Page 12 of Alien War Daddy's Got Rizz
“I know.”
“Of course you do. That’s how this whole thing works, right?” Her tone’s even. Witty. But her fingers flex beneath mine, testing.
I let go, slow and deliberate.
“Do you always meet your matches looking like a myth out of a military recruitment poster?” she asks.
I laugh. It rumbles deep in my chest, the sound curling up from somewhere raw. “Only when I want them to remember me.”
Her eyes narrow just slightly.
“So this is a performance?”
“No. This is me.” I pause. “I don’t perform. Iam.”
Yara tilts her head. “And what are you, exactly?”
“Yours,” I say.
She goes still.
Not frozen. Not alarmed.
Still—like a power core right before ignition.
I watch her closely.
The flutter in her throat. The way her breathing skips, then regulates. The twitch of her jaw. She’s processing. Calculating. And underneath all that—feeling.
I can smell the adrenaline. Taste it on the recycled air. She's scared, but not in a way that makes her shrink. Not in a way that smells of retreat. This iscuriosity. This is a hunter catching wind of something rare and deciding whether it’s dangerous or delicious.
She’s braver than she knows.
“So,” she says slowly, “what did you tell Molly to get a meeting with me?”
“Nothing,” I say truthfully. “Molly owed someone something, and I was the call that came due.”
Yara’s eyes flicker. “That doesn’t sound… legal.”
“Neither is being interesting in public.”
She laughs.
It surprises both of us.
There’s a hint of wild in her laughter. A kind of desperate freedom, like a songbird in a sealed dome who just found the door unlocked. She clamps down on it fast, but it’s there.
And I like it.
A lot.
“Let me guess,” she says, voice still light. “You’re not really in the matchmaking pool.”
“I am now.”
She folds her hands in front of her, measuring me. “This feels more like an ambush than a date.”
“Maybe it’s both.”
