Page 84 of Alien War Daddy's Got Rizz
Still here.
I slice through the lock with the edge of my arm blade and slip inside like smoke. The air’s stale. Dust on every surface. The perfume she used to spray to keep her clients calm still lingers in the vents—citrusy, cloying, synthetic.
I find what I’m looking for behind a false panel in the floor: the original matchmaking dossier.
The one that started everything. The one that lied. The one that sold me to Yara as something curated. Clean. Professional.
I laugh. It sounds broken.
I take the file anyway.
She needs to see what they planned for her. Who played her. How deep the hooks really went.
With the dossier in hand, the picture is complete.
When the final file’s in place, when every corrupted line of Tidball’s shadow empire is documented in crystalline detail, I sit down. Not to rest. To breathe. To think.
Because now comes the hardest part.
Returning.
Facing her.
Not as the man she used to let kiss her spine in the morning. Not as the lover who memorized the sound of her laugh. But as the storm that kept her safe. Even when she didn’t ask. Even when she told me to go.
Even when it broke me.
I can’t undo the blood on my hands. I don’t want to. But I can give her the one thing no one else ever has.
The truth.
Raw. Unvarnished. Merciless. Like me.
I close the case file. Slide the drive into the interior sheath of my coat.
I stand.
And I walk into the night. Not toward forgiveness.
But toward her.
CHAPTER 14
YARA
The silence in the boardroom is a scream no one hears.
I sit at the head of the table—my table, or what used to be—and watch as a legal execution unfolds. Polite voices. Clinical hand gestures. Smiles sharpened to razors. Everyone’s dressed like nothing’s wrong, but I can feel the ambush in my teeth.
“We’ve reviewed the terms, Ms. Greenfield,” says the woman across from me, sleek and glacial in a cobalt pantsuit. “There’s no precedent for halting the takeover at this stage. You ceded majority leverage two quarters ago.”
I stare at her.
Because I don’t understand the words.
Not really.
Not through the static rushing in my ears.
