Page 83 of Alien War Daddy's Got Rizz
But I’m not risking this. Not this. Not after what he did to her.
The work consumes me, devouring hours and days alike.
The more I build, the less I sleep. I don’t eat unless it’s something I can chew while slicing through firewall code. I don’t speak to anyone. I stop shaving, stop bothering to rewrap the bandage around the bone spur in my left shoulder that tore free last week during a fight with a smuggler who didn’t want to give up a data cache.
I let it bleed.
Because every drop feels like proof that I’m still moving forward. Still becoming the thing I have to be to finish this.
A shadow, not a man. A Reaper.
And not the kind the galaxy still tries to pretend doesn’t exist. Not the folklore. Not the propaganda. The real kind. The kind they whisper about in broken dialects on fringe worlds. The kind that doesn’t flinch, doesn’t falter, doesn’t forgive.
The kind built for war.
Just when the exhaustion threatens to drag me under, a ping on the console wakes me up.
A contact in the lower rim gets me what I need next: a sound file. Low-quality, fuzzy around the edges, but clear enough to count.
Tidball again. Softer this time. Intimate.
He’s talking to Yara.
“You have to trust me,” he says, gentle, soothing. “Grau’s dangerous, Yara. You’ve seen it yourself. The unpredictability. The temper. The way he… fixates.”
Silence on the other end.
Then her voice. Quiet. Wrecked.
“I don’t want to believe that.”
And fuck me if it doesn’t hit harder than a plasma bolt to the chest.
Because she didn’t say she does believe it. Just that she doesn’t want to. Which means she’s already halfway convinced. Which means I’m already halfway lost.
And it shouldn’t matter. But it does. It does more than I want it to.
That ache pushes me through the final miles of code.
I keep going. Even when my bones ache. Even when I can't look at myself in reflective surfaces because what stares back isn’t someone she’d recognize.
I keep building the case. Because it’s all I can give her now.
The truth.
That’s it. Not apologies. Not flowers. Not some whispered "I’m sorry" over a bottle of recaf at dawn. She’s too smart for that. Too strong.
She doesn’t need excuses. She needs clarity. She needs the data laid out like a war map, every move accounted for, every motive exposed, every weapon stripped and laid bare. So that when she looks at Tidball, she sees not a mentor, not a partner—but a parasite.
And maybe, just maybe, she sees me again.
But the digital trail isn’t enough. I need the origin point.
I return to the place it all started.
Molly Jaiden’s office.
It’s been stripped. Empty. She left months ago, ran for the outer colonies after I shook her tree the first time. But her old files, the ones she thought she hid too well?
