The Space Empress He Craved

Chapter 5

POV: Lyra

Sleep came in fragments, broken by dreams of dying females and a father's curse.

When my chronometer showed 0300, I surrendered pretense and stared at the bioluminescent ceiling. The soft blue glow pulsed in rhythm with the station's life support systems—a mechanical heartbeat measuring out the hours until everything changed.

Through the bond—that void-cursed connection I couldn't sever completely—Orion slept restlessly. His consciousness leaked nightmares into mine like radiation through a cracked hull. Vera's face, gentle and trusting. Her blood spreading across the marble. His inability to save her, his arms held back by guards loyal to his father.

Then the dreams shifted. To me.

Heat flooded through our connection, unwanted, undeniable. In his sleeping mind, I was beneath him, my opalescent skin shifting through colors as his hands explored. Rose to crimson to gold. My back arching. My voice saying his name—not the title, but the name, Orion, breathless and wanting. His lips tracing the plasma scar on my arm before moving lower.

I slammed my shields up so hard my temples throbbed.

Even in sleep, he wanted me. The intensity of it terrified me more than any Rogue attack.

I severed the bond entirely and let my mind drift to older memories. Safer memories. The ones that reminded me why children mattered more than any match ever could.

The orphanage on Station Twelve. The memory rose unbidden, sharp as the day it happened. Thirty-seven children, youngest barely three cycles old, huddled in the evacuation center while Rogue ships tore through the outer defenses. The evacuation shuttle held forty. The caretakers—five adults, all terrified—had been panicking, trying to choose which children to leave behind.

I'd been there as a military escort. Twenty-two cycles old, fresh from my first command, still naive enough to believe the galaxy might be fair.

"Take my seat," I'd told the head caretaker. A middle-aged Kaelari female with kind eyes and trembling hands. "I'll buy you time."

Her pathways had shifted to shocked white. "Commander, you can't—"

"Thirty-seven children need you. They need someone who knows how to calm them, feed them, love them. I know how to fight." I'd pressed my sidearm into her hands. "Go. Now."

Their faces when the shuttle launched. Relief mixed with guilt mixed with something like awe. The smallest one—a girl with silver-blue skin and enormous dark eyes—had pressed her palm against the viewport. Watching me as they escaped into the void.

Her pathways had pulsed grateful pink. The color of hope surviving.

"Thank you," she'd mouthed through the transparisteel.

I'd survived. Barely. Three days in a failing life pod, oxygen depleting, temperature dropping until frost formed on my skin. When rescue finally came, my pathways had gone so dim the med-techs thought I was dead.

But the children lived. All thirty-seven of them.

That's what mattered. That's what always mattered.

Then there was Station Seven's crèche evacuation, two cycles later. A memory I rarely allowed myself to examine. Twelve children trapped behind blast doors, atmosphere venting through hull breaches. The maintenance shafts were the only route—passages so narrow my shoulders scraped metal with every movement.

My skin had shifted to pain-grey, staying that color for hours as I crawled through darkness. Blood from scraped shoulders made the surfaces slick. Twice I'd gotten stuck, panic rising like bile, claustrophobia screaming at me to turn back.

But I could hear them. Through the metal, through the failing atmosphere, I could hear children crying.

Found them huddled together in a storage compartment, the oldest—a girl maybe ten cycles, with fierce amber eyes and pathways cycling through terror-orange—sheltering the younger ones with her own body. She'd arranged emergency blankets over them, was telling them stories to keep them calm while the air ran out.

"We're going to die," she'd whispered when she saw me. Not a question. A statement of fact from a child too young to understand death but old enough to recognize it.

"Not today," I'd told her. "Not any of you. Not while I'm breathing."

All twelve made it. The scars on my shoulders from those maintenance shafts still ached when atmospheric pressure dropped. Small price.

Children were sacred. The one truth mining colonies and Core Worlds agreed on. Create life, protect life, give the next generation something better than you had. It was encoded in Kaelari DNA, this drive to nurture, to protect, to continue.

I wanted children.

The admission hurt like a plasma burn. The desire burned in me like reactor fuel—constant, consuming, never acknowledged because what was the point? Five rejections meant five failed chances at conception. No bond meant no children for Kaelari. Our biology required the psychic connection for reproduction—a cruel evolutionary joke that tied our fertility to emotional vulnerability.

But now there was Orion.

My skin shifted to dangerous gold—the color of desperate hope, of risk, of choices that could destroy me.

If I conceived before he discarded me, I'd have something. Someone. A child who'd never know their father was an Emperor who used their mother for politics, but a child who'd be loved. Protected. Given everything I never had in Sector Seven's mines.

The mathematics was cold. Calculated. Exactly the kind of survival thinking that mining colonies bred into you when the alternative was extinction.

My door chimed, shattering the calculation.

"Commander Ash?" A station aide, her voice nervous through the metal. "Urgent communication from Blue Crescent Station."

I crossed to the door, accepting the data pad with steady hands. The aide fled like I might bite—probably she'd heard about the assassination attempt. Word traveled fast on stations.

The message was from my second officer, coded priority alpha. I decoded it with trembling fingers, then read it again because surely I'd misunderstood.

"Emperor Orion formally betrothed to Lady Vespera of House Thane. Ceremony postponed due to diplomatic summit, but contracts signed three cycles ago. Source: intercepted Core World communications, verified by multiple channels. She travels to meet him at current location. Arrival: 72 hours."

Betrothed? Contracts signed? Three cycles ago?

My skin went shock-white, then grief-blue, then something cold and grey I'd never felt before—the color of betrayal, of hope dying, of being exactly as stupid as I'd always feared.

He has a bride. An actual, contracted, politically-arranged Lyrokan bride. And he's been pursuing me anyway. Kissing my wrist. Sending desire through our bond. Calling me his match.

The assassination attempt made sudden, horrible sense. Lady Vespera—or her family—eliminating competition before she arrived to claim what was contractually hers.

I laughed—a broken sound that echoed off the crystalline walls of my borrowed quarters. Of course. Match number six wasn't special. Wasn't different. Wasn't anything except a temporary distraction before his real match arrived. A final taste of forbidden Kaelari before he settled into proper Lyrokan nobility.

But then—

I thought of his nightmares. Vera's face. His desperate please don't run. The genuine terror when someone tried to poison me.

He's doing it again. Pursuing forbidden fruit while contracted elsewhere. And last time, the forbidden fruit died.

My skin flickered through rapid colors—fear-yellow, anger-red, grief-blue, and underneath it all, that stubborn gold hope that refused to die no matter how many times I killed it.

I should run.

Pack my things, take the next transport to the outer rim, forget this entire summit and this impossible, dangerous, contractually-unavailable male.

Instead, I thought of children's faces pressed against viewports. Of silver-blue skin and grateful pink pathways. Of a girl with fierce amber eyes whispering "we're going to die" and me proving her wrong.

One night. That's all I needed.

I'd give myself one night with him. If I conceived, I'd have something real—something no one could take from me, no contract could dissolve, no assassination could steal. A child. My child. Purpose beyond survival.

If I didn't conceive, I'd disappear before Lady Vespera arrived. Spare myself the humiliation of being set aside for his proper match.

Survival calculus. Mining colony mathematics. The kind of thinking that kept you alive when nothing else would.

Through the bond—I'd accidentally reconnected in my distress—Orion stirred. His consciousness reached for mine, warm and wanting, still fuzzy with sleep.

Lyra? His thought brushed mine like fingers against skin. You're distressed. What's wrong?

Nothing. Go back to sleep.

His presence wrapped around me through the connection—protective, possessive, hungry even half-awake. I want to see you. Now.

My skin flushed rose despite everything. Despite the betrothal. Despite the lies. Despite knowing exactly what I was—a placeholder, a ghost, a temporary comfort before politics reclaimed him.

Tomorrow.

Now—his need pulsed through the bond, raw and desperate. I can feel your fear. Let me help.

You can't help. You're the problem. You and your contracts and your bride and your centuries of emotional damage.

I severed the connection again, harder this time. Felt him reaching after me, confused and wounded by the rejection.

Seventy-two hours until his bride arrived. Seventy-two hours to make my choice.

My skin settled to determined steel-grey—the color of mining colony survivors, of those who'd learned to take what they could before the void took everything.

Mining colony girl. Match number six. Future ghost. But maybe—maybe—mother first.

The void takes everything eventually. But I'd steal what I could before it was noticed.