,” I whisper, voice hollow and full at once.
“Hey.”
He lifts a scaled hand and presses it to my collarbone. Warmth blooms from that touch, a tide in the vessels of my chest.
“You okay?” he asks—each syllable rough, caring, vulnerable.
I swallow. My hands tremble. But I lean in anyway, brushing my lips along the ridge of his thumb.
“I... I pick you.”
My words tumble, simple but seismic. My fingers trace scars—ours and his. I let it sink into my skin, the certainty of it, the revolution it births in my soul.
“You choose me,” he murmurs, voice brittle with relief, pain, something raw and tender.
“Yes.” I cradle his face. “Monsters, legends, soul-stealers...they’re stories. But you? You’re real. And I love you.”
He closes his human eyes, and his extra ones glimmer like distant constellations. He nods, slowly, as if the weight of it all could reshape the gravity of his bones.
