Page 36 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

“Then lie better.”

She meets my eyes. The fear is still there, but excitement burns with it, bright and reckless and impossible to contain.

“Fine,” she says. “I promise to make a sincere effort to stand in the general region behind you.”

Brakk appears beside us with a fusion cutter slung over one shoulder and a pistol at his hip. “That’s the best you’re getting, big man.”

Teren hurries after him, already fumbling with a med kit. “I hate this. For the record, I am academically opposed to all of this.”

Sira joins us without a word.

I look toward the exit, toward the cold, toward the buried route where someone has vanished inside a tunnel that should have stayed sealed.

The old battlefield instinct returns.

This time it is not whispering.

Something is hunting them.

And Anita is walking straight toward it.

CHAPTER 5

ANITA

The lower tunnels beneath Nareth-Kul feel wrong in ways my brain keeps trying to politely reinterpret as exhaustion, stress, or oxygen imbalance.

The air down here carries a mineral sharpness that clings to the back of my throat like powdered glass. Every breath tastes faintly metallic, as though ancient machinery has been bleeding into the atmosphere for centuries through fractures too old to seal. Emergency lanterns cast pale cones across black stone corridors that seem to absorb light instead of reflecting it. The walls do not curve naturally. They fold inward through impossible geometric transitions, each surface joining the next at angles that remain close enough to normal to fool the eye before quietly betraying it.

That subtlety makes the effect infinitely worse.

If the tunnels looked dramatically alien, my mind could reject them outright as spectacle. Instead, the architecture stays almost comprehensible, which forces my perception to keep making tiny unconscious corrections. My eyes insist certain corridors rise upward while the gravimeter insists they descend. Distances stretch and compress depending on viewing angle. Shadows linger too long at intersections before sliding away when directly observed.

Teren walks behind me muttering steadily under his breath. “I officially hate this place. I know I already said that upstairs, but I would like the record to reflect that my hatred has evolved into a more nuanced academic position.”

Brakk snorts without slowing. “You people always think adding the word academic makes panic sound dignified.”

“It does when pronounced confidently.”

The tunnel floor shivers beneath us with a low vibration that travels through my boots and up into my knees. Ghar immediately raises one hand, silently slowing the group while his attention sweeps the corridor ahead. The floodlamp clipped to his shoulder throws pale blue light across the black walls, sharpening the hard lines of his face and the old scars cutting through the scales along his jaw.

Unfortunately, I notice him constantly now.

That realization irritates me enough that I deliberately focus on my scanner instead.

Sira walks beside me with her usual unnerving calm. “The resonance frequencies are shifting again.”

Teren makes a wounded sound. “See, this is why I distrust spiritually serene people. You say things like that in exactly the same tone other people use to discuss weather.”

“The frequencies remain unconcerned with your comfort.”

“That somehow made it worse.”

Brakk angles a handheld gravimeter toward the floor and grunts. “Gravity flux is wobbling harder here than it did near the western fractures.”

I look over immediately. “You’ve seen this before?”

“A few times during deep scans. Small inconsistencies at first. Loose equipment drifting sideways. Dust falling in the wrong direction. One toolbox floated three feet off a catwalk and nearly gave Pell a religious awakening.”