Page 8 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

“You can barely stand.”

“I am standing with enormous personal flair.”

“You are trembling.”

“Because it is freezing and your planet is rude.”

“It is not my planet.”

“Then stop acting like you own every bad decision made on it.”

His nostrils flare. For one insane second, I think he might argue. Instead, he turns his head slightly toward Teren. “Escort Doctoral Candidate Prentiss back to command. She needs evaluation for shock.”

I bristle at the title even though he used the correct one. Maybe because he used the correct one. “I do not need evaluation.”

“You crossed into an unstable zone, touched an unidentified ruin-adjacent surface through contaminated gear, experienced acute disorientation, and are now arguing with the head of security while your pulse is elevated.”

“My pulse is none of your business.”

His gaze dips briefly to the side of my throat, where my traitorous heartbeat is apparently staging a public uprising. “It became my business when you ignored my perimeter.”

The words are ordinary. The look is not. Beneath the discipline, beneath the irritation, something shaken and unwilling moves behind his eyes. It scares me because it is not possession. It is not the smug certainty I expect from people who believe fate has handed them a person like property.

It looks like dread.

That is worse.

Because I understand dread.

I clutch my scanner tighter, grounding myself in its hard rectangular shape and the little crack across its display. “Listen to me, Commander Wall. I came here to study a ruin that may rewrite half of known history. I am not interested in getting derailed by folklore with a pulse.”

“I am not a commander.”

“Security Wall, then.”

“Ghar.”

“I did not ask.”

“You will use my name if we are going to argue this often.”

The sheer nerve of that almost steadies me. “We are not going to argue often.”

“We have known each other for twelve minutes.”

“And look how beautifully we’re doing.”

Teren steps carefully through the gate and approaches like he is trying not to startle a bomb. “Anita, maybe we should actually head back. Not because he’s right in a broad philosophical sense, obviously, but because if Director Halvek finds you in the fracture zone before orientation, she’s going to peel all of us like fruit.”

Brakk nods. “And I refuse to die because an academic and a Vakutan got weird at each other near the murder wall.”

“We did not get weird,” I say.

Brakk looks at Ghar, then at me, then at the space between us. “Sure.”

The exposed symbols shimmer faintly behind Ghar’s shoulder. I want them with a hunger that feels almost physical. Answers wait there. Real ones. Not temple stories. Not colony myths. Not the cheap frauds I grew up watching desperate tourists buy from men who knew exactly how to fake awe.

But my hand still tingles from touching Ghar.