CHAPTER 7
ELLA
We float in the wreckage of what used to be my life.
Everything’s wrong. The light, the air, the silence—it’s all wrong.
The Seeker isn’t a ship anymore. It’s a graveyard stitched together with flickering power conduits and dying breaths. The deck plates moan like a wounded animal every time the gravity field spasms.
My lungs burn. My ears are still ringing. There’s smoke thick enough to taste, bitter and metallic on my tongue. The emergency lights flicker a lazy crimson across the debris field—like a heartbeat fading out.
And then there’shim.
Takhiss.
He moves through the ruins like he belongs here, like the world bending around us is just another obstacle to crush. Every time he turns, the amber glow of his armor catches on the shattered bulkhead, and the air seems to hum around him.
I keep telling myself I should be afraid.
He’s one ofthem. A Coalition soldier. The kind who butchered my friends. The kind who turned our research ship into a massacre.
But I’m not. Not completely.
Fear’s there, sure—pulsing, coiled in my stomach. But there’s something else under it. Something heavier. Something… alive.
Every time he looks at me, I feel it—this low vibration in my chest, like my heart’s trying to remember a rhythm that isn’t mine.
I remember his eyes in that split second before the world came apart. The heat in them. The pull.
And now, here we are, side by side in the wreckage.
I suck in a breath through gritted teeth. “Oxygen levels are falling. You feel that?”
He glances up from the torn-open panel he’s been inspecting. “Air’s thin. Getting colder too.”
“No kidding,” I mutter. I check my suit’s integrity on reflex, but it’s half-fried. The gauge blinks low pressure. “We need to stabilize a heat source or we’re going to turn into popsicles before the CO2 kills us.”
He watches me quietly for a moment, then says, “You know this ship better than I do. Tell me what to do.”
The simplicity of it catches me off guard. No dominance. No barking orders. Just—deference. Respect.
I kneel beside a cracked wall console, prying it open with my spanner. Sparks jump, kissing my knuckles. I wince but keep working. “Atmosphere control’s shot. We lost half the internal regulators when the hulls fused. But there’s still residual power in the grav-scrubbers.”
He frowns, those red eyes narrowing. “Grav-scrubbers?”
“Yeah,” I say, voice shaking slightly. “They stabilize localized gravity shifts. Small ones. They’re inefficient as hell for heating, but if I reroute the energy coils…”
“You can make fire.”
“Heat,” I correct automatically. “Contained heat.”
He studies me like I’m doing something sacred. It’s unnerving, the way he looks—like he’s memorizing every movement.
I pull a tangle of wires from a dead soldier’s compad nearby. I try not to look at his face as I do it. The guilt crawls up my throat like bile.Sorry.
I can’t afford to feel that right now. Not when my fingers are shaking and my vision keeps blurring at the edges.
He crouches beside me, silent, massive. His presence fills the corridor. I can feel his heat even through the armor. He hands me a broken relay without a word, as if he knows what I need before I ask.
