Page 160 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

She lifts one hand, not in attack but toward the central archive field. Rings of hidden code flare around her wrist, old fragments answering the ones she carries.

Sira cries out. “She has a destruction key.”

The archive’s outer rings begin to turn faster.

Rolaev looks past Ghar at me, and the ideological distance between us collapses into something painfully human. She is not a villain in my mind anymore. That would have been easier. She is the road I could become if grief got to finish my sentences.

“Forgive me,” she says.

I step around Ghar despite his attempt to stop me. “No.”

The word cracks through the chamber.

Rolaev ’s hand freezes.

“You do not get forgiveness in advance like a permit,” I say. “You want to destroy the archive, then own it. Do not ask me to launder it into mercy for you.”

Her eyes flash. “You arrogant child.”

“Yes,” I say. “Maybe. But I am an arrogant child who finally understands the stakes, and I am still telling you no.”

The archive roars.

Light erupts from the central hollow, silver and blue and violently white, throwing our shadows huge across the impossible walls. The terraces tremble beneath us. Brakk shouts something profane. Sira calls my name. Ghar grabs for me, but the preservation field surges between us, not separating us fully, only forcing distance enough to make terror bloom in his eyes.

Rolaev ’s destruction key burns above her palm.

The final archive answers mine.

Silver threads snap around my wrists, not restraining, not gentle, but demanding a decision.

Rolaev and I stare at each other across the oldest truth in existence, two women shaped by the same horror and split by what we believe horror permits.

She believes mercy means silence, even if silence must be built from graves.

I believe truth must survive, even if survival requires restraint I once would have called cowardice.

Neither belief feels clean.

Neither woman looks away.

CHAPTER 24

GHAR

The archive chamber shudders around us as if the buried world has finally grown tired of holding its breath.

Silver light snaps across the terraces in violent threads, bright enough to carve shadows into the black stone and leave hot ghosts behind my eyes. Beneath my boots, the floor trembles in deep, uneven pulses that travel up my legs and into my chest, where both hearts answer with a rhythm too hard and too fast for calm. Around the central hollow, the archive rings turn with increasing speed, their ancient surfaces grinding out notes so low I feel them in my teeth before I hear them in my ears.

Rolaev ’s destruction key burns above her palm.

Anita stands across from her with silver threads wrapped around her wrists, her face pale beneath the archive light and her eyes blazing with fear she refuses to surrender to. The preservation field still separates us by only a few paces, but those paces might as well be vacuum. I test the barrier with one hand and pain flashes up my arm, sharp and cold enough to numb my claws.

“Anita,” I growl.

“I’m okay.”

“You are not.”