Page 96 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

Sira looks pained. “She knows how to wound.”

Ghar steps closer to the nearest projection column, searching for the signal path. “Brakk.”

“Already on it,” Brakk says, dragging a tool from his belt and moving toward a ribbed wall panel. “I am about to commit technical blasphemy against the death cult’s murder intercom.”

The voice remains calm. “You may still prevent wider catastrophe. Surrender the archive, and the remaining witnesses will be spared unnecessary pain.”

Ghar looks toward me.

For all his withdrawal, all his fear, and all the things he will not say after the kiss, his concern cuts through the chamber as clearly as light. That look is real enough to hurt.

I need his affection to belong to him.

The admission nearly knocks the breath out of me.

Not because I want him. I already know that, unfortunately.

Because I want the wanting to matter.

Brakk drives his tool into the wall panel with a shower of silver sparks. “Everybody cover your ears if you like them attached to your sanity.”

A shriek of feedback blasts through the chamber. The Choir broadcast fractures into static, then collapses.

Silence returns too heavily.

I stand beside the open archive case while the phrase PLAYFUL CREATION CYCLES fades slowly from the air. My hands shake for reasons that have nothing to do with exhaustion now.

Ghar walks toward me, stopping closer than he has since the small chamber but still leaving careful space.

“Anita,” he says quietly.

I look up at him.

His face carries too much at once: fear, restraint, injury, anger, and something softer that he keeps trying to bury under all the rest.

I want to ask if the softness is real.

I do not.

Instead, I close the archive case with a trembling hand. “We keep moving.”

His eyes hold mine. “Yes.”

Sira lifts her head toward the lower exit as if listening to the ruin breathe. “The nexus has opened another path.”

Brakk yanks his smoking tool free from the wall. “Of course it has. Nothing says emotional healing like deeper cosmic infrastructure.”

I pick up the archive case and turn toward the newly lit passage before I can say anything dangerous.

Behind us, the larger fragment fades into darkness, but the idea it leaves behind does not fade at all.

The universe may have begun as an accident.

The truth may destroy people who are not ready for it.

And Ghar may want me in a way neither of us can prove belongs entirely to us.

I walk into the next corridor with all three possibilities burning in my chest.