Page 152 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

I know I would stand between Anita and harm even if every star in the universe admitted it had no opinion.

“I know I do not want to lose you,” I say.

Her face crumples slightly before she steadies it. “That counts.”

“It feels small.”

“It isn’t.”

“It feels insufficient.”

“Most true things do at first.”

I pull her into my arms carefully, giving her every chance to resist. She comes to me with a soft, broken sound that buries itself beneath my armor and finds the living wound beneath. I hold her against me while the cold chamber hums around us. Her body is warm, solid, and shaking. Mine is larger, stronger, and no less shaken. The bond moves between us, but it no longer feels like an answer forced into my blood. It feels like a question we are both still allowed to answer.

The silence does not stretch empty. It fills with breathing, with contact, with the distant murmur of the archive and the soft scrape of Anita’s fingers tightening against my armor. I feel no divine hand settle over us. No ancient certainty descends. No Precursor blessing repairs what has broken.

Still, I am not alone.

That has to matter.

Anita lifts her head. “We need to go back.”

“I know.”

“Brakk is probably either worried or trying to steal something that will kill him.”

“Both are likely.”

“And Sira should not be left alone with those records for too long.”

“No.”

She studies my face. “Are you ready?”

“No.”

“Good. Me neither.”

I release a slow breath, and though it does not cleanse the wound, it enters me without turning to ash. “Then we go back unready.”

“That might be the most honest plan anyone has had on this planet.”

I look once more at the chamber’s broken pillars and dim silver veins. Nothing sacred waits here. No certainty hides under the stone. No voice rises to tell me my life has not been wasted.

But Anita’s hand remains in mine as we turn toward the corridor.

Perhaps meaning does not wait.

Perhaps it is carried.

And as we walk back toward the archive, toward danger, toward a truth too heavy for any one soul to hold cleanly, I begin to understand that the absence of destiny is not the same as emptiness.

It is terror.

It is freedom.

It is Anita choosing to stay beside me when neither of us knows what the universe means anymore.