Resisting her has never been my strength.

It has always been my choice.

I stand in a tailored suit that costs more than most people’s rent, looking like composure personified, because that’s what I do now. I am the quiet anchor. The steady presence. The man who learned restraint the hard way.

I have a wife.

I have a child.

Karma is my heart outside my body, and I would burn the world before I let anything touch her.

That life requires loyalty. Discipline. A kind of steadiness that doesn’t crack when temptation breathes too close.

And then Ra locks eyes with me.

Across the room, across the noise, across all the careful architecture of choices we made.

Starbound Dyad.

You don’t outgrow it.

You don’t rationalize it.

You don’t politely file it away because life moved forward.

It remains.

Ra is standing there like a goddess pretending to be social. Gold on her skin. Burgundy braids like a crown. Power held so tightly it makes the air feel electric.

She smiles at something Tyler says.

Then her attention shifts.

I feel Mehen before I see him.

The room changes temperature the way it does before a storm. Ra’s breath pauses. Her chin lifts slightly.

She is aware.

She is always aware.

Mehen doesn’t touch her. He doesn’t need to. His presence is pressure. Hunger disciplines into patience. It’s obscene in its restraint.

My jaw tightens.

The wolf in me rises instantly, territorial and ancient, but I do not move.

Because I am not a creature of impulse anymore.

I am a man of vows.

Still—God help me—I am tired of waiting.

Tired of pretending this bond is quiet when it is a gravitational wound. Tired of acting like fate is finished with us because we chose different lives.

Ra looks back at me again, and something inside me aches so sharply it feels like devotion.

She doesn’t ask.

She doesn’t plead.

She simply looks.

And the look says, You still feel it.

I do.

I always will.

But loyalty is not the absence of hunger.

It is hunger disciplined into choice.

So I stay where I am.

Friend, for now.

Anchor, for now.

Because I am not convinced the universe is done with either of us.

And the most dangerous part?

Ra doesn’t look away.