Stars exploded behind Seyn’s eyelids, pleasure like no other sweeping through his body. He groaned and went limp on the desk, breathless and shocked to his core. Vaguely, he was aware of Ksar saying something and his ejaculate spilling against his stomach, but he barely registered it.
He was floating. He felt so good. He felt like he was born anew, aftershocks of pleasure making him smile dumbly.
And then reality came crashing back.
Seyn shoved Ksar off and scrambled to his feet. His hands shaking, he fixed his fly, his stomach turning when he saw the sticky mess at the front. No, he wasn’t thinking about that.
Behind him, Ksar snorted. “It’s hardly the end of the world,” he said in his infuriating monotone. “It doesn’t have to mean anything. Stop panicking.”
Refusing to look at him, Seyn stormed out of the room, confused, horrified, and disgusted to his core.
What had he been thinking?
How could he have done that—now that he was finally free?
Chapter 8
Seyn stared at his niece, watching in fascination as she played with her legs.
Three months away from birth, she was already beautiful, with perfect little fingers and toes and a cute frown on her wrinkly face. He could sense her emotions a little, even through the thick walls of the artificial womb. She was confused about something. It was kind of amusing, considering that she was playing with her own legs.
“What are you doing here?”
Seyn flinched, his body tensing involuntarily. Shit. Even after thirteen days without the bond, he still had trouble dealing with abrupt sounds.
“Just came to say hi to my favorite niece,” Seyn said, turning to smile at his older brother.
Jamil snorted and sat down next to him. “She’s your only niece,” he said, lightly touching the womb with his fingers. “Good morning. How is my beautiful girl today?”
The baby didn’t react at all, the womb’s walls too thick for her to hear her father.
Jamil’s expression was wistful. “Sometimes I wonder if she feels lonely in there. I know it’s ridiculous. We all were born that way, and we turned out fine.”
“Define fine,” Seyn said with a snort, and Jamil’s lips curled into a crooked smile.
Silence fell over the room.
“Maybe it isn’t that ridiculous,” Seyn said after a while, watching his niece pensively. All telepathic races considered casual physical touch invasive because of touch-telepathy, but modern Calluvians touched each other very rarely compared even to other telepathic species. “Maybe we aren’t much for physical touch because we got used to being isolated from before our birth.” It was an interesting thought. Harry was the result of a natural pregnancy and he was definitely more touchy-feely than him.
Jamil shrugged, a strand of dark brown hair falling into his eyes. He pushed it back. “Maybe.” His face contorted into a smile that looked more like a grimace. “In any case, the point is moot. I’m lucky that I can have her at all—that Mehmer had preserved his genetic material just months before he…”
Wincing, Seyn sent him a wave of reassurance and comfort, not having missed the way Jamil’s deep voice had cracked a little at his dead bondmate’s name. Admittedly, offering comfort to his big brother felt a little awkward and strange. Jamil was generally the one who did the comforting when his younger siblings needed it, never vice versa.
Sighing, Jamil reached out to him through their familial bond. “I’m fine, kid.”
Seyn hugged him back telepathically, carefully suppressing his own strength; he couldn’t let his brother notice how much stronger his telepathy was nowadays. Thankfully, Jamil didn’t seem to notice anything, his mind still a little hazy and distracted, tinged with grief. It had been only eleven months since his bondmate had died.
Sometimes Seyn wondered what it was like to have a perfectly good, functional bond and a bondmate one actually loved only to lose them in such a horrible way. It was a good thing he would never know.
“Are you, really?” Seyn said, feeling a pang of guilt for being so distracted by his own problems.
Jamil shrugged again, his firm jaw clenching a little. “I still reach for his mind sometimes, but it’s getting easier, I suppose. The mind adepts said the bond will heal in time and all I will feel is absence.”
That didn’t exactly sound reassuring.
“I still don’t get why they don’t remove the bond from your mind,” Seyn muttered, even though he could guess why the mind adepts refused to do that even after one’s bondmate’s death. On the rare occasion a torn bond compromised the health of the surviving bondmate’s mind, they were bonded to someone else again, provided there was a suitable candidate available, like it had happened to Ksar. But unlike Ksar, Jamil was too old to be bonded again, even if he wished to do so. Everyone else his age was paired up and a thirty-four-year-old man could hardly be bonded to a child. Other widowers and foreigners were options, Seyn supposed, but it was frowned upon in their social circles. Marriage was considered to be for life, even if one outlived their spouse by many years. Widowers generally didn’t marry a second time, especially when they were royalty. Jamil effectively had little choice but to be alone for the rest of his life.