But inside him, the yearning pressed harder than it had on the way in, sharpened now by certainty and humiliation and the knowledge that his future had been moved into the hands of a foreign powerbroker.
He had agreed.
He had given a stranger permission to procure a solution to his unravelling.
Makrath settled into the rear compartment again as the hatch sealed. He closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to contain the images that kept forming uninvited—soft human skin against jungle shadow, a voice he had never heard calling out in fear or anger, the snap of his own restraint.
The craft pulled away from the station, engine note rising.
The crew remained quiet.
No one spoke of what had been decided.
Makrath listened to the silence and discovered it no longer felt empty.
It felt like the moment before a Hunt began.
CHAPTER 7
Serafina woke with her laptop dead beside her and the numbers still wrong.
The motel room was gray with early light. She'd fallen asleep sometime after three, still dressed, the computer open on the bed next to her. Now the screen was dark, battery drained, but it didn't matter. She remembered every figure. They were carved into the inside of her skull.
She'd spent the night the way she spent cases—methodical, thorough, turning over every stone until something gave. Except nothing had given. Nothing was going to.
Personal loans. She'd applied to three lenders before midnight. Two had rejected her instantly—debt-to-income ratio, insufficient credit history for the amount requested. The third was "pending review," which meant five to seven business days. She didn't have five to seven days. She had until Thursday.
Medical credit cards. CareCredit. Prosper Healthcare Lending. She'd filled out the applications with her Social Security number and her salary and her years at the same address, and they'd approved her for fifteen thousand dollars combined. The surgery cost a hundred and eighty-seven thousand.
Her own credit cards. She'd checked the limits, calculated what she could max out if she used every card she had. Twelve thousand, maybe thirteen. Interest rates north of twenty percent, the kind that buried people for years.
Retirement. She could cash out her pension contributions, take the tax hit and the early withdrawal penalty. But the paperwork would take weeks, and after penalties she'd be left with maybe thirty thousand—less than a fifth of what she needed.
She didn't own property. Couldn't borrow against a house she'd never been able to afford.
Crowdfunding. She'd opened the GoFundMe website and stared at the blank template for twenty minutes. Couldn't make herself type the words. Couldn't stomach the idea of posting her sister's medical records for strangers to judge, begging for money that might trickle in over weeks while the hospital billing department sent notices and the surgery date crept closer. Even if it worked—and she'd seen the statistics, knew most campaigns never reached their goals—it wouldn't work fast enough.
She'd looked up her car's value. Eight thousand on a good day. She needed it to get to work. To get to Aria.
By three in the morning, she'd stopped searching. The math didn't work. It wasn't going to work. She could stack every dollar she could beg, borrow, or liquidate, and she'd still be over a hundred thousand short.
She'd watched this before. Her mother, drowning in bills while the cancer ate her from the inside. The insurance company had denied treatment after treatment—experimental, they'd called it, not covered, not approved. Angelo had nearly bankrupted himself keeping up with the payments, refinancing the house twice, working double shifts until his hands shook and his heart started skipping beats. Serafina had been fifteen, old enough to understand the phone calls, the collection notices, theway her mother's eyes dimmed a little more each time another envelope arrived.
In the end, none of it had mattered. Her mother had died anyway, and the debt had lived on for years.
Now it was happening again. Different disease, same system. Same grinding machinery designed to extract everything you had and leave you with nothing.
She'd fallen asleep with the calculator app still open, the number glowing in the dark like an accusation.
Now it was morning. The screen was dead. The gap remained.
Serafina sat up slowly, muscles stiff, eyes gritty. She plugged in the laptop, watched it blink back to life, checked her email. No miracles overnight. The "pending" loan application was still pending. Everything else was silence.
She showered. Dressed. Didn't bother with makeup or food. Aria had been discharged yesterday afternoon with instructions to rest and stay upright until Thursday's surgery. Two more days. Serafina would check on her, bring her breakfast, make sure she was following the doctor's orders.
She'd figure something out. She told herself that as she grabbed her keys. She didn't believe it.
The dorm wasquiet when she arrived.
