Page 89 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

She does not look away this time.

I do not feel only trapped by what ties us together. I feel wounded by it, frightened by it, drawn through it, and uncertain where my own will ends inside the storm. Yet when Anita’s fingers brush mine once before she moves ahead, the ache that follows belongs to me completely.

Above us, the Choir keeps cutting through the ruins.

Below us, the archive waits.

I follow Anita into the dark with blood cooling on my skin and the taste of her still on my mouth.

CHAPTER 13

ANITA

The taste of Ghar stays with me longer than the smoke.

That is an inconvenient, humiliating, and extremely poorly timed fact, so naturally my brain presents it to me every few seconds while we descend through another vein of impossible architecture beneath Nareth-Kul. The passage below the small chamber curves through warm black stone, its walls ribbed like the inside of some colossal mechanical throat. Silver lines pulse beneath our boots in slow intervals that match the archive case Sira carries at her side. The air is warmer here than in the upper ruins, almost feverish, and it smells of heated minerals, old metal, and the sharp sterile bite of power systems waking after a sleep longer than history.

My mouth still remembers his.

My hands still remember the shape of his jaw under dust and blood.

My body, the treacherous little committee of nerves that it is, remembers the way he held himself back even when fear and hunger had stripped us both raw. That restraint should soothe me. Instead, it makes everything more complicated, because restraint implies intention, and intention is the part I can’t trust.

Ghar walks several paces ahead with his weapon raised and his back rigid.

That distance is new.

He is still guarding me. Of course he is. The man could be unconscious and probably still arrange his body between me and a threat through sheer stubborn muscle memory. But there is a coldness in the space he keeps now, a deliberate caution that did not exist before he kissed me like the ruins were collapsing and I was the last breathable air in the universe.

I hate that I notice.

Brakk notices too, because the universe remains committed to my suffering.

The Fratvoyan limps beside me with the fusion cutter balanced over one shoulder, grease-streaked fur clumped with dust and blood. He looks from Ghar’s back to my face, then back again. His whiskers twitch with the effort of not saying something.

“Don’t,” I warn him.

Brakk lifts his brows. “I didn’t say a word.”

“You were about to.”

“I was merely thinking a word.”

“Think quieter.”

Brakk glances toward Sira, who walks with the archive case held carefully in both hands. “Moon lady, tell her I have a right to my private thoughts.”

“Your private thoughts are remarkably loud.”

Brakk points at her in triumph. “See? I am being spiritually oppressed.”

Despite everything, a tired laugh escapes me.

Ghar’s shoulders shift ahead of us. He heard it. He hears everything.

He does not turn.

The small omission lands harder than it should.