Page 19 of Accidentally Fearless

"I know."

"It was reckless. It was improper. It was—" He stopped. His jaw worked. The bioluminescent marks on his arms were bright. A hard, burning amber that meant he was fighting himself. "It was the most effective argument anyone has made in that chamber in three years."

"I know that too."

He leaned against the opposite wall. I'd never seen him lean. The posture was so different from his usual rigid bearing that it frightened me more than Therak's motion had. This was a man who was exhausted well beyond sleep deprivation. Exhausted at the bone. At the foundation.

"Vrex. Tell me about the valley."

He flinched. His scales flattened along his jaw and his shoulders locked, his bioluminescence guttering like a candle in wind.

"Therak knows something about why this war matters to you personally," I said. "He's using it. I watched him aim at you in there—not at your strategy, not at me. At you." I stepped closer. "I can't help you fight something I can't see."

He was quiet for a long time.

"The valley contains my family's ancestral land," he said. "The eastern ridge. The central pass. The meadows along the river. All of it."

I waited. His words came slowly, pulled from somewhere deep.

"My parents were warriors. Both of them. They fought in the previous territorial war over this valley. Twenty years ago. The same land. The same dispute, recycled through generations because neither side will accept permanent defeat." His voice was steady, but it was the steadiness of someone narrating a wound. "My mother fell defending the eastern ridge. She was killed by an energy blast during the third day of a sustained assault. She was forty-one."

My throat tightened.

"My father held the central pass alone for six hours after his unit was overrun. He held it because he knew the pass was the only approach to the civilian encampments behind the line, and if Krenix's forces—Krenix's father's forces, at that time—broke through, the evacuation would fail." He paused. The bioluminescence along his arms had gone almost dark. "He did not survive his injuries. He died in the field hospital three hours after the ceasefire was called. The war ended in a draw. The valley was divided. His sacrifice preserved the evacuation but did not resolve the dispute."

"Vrex." My voice came out barely audible.

"I was young. Not yet of age for military service. I watched from the civilian encampment." He looked at the wall behind me, his amber eyes reflecting the light. "I could see the ridge from there. I could see the fires."

The corridor was quiet. The sounds of the base continuing its operations—footsteps, machinery, the faint hum of communications equipment, were distant. Here, there was nothing but his voice and the steady pulse of the building around us.

"I entered military service the day I came of age. I trained. I rose through the ranks. I applied specifically for this command. This specific campaign, over this specific valley, because it was the only thing I had wanted since I was a child watching the ridge burn." He turned to face me.The pain in his eyes wouldn't heal because he wouldn't allow it to. "Therak knows this. He knows my connection to this land compromises my objectivity. He has told the Council, privately and repeatedly, that my emotional attachment makes me unfit."

"Does it?"

"Yes." His answer was honest and unflinching. "I have defended the eastern ridge beyond its strategic value because my mother died there. I have committed resources to the central pass that should have been deployed elsewhere because my father held it. My officers know. They follow me regardless, but they know."

I took a step toward him, then another. We were close now—close enough that I had to tilt my head back to see his face, close enough that the heat radiating from his body was tangible.

"You should have told me," I said.

"Would it have changed your tactics?"

"No. But I would have understood why you fight the way you do. Why you're so rigid. Why breaking from the traditional approach feels like—" I searched for the right words. "Like breaking from them. From your parents. Because they fought traditionally. Because every time you consider doing something different, it feels like you're saying their way wasn't good enough."

His scales flared. Not in anger, but in recognition. The shock of being seen in a place he'd kept hidden.

"Yes," he said. Barely a sound.

"Okay. Then here's what we do." Another step. We were very close now. "We win this war using every legal tactic available. Including the ones your parents never used. And we win it for them. Not the way they fought. But for the reason they fought. Because the valley matters. Because the land matters. Because you matter, and you've been carrying their war for twenty years, and you deserve to put it down."

He stared down at me. His breathing had changed— slower and heavier. The bioluminescent marks along his arms were doing something I hadn't seen before. Not pulsing. Not dimming. Glowing. Their steady light cast long shadows on the corridor walls and turned the space between us into something luminous and alive.

"Rory," he said. My name in his mouth was different—rougher and more urgent.

I reached up and grabbed the collar of his uniform and pulled him down to me.

He came willingly—more than willingly. The moment my hands touched his collar, his own large hands settled on my waist, lifting me effortlessly until my feet left the floor. I wrapped my arms around his neck.