Page 74 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

For one breath, she is there.

Then she is gone over the edge.

My body moves with no plan except reaching her.

I launch myself across the ramp as upward gravity drags us toward the open shaft. One hand catches a structural rib. Pain rips through my shoulder. My other hand closes around Anita’s wrist as she swings out over the inverted void, the archive case strap caught around her body and the case itself hanging below her toward the sky that has become a pit.

Her eyes are wide.

Real fear strips every clever word from her face.

“Ghar!”

Her voice breaks on my name.

The sound tears something open inside me.

I clamp both hands around her wrist and forearm, digging my claws into the seam of her sleeve to keep her from slipping. The bond hits with such force that the world narrows to her pulse under my fingers and the impossible distance below or above or whatever direction death has chosen. My own voice comes out raw, nothing like command.

“I have you!”

A plasma bolt flashes past us and disappears into the shaft.

Brakk fires upward from somewhere behind me, cursing in Fratvoyan. Sira shouts a warning. The ramp’s silver lines pulse again, and the gravity field stutters between directions. Anita’s weight jerks downward, then upward, then sideways, each shift threatening to rip her from my grip.

Her sleeve begins to tear.

Panic floods me so suddenly that I no longer recognize my own breathing.

“Hold on!” I shout.

“I’m trying!”

“Drop the case!”

“No!”

“Anita, drop it!”

“No!”

The answer is pure terror and pure stubbornness. It should infuriate me. It does infuriate me. It also tells me she is still herself, even hanging over an impossible shaft while fanatics fire on us.

I brace one boot against the support rib, ignore the way the shifting gravity grinds my knee sideways, and pull.

Vakutan strength can lift a ton in stable conditions. These conditions are not stable. The ramp fights me. Gravity claws at her body in alternating directions. The archive case adds weight, drag, and madness. Pain flares through my injured shoulder until my vision whitens at the edges.

I pull harder.

Anita rises inch by inch.

Her other hand scrabbles against the stone and finds nothing. I snarl through my teeth and haul her high enough that she can hook one elbow over the support. The sleeve finally tears, but by then I have an arm around her waist. I drag her against me and roll both of us behind cover as gravity slams back into its original direction.

We hit the ramp hard.

Neither of us moves.

The firefight continues around us, but it feels distant through the thunder of my pulse. Anita is beneath me, alive, breathing in ragged gasps with the archive case trapped between us. Her hair has come loose around her face. Dust streaks her skin. Her eyes lock onto mine, enormous and shaken.