Page 109 of Alien War Daddy's Got Rizz
And then I move.
Because even if she never forgives me... at least she’ll have something to come home to.
CHAPTER 19
YARA
The alert comes through at 3:47 a.m. A soft chime, innocuous, like the whisper of a dream. I sit bolt upright, heart already sprinting before my brain catches up. I reach for the tablet beside my bed with hands that don’t quite feel like mine.
One notification.
One line of text.
“Transfer Confirmed: 94.2% Ownership—Yara.”
It takes me a full thirty seconds to breathe.
Another ten before the shaking starts.
I stare at it, over and over, like the words will change. Like maybe this is some cruel illusion spun from sleeplessness and wishful thinking. But it’s real. The security encryption is flawless. The blockchain confirmation is timestamped. Everything is clean. Precise.
Final.
It’s mine.
CY8 ismine.
My name is on the company again, not as a ceremonial relic, not as some hollowed-out mascot to make investors feelprogressive. It’s carved into the foundation where it always belonged.
And I feel nothing.
No rush of triumph. No warm, cathartic release. Just a low, pulsing pressure behind my eyes and the throb of a headache blooming at the base of my skull.
I swing my legs off the bed and walk barefoot across the floor, the tile cold against my skin, grounding me. I stand at the window and look out over the city—neon veins and sleepless towers stretched wide beneath the velvet sky.
And I whisper to no one, “We did it.”
Only it doesn’t feel likewe. It feels like ghosts.
Because I know what Grau did.
Not in full. He hasn’t told me all of it—and I haven’t asked. But the edges are enough. The way he’d come home quiet some nights, blood crusted beneath his fingernails no matter how hard he scrubbed. The data leaks that were too clean to be legal. The sudden disappearances that were too silent to be coincidence.
I’m not stupid.
I know what war smells like.
And this one reeks of sulfur and ash.
I asked him once, in the dark, when we lay tangled and silent and raw, what price he thought was fair.
He didn’t answer.
Now I know why.
I move to the kitchen and pour a glass of water I don’t drink. My hands still tremble when I set it down. The reflection in the mirror across the room is someone I don’t quite recognize—tired eyes, a jaw set like stone, shoulders that haven’t truly rested in weeks.
This is what victory looks like.
