The first light crept in like a secret, soft and gold, slipping between the shutters and laying warm bars across the tangle of sheets. The ship breathed with the tide—wood sighing, ropes whispering, hull shouldering the slow swell—and in that hush Andy woke to the weight of two different heartbeats leaning into him.
Left side: Nia. She'd folded herself over his arm in sleep, cheek pillowed on his shoulder, auburn hair flung everywhere in a riot of silk. She was all warmth and soft breaths, every exhale a brush of heat across his skin. Her fingers had found his sternum sometime in the night and stayed there, as if her palm were a seal pressed over the pulse that belonged to her.
Right side: Aurelia. Not feigned this time—awake, bright, intent. Andy didn't realize how close she'd drifted until he felt the slow, deliberate glide of her palm across his chest, mapping him like a hunter tracing a familiar range. Her hair spilled in loose gold over his bicep; her gaze, when he met it, was sunlit mischief wrapped around a steel certainty.
"Morning, Silverblade," she murmured, voice low enough not to wake the world, warm enough to stir it. Her thumb circled lazily just below his collarbone. "You're very… present. Given what you survived last night."
Andy's throat went dry. "Aurelia."
"What?" A playful tilt to her mouth. "Compliments are polite."
"You don't sound polite."
"Maybe I'm not trying."
Heat flickered under his skin, the way it always did in the breath before a fight—only this was a different kind of combat entirely. Andy kept his voice a whisper. "Nia's sleeping."
"Is she?" Aurelia leaned in, golden lashes lowering, the shape of her smile turning wicked. "Are you sure? The cabin didn't sound very asleep."
He closed his eyes, mortified and somehow amused. He'd fought monsters that ate light and men who wore crowns. He had never trained to handle this: a hunter's grin inches from his mouth while his fiancée dozed on his shoulder, satisfied and unsuspecting—or, knowing Nia, very much suspecting.
"You're trouble," he breathed.
"I'm opportunity," Aurelia returned, like a promise. Her hand glided higher in a confident line that made his heart lurch against her palm. "And one day you'll stop pretending you don't see it."
He could feel the shape of Nia's weight against him, the way she clung in sleep as if the night hadn't been enough. The scent at her temple—salt and flowers and something that was just Nia—rose with every gentle motion of the ship. And on the other side, the hum of Aurelia's breath, steady and deliberate, like a bowstring drawn and held.
Stars help me, Andy thought, somewhere between a laugh and a groan. Put me on a battlefield with a blade in each hand and I know exactly who I am. Put me here and I'm drowning with no water.
Nia stirred then, lashes fluttering. She didn't lift her head at first; she nuzzled closer, pressing a kiss to the curve where shoulder met throat, an unthinking claim that made his pulse jump under Aurelia's fingers. When Nia finally blinked up, the sleep in her eyes cleared fast. She registered one detail, then another: her position, his smile trying not to exist, Aurelia's hand spread boldly over the center of his chest.
Nia's mouth curved—slow, sharp, amused. "Good morning," she said, voice husky. "I see someone woke early to… housekeeping."
Aurelia didn't flinch. "Someone had to make sure the wreckage was accounted for. Your performance had structural implications."
Andy strangled a sound that might have been a cough. "Please don't use the word 'structural' about—"
"—about the ship? The ship nearly sang," Aurelia said brightly. She tilted her head, gaze sliding to the blanket—and how little of anything it covered. "And for future reference, both of you forgot something last night."
Nia lifted a brow. "Clothes?"
Aurelia's smile grew feline. "Exactly."
Only then did Andy become vividly, catastrophically aware of just how bare he was beneath the sheet and how indifferent either woman seemed about it. Heat scalded his face. Nia, shameless in a way that always unmade him, pulled the blanket half an inch higher in a gesture that hid nothing and said everything. She tipped her chin toward Aurelia, eyes lean and bright.
"You talk an awful lot for someone who didn't sleep," Nia murmured. "Judging from the way the mattress shifted after we were done."
Aurelia's cheeks colored; her fingers paused—only for a heartbeat—before resuming their lazy pattern. "What's your point?"
"My point," Nia said sweetly, "is that the ocean wasn't the only thing restless."
"Nia," Andy tried, and failed, to sound like a man in control of his circumstances. "Maybe we can not—"
"Why?" Aurelia's gaze didn't leave his. "Embarrassed? Or excited?" Her thumb dragged one last time and lifted, her palm flattening possessively as if to mark him. "You can call me shameless. I'll call myself honest."
Nia flowed up on an elbow, leaning across Andy to press a slow kiss to his jaw, a deliberate demonstration at a maddening angle that made him forget every language he knew. She didn't look away from Aurelia.
"Honesty is a good policy," Nia said, sweetness edged with steel. "So let me be honest too: he's mine."
There was no apology in Aurelia's answering smile, only a dare. "Then keep him."
Andy's breath stalled. It wasn't the threat in it; it was the faith. Aurelia didn't believe she would win by taking something. She believed she would be chosen for being exactly who she was.
He sat there, the axis of a small and beautiful storm, and felt his heartbeat hammer. His right hand—unauthorized by any sensible plan—lifted to cover Aurelia's fingers where they rested against his chest. She stilled. Surprise flickered across her face, followed by triumph, followed by something like relief.
"Don't," Nia said—quiet, not quite a warning, not quite a plea.
Andy turned, meeting her eyes. There were a hundred battles in that gaze and not one of them with Aurelia. All of them with fate. With loss. With the parts of himself he couldn't give away.
He threaded his left hand through Nia's hair, finding her scalp the way he always did, gentle, sure. "I'm not going anywhere," he said, truth settling into every syllable.
Nia's expression melted and sharpened at once. "Good."
The ship rolled; the three of them swayed into each other. For a moment they were a knot of limbs and warmth, of soft skin and stubborn wills. Andy's senses filled with details he would never be able to forget: the contrast of temperatures where Nia's cheek met his collarbone and Aurelia's wrist pressed his ribs; the way Nia's breath tickled his throat, how Aurelia's hair left a thread of warmth on his arm; the weight and give, the human fact of them. He wanted to memorize it, this fragile peace, this sizzling argument of affection.
A pale blue glimmer nudged the corner of his vision.
[Bond Synchronization: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ — 97%]
The little chime threaded through his heartbeat. He swallowed. Of course. Even the system knew when the world tilted.
Nia caught the change in his breath the way she always did. "What is it?" she asked, too astute by half.
"Nothing," Andy lied, with a smile that tried to be casual and landed somewhere near reverent. "Just thinking we've got a lot of reasons to get breakfast."
"Breakfast?" Aurelia echoed, mock-offended. "After all that I endured for the arts last night? You owe me a better reward than porridge."
Nia snorted. "You endured? You contributed commentary."
"It was high-quality commentary." Aurelia's eyes danced. "Very supportive."
"Oh, I'm sure you were very… supportive," Nia said primly, then cracked and laughed. She sank back against Andy, stealing a quick kiss from the corner of his mouth like a thief who would never be caught. "Fine. Breakfast. But you're wearing clothes."
"Which of us?" Aurelia asked, flawlessly innocent.
"Yes," Nia said, deadpan.
Andy scrubbed a hand over his face, helplessly grinning now despite the embers under his skin. "If the crew sees us like this, they'll mutiny."
"They'll applaud," Aurelia said. "They like me."
"They love me," Nia countered.
"They fear me," Andy muttered.
"They should," both women said together, then shot each other a look and—stars, mercy—smiled. Not a truce, not yet. But not knives.
The bed creaked as they shifted. The blanket made a doomed attempt to remain dignified and failed spectacularly. Andy grabbed for it; Nia let it go with the air of a queen granting clemency; Aurelia made no move to help whatsoever, because of course she didn't.
"Stop looking at me like that," Andy told them, which was unfair to the concept of stopping. "I'm getting up."
Nia set her palm back where it had lived all night, over his heart, gentle pressure that said not yet. "One minute," she murmured. "Just one. I want to listen."
"To what?"
"To this." She lowered her head to his chest and closed her eyes. "To proof I didn't dream you."
Something in Andy gave way at that, a quiet, bright break. He cupped the back of her head and kissed her hair, and feeling the way he softened, Aurelia's teasing gentled, too. She turned her hand and laced their fingers, his and hers, a neat and outrageous little knot right over his ribs.
"Claim noted," she said, voice soft for the first time. "I'm not here to steal him. I'm here because the two of you are the most real thing I've found in years. If the world is going to burn, I'd rather warm my hands at your fire than freeze by myself."
Nia opened one eye, considering. "Poetic," she decided. "Annoyingly persuasive."
"I train," Aurelia said lightly.
"I noticed," Nia muttered, the corner of her mouth betraying her.
The ship sighed again. The sunlight had climbed another inch down the wall, gilding everything it touched—the iron ring in the beam, the worn edge of a trunk, the fine copper strands lost in Nia's hair, the freckles at the very top of Aurelia's shoulder. Andy had the absurd thought that if he held perfectly still, he could keep the world in this exact arrangement forever.
He didn't. He breathed. The system hummed at the edge of perception and let him have this.
"Breakfast," he said at last, because if he didn't move soon he never would—and because moving forward was what he did, even when forward was straight into the teeth of fate. "Clothes first."
Nia kissed his throat one last time and rolled away, scandalizing the blanket afresh before snagging it with a queenly flick. "You may avert your gaze, Hunter," she told Aurelia, regal as sunrise.
"I may," Aurelia agreed with perfect sincerity, and did not.
Andy groaned and swung his legs over the side of the bed, only to be ambushed at the ankle by a coil of sheet that refused to release its prisoner. Nia failed not to laugh. Aurelia did not try.
"You command dragons," Aurelia said, eyes bright. "But not linens."
"Linens," Andy said darkly, "are worse."
Nia tossed him a shirt. He caught it one-handed, because if he failed at that too he would simply walk into the sea. When he dragged it over his head, the cotton was cool against skin that still carried the memory of last night's heat. He willed his pulse steady, and—betrayer—his heart answered by tripping instead when Nia stood and the light touched her like a benediction.
Aurelia caught the look and grinned. "If you keep staring like that, we'll never leave this room."
"Promises," Nia said, and this time Aurelia was the one who coughed.
Andy finished lacing his trousers with the stubborn dignity of a man who had lost every other battle and refused to lose this one. By the time he turned, both women were gathering themselves: Nia smoothing the fall of a light robe, fingers deft and unhurried; Aurelia tying a sash with a tug that looked like a challenge. Their eyes met in the mirror's wavy glass and did not look away.
"We can't keep… sparring like this forever," Andy said carefully.
"We're not sparring," Nia said.
"We're practicing," Aurelia said at the same time. They stopped. Blinked. Then, traitorously, both of them laughed.
He felt the laugh in his bones. He felt it all the way down. He didn't deserve this, some ragged part of him thought—this grace after everything he'd broken and been. But another part, steadier now, whispered back that the world had not been kind, and when it offered something real, you took it in both hands and swore to protect it.
A whisper of blue kissed his vision again, faint as a heartbeat.
[Bond Synchronization: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ — 97%]
[Warning: Critical Threshold Approaching]
He drew a long breath. Soon. He didn't know what the system would become—only that when it changed, everything else would, too. For now, he could give them coffee and sunlight and a joke about linens.
"For the record," he said as they made for the door, "the crew absolutely adores you both, and I expect at least three to faint when we appear together."
"Four," Aurelia said, opening the door with a flourish.
"Five," Nia corrected. "We'll walk in with him between us."
They did. The corridor was cool and shadow-striped, smelling of brine and tar and morning. Andy felt the brush of their shoulders as they moved, the unintentional sync of steps that happened when people had learned each other without meaning to. Somewhere on deck, gulls cried; somewhere below, a cook swore at a kettle. The world had no idea it was about to change.
Nia's fingers found his again, squeezing once—fierce, certain. Aurelia took his other hand not as a theft but as an answer. It should have been impossible, this geometry of hearts. It walked anyway.
"Breakfast," Nia decreed.
"Then training," Aurelia added.
"Then… whatever comes," Andy said, and meant it.
The ship rose, fell. Sunlight broke wider over the sea. And in the corner of his sight, where the system lived, a constellation he could almost name flickered and waited for night.