Page 111 of Alien War Daddy's Got Rizz
Mine again.
It should feel like a coronation.
Instead, it feels like a wake.
I findhim in the atrium.
He’s standing at the edge of the balcony, just outside the security camera's frame—like he always is—one arm braced against the railing, gaze lost somewhere past the sprawl of city lights bleeding through the fog. He doesn’t turn when I enter, but I know he hears me. Grau always hears me.
I don’t bother with pleasantries.
“Tell me,” I say.
He tilts his head slightly, but still doesn’t look. “Tell you what?”
I walk until there’s no distance left between us and stand at his side, heart pounding. “The truth. The real one. Not the cleaned-up version. Not the one you think I can stomach.”
Finally, he looks at me.
The light catches his profile—sharp, shadowed, haunted. There’s blood beneath his fingernails again. And something in his eyes that looks like regret. Or maybe just exhaustion.
“You’re sure?” he asks, voice low.
I nod, once. “I don’t want to guess anymore. I want toknowwhat loving me cost.”
His expression doesn’t change.
But something in his posture shifts—something weighty, like a man about to lower a blade he’s been holding up for too long.
“All right,” he says. And then he begins.
He doesn’t soften the edges. Doesn’t spare me.
He starts with names. Locations. The night Vakez disappeared between transport docks. The fixer in the atrium garage, breath rattling in his throat while Grau knelt beside him, whispering how it all ends.
He tells me about the banker who broke after a forged warrant showed up on her doorstep. About the board member who turned on Tidball the moment his daughter’s offshore surgery was “unexpectedly” canceled.
He tells me who he bribed. Who he blackmailed. Who he erased.
“They weren’t innocents,” he says, after a while. “But they were yours. Part of your world. And I made them mine. That’s on me.”
I listen.
My hands clench and unclench at my sides. I press my fingernails into my palms until it hurts—until the sharp, grounding pain is the only thing that keeps me from flinching.
I knew. Deep down, I knew.
But hearing it aloud? Feeling the full weight of it laid bare between us like bones on a slab?
It cracks something inside me.
“You didn’t have to kill them,” I say, though my voice is more breath than sound.
“I didn’t kill them all.” His tone is so calm it’s almost cruel. “But the ones I did... I did for you. So they couldn’t come back. So they couldn’t touch you again. So no one could.”
“That wasn’t your choice to make.”
“No. It wasn’t.” He looks at me, finally, really looks. “But I made it anyway.”
