Page 110 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

I look down at the galleries to keep my expression steady. Below us, a Choir soldier adjusts Sira’s collar. She remains upright, but her shoulders tighten before she masters the pain.

My hand closes around the tactical lens until the casing creaks.

“I have cared about people,” I say.

“I know.”

“I buried them anyway.”

“I know that too.”

“No, you do not.” My voice drops. “You know the shape of it. You do not know the weight.”

Anita’s anger falters.

I should stop. The mission requires clarity, not confession. Yet the words come because Rolaev ’s transmission, Sira’s capture, Anita’s accusation, and the ruin’s quiet pressure have stripped too much of me raw.

“I have stood over squads I trained and decided who could be carried, who had to be left, and who needed a mercy shot before the enemy reached them,” I say. “I have made survival calculations with names attached. I have lived long enough to learn that compassion without discipline can become another kind of murder.”

Anita’s face tightens with pain. “And discipline without compassion becomes Rolaev .”

That strikes clean.

Brakk exhales through his teeth. “Well, damn.”

I look at Anita then, really look at her. She is exhausted, bruised, smeared with dust and old blood, carrying the archive that may shatter worlds, and still every part of her is angled toward the captured woman below. Rolaev is using that compassion as bait. That does not make the compassion foolish. It makes Rolaev vile.

The truth of it moves through me slowly and painfully.

Anita steps closer, her voice lower now. “I am not asking you to throw everyone away for one person. I am asking you not to become so good at surviving that you forget why survival matters.”

The bond stirs, but the feeling that rises with it is not simple instinct. It is recognition of the person in front of me: maddening, brilliant, wounded, and unable to accept a world where the right thing becomes disposable because the odds are ugly.

I look back down at Sira.

“She may die if we act,” I say.

Anita’s voice trembles. “She may die if we don’t.”

“They may take you.”

“Then don’t let them.”

The answer is reckless enough to anger me and trusting enough to hurt.

I turn away because my chest has become too tight. “You should not put that on me.”

“I’m not putting it all on you,” Anita says. “I’m standing beside you.”

“Anita.”

“What?”

“If they take you, I don’t know what I will do.”

The admission silences her.

Brakk becomes intensely interested in checking the charge on a smoke capsule.