Page 126 of Alien War Daddy's Got Rizz

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A real one.

The doors to the chamber open.

Four corporate enforcement agents walk in, expressionless and efficient. They head straight for the back row, where a gaunt, pale man is already pushing to stand.

He’s in a cheap suit now. Hands trembling. Hair disheveled. The mask has fallen off, and what’s underneath is pathetic.

He tries to speak.

No one listens.

They cuff him.

Not violently.

Surgically.

And as he’s escorted past me, I catch his eye.

“Everything you taught me,” I say softly, “I unlearned. And everything you tried to steal—I took back.”

He doesn’t speak.

Just stares like he’s seeing me for the first time.

Let him.

Let the world.

I step off the podium, not to applause, but to silence.

Respect.

Fear.

Something new.

And when Grau joins me, doesn’t speak, just places one hand lightly on my back, I don’t lean in. Don’t falter.

I nod once.

Then walk off into the future I built.

One signature. One takedown. At a time.

The holdingfacility smells like recirculated air, stale coffee, and regret. It’s sanitized, sterile, everything wrapped in layers of fake civility, but I know better. The walls hum with static. Cameras track my every step. The guards don’t bother hiding their curiosity as I’m escorted down a too-bright corridor lined with reinforced glass cells.

He’s in the last one.

Jonathan Tidball.

Once a king in this world, now nothing more than a man in a beige jumpsuit that does nothing to hide the tremor in his hands. He sits with the precision of someone trying to appear calm, but his eyes twitch when he sees me, flicking to the guards, then back to my face. There’s an awful sort of hope in his expression, the desperate kind. The kind that thinks maybe the past still holds power.

“Yara.” His voice catches on my name like it’s a hook. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

“I wasn’t either.” I don’t sit.

He stands. Slowly. Like he wants to close the distance between us, but something in my face warns him off. Good.

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