Page 71 of Claimed By the Condemned Alien

Lina’s mouth trembled.

“She made me memorize your parents’ names and Dav’s. She did that while she was frightened.”

A tear slid down Lina’s cheek.

Kesta wiped it away with the edge of the blanket rather than her hand.

“Courage isn't being the one who never breaks. Sometimes it’s deciding what matters while you’re breaking.”

Lina closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, her fingers loosened around the blanket.

“I want to go.”

“All right.”

Sera watched from the supply table, one weathered hand hidden inside the fold of her robe. Her face remained calm, but Kesta noticed the slight tremor in the exposed fingers of her other hand.

Apparently, Mira’s death had found more people than the sister who had known her.

At the infirmary entrance, Dreven waited.

He had removed his armor.

Kesta stopped for half a heartbeat.

Without the asymmetric plates and weapons, he looked less like the commander who had entered the raider basin and more like the male underneath it. A simple black wrap crossed his chest and shoulder, leaving the other side bare. Scars traveled over his bronze skin in pale lines, some jagged and clearly earned in battle, others straight enough that Kesta recognized restraint frames and surgical access.

One mark near his ribs looked uncomfortably similar to Horan’s.

Kesta’s gaze lingered.

Dreven noticed.

His eyes met hers.

For once, neither of them made a joke.

He turned toward Lina’s wheeled cot.

“May I?”

Lina seemed startled by the question.

Then she nodded.

Dreven took the handles.

He did not push until Sera had secured Lina’s injured leg and Kesta had collected the bowl of gray mineral ash waiting beside the door.

The camp had gone quiet by the time they reached the eastern fissure.

Forge fires had been lowered. Guards stood with their weapons pointed toward the ground. Children carried shallow bowls of pale dust and set them along the edges of the gathering space before retreating to their families.

Mira’s body lay wrapped in gray cloth on a stone platform suspended above the fissure.

Heat breathed upward from the planet.