We crossed a line.
And I’d do it again.
CHAPTER 12
NAULL
Ihadn’t meant for it to happen like that.
I’dthoughtabout it—of course I had. Hell, I’d dreamed it more nights than I’d care to admit. The curve of her jaw in low light. The way her eyes burned when she argued. The sound of her voice when she dropped the sarcasm and just...spoke.
But I hadn’t planned on that moment.
Not in the containment vault. Not with the fire behind us and the oxygen tank redlining. Not while we were floating in zero-G, stripped bare by pressure and panic and something older than both.
Yet when she said my name—like it was something sacred—I forgot how to think.
And when she kissed me?
I forgot how tobreathe.
I’ve been in warzones. Faced monsters that make your bones hum with fear. But nothing—nothing—has ever broken me the way she did in that flickering, smoke-filled room.
Not because it was wild.
But because it wasreal.
She didn’t flinch.
She didn’t hold back.
And when we sank down together, skin to skin, tangled in heat and hunger, she looked at me like I wasn’t just a weapon in someone else's war. Like I was a man. Like I washers.
And that?
That undid me.
I don’t remember walking back to my quarters after the emergency lift. I don’t remember nodding to the techs, pretending my pulse wasn’t still racing, pretending my mouth didn’t still taste like her.
I just remember locking the door behind me and sinking into the dark, the silence pressing in heavy around me.
I didn’t expect her to come.
But she did.
No knock. No announcement.
Just the soft hiss of the door, the shift of air as she stepped inside, and the quiet click of it sealing again behind her.
I turned.
She stood there, still in her base layers, eyes shadowed, jaw set—but not tense. Not angry. Just...determined.
“Aria.”
She didn’t answer.
Didn’t need to.
