Still, his words brought me back to the reality we were talking about. "How do you know?"
"Because," he rubbed his palm over his face like he didn’t want to see my expression when he said, "because that's how we died."
I hadn't thought anything else could surprise me, but it did. His words rang deep inside me; they sounded and felt true.Fuck!
Fuck!
This was true. All of this was true.
"What happened?" I wanted to know.
"Drones." Xyrek’s voice was low, rough, edged with something I had never heard from him before—not frustration, not irritation, but something colder. "The Ohrurs used drones to hunt us down, then they killed us with sound and air."
I barely breathed as I watched him. His posture was controlled, arms crossed over his chest, but his fingers twitched—like he was reliving the horror of it. The same horror I had felt before I passed out.
"They didn’t even need to fire a weapon," he continued in a flat voice. "They sent in waves of machines that changed the pressure around us, like twisting a dial between life and death."
I swallowed, the weight of his words pressing into my chest like an invisible force.
"First, the air felt thick—like breathing in liquid metal. Then, the pressure dropped so fast it felt like your lungs were being ripped apart from the inside."
My stomach twisted. For a frightening moment, that was exactly what I had experienced.
"Some must have died instantly—blood vessels burst, brains swelled, lungs collapsed." He exhaled sharply, and his jaw worked so hard that I worried about his molars. A shiver ran down my spine, but I couldn’t look away.
"The drones emitted a low-frequency sound—something deep that crawled under your skin and into your skull. It shook people apart from the inside out." His fingers curled into fists. "Organs ruptured. Nerves misfired."
My entire body shook at the images he called up in his brutal style. He wasn't the type to sugarcoat things, but damn, I wished he had this time. The silence that followed felt thick, suffocating—as if even the ship around us could feel the weight of what had been done to him, to us. I forced down the lump in my throat and whispered, "How did you survive?"
Xyrek’s gaze met mine, and for a moment, there was something unreadable in his black eyes. Something that made my pulse spike for reasons I couldn’t quite explain.
"I didn’t," he said simply. "The Xyrek you’re looking at? He died on Darlam."
The words shouldn’t have affected me the way they did, but a sharp pang twisted deep in my gut because I believed him.
The thought of him dying, or having died, scared me. I couldn't imagine a world without him. "But if you died…" I trailed off, trying to find the right words to express the rampant thoughts running through my head. "Then how… where were you reborn?"
"That's one of the things I need to figure out."
"We," I took his hand and pressed it. "We, Xyrek. This is about both of us. And… Zaarek?" I cocked my head. "That was your brother, right?"
"Yes."
"But he's also one of the other Space Guardians?" I tried to wrap my head around it.
Xyrek pulled up his comm, opened a cube, and showed me an image of the other Space Guardian. "Except for having shorter hair in this image, he looks exactly like the male from my dream. Like how I remember my brother."
There were probably a million psychological explanations for this. Like his mind had made up the whole thing, given his brother the name of the other Space Guardian, and made him think they looked the same. But I didn't believe so. I really didn't. Whatever we were going to hypothesize, we needed to work under the assumption that all of this was true.
I reached out and placed my palm on his face. "Let's not talk about this anymore," I pulled him closer. "Kiss me. Let's forget about this for a while."
"Gladly," he said before his lips sealed mine. Emotions washed through me. Strong emotions. I held on to him like I hadn't seen him in years. My hands moved up and down his muscled arms, arms that felt more familiar than they should have.
A deep tenderness overcame me as Xyrek's strong arms enveloped my body, pulling me flush against his broad chest. His lips moved against mine with a desperate hunger as if he, too, was overwhelmed by the strange sense of longing and familiarity that had seized us both.
Xyrek's hands roamed my curves possessively, igniting my skin wherever they touched. A soft moan escaped my lips as his mouth trailed hot kisses down my neck. I arched into him, craving more of his touch, his taste, not just from physical desire but from something deeper. Something was changing inside me, or remembering. I wasn't sure which any longer. All I knew was that his touch ignited a fire I had never felt before.
"Alice," he growled against my throat; his deep voice vibrated through me and sent shivers racing down my spine. The way he said my name, with such raw need and reverence, made my heart clench almost painfully in my chest.
