She’s right. She’s always right. Which is extremely attractive and also deeply frustrating given current circumstances.
“The asteroid field will buy us time,” she continues, “but we need more than time. We need you functioning at full capacity.” She pauses, then looks at me directly. “You were a gladiator. The Golden Viper. Legendary for maintaining perfect focus under impossible conditions—whose biology responds to competence with the kind of focus that makes legends.”
The words hit me with unexpected force, and I realize this is the moment. The moment to tell her what the “legend” actually meant.
“Is that what they taught you in the Nexus?” she asks, her voice quieter now, more intimate despite the crisis bearing down on us. “How to channel the adrenaline, the arousal, the chaos into tactical advantage?”
I’m quiet for a moment, memories flooding back. The roar of the crowds. The blood on the sand. The desperation that drove every fight.
“The Nexus taught me how to survive,” I say finally, each word carefully chosen. “The Golden Viper wasn’t about ambition orglory. It was about credits. Enough credits to buy a ship and fly away from the violence.”
She glances at me, her expression shifting from tactical focus to something softer.
“I didn’t want to be a legend,” I continue, the admission easier than I expected. “I wanted to be free. Every fight, every victory, every time the crowds chanted that ridiculous name—it was just me counting down the days until I could escape. The focus they celebrated? That was survival instinct wrapped in desperation and sold as entertainment.”
“But you survived,” she says quietly. “You got out.”
“I survived because I learned to channel everything—fear, rage, arousal, exhaustion—into a single point of tactical focus. When everything else became noise, I could still see the patterns. Still calculate the angles. Still find the weakness that would end the fight.” I pause. “But I’ve spent three years trying to forget how to do that. Trying to be just a courier instead of a killer.”
“I don’t need the Golden Viper,” Zola says, her voice carrying absolute certainty. “I don’t need the legend or the role or the fighter they made you become. I need the survivor. The one who knows how to take impossible circumstances and find the angle that keeps you breathing.”
Something in my chest cracks open at her words—acceptance instead of judgment, validation instead of disgust.
“I can do that,” I say, my voice rough with emotion I’m not trying to hide anymore. “I can be that for you.”
“Then help me keep us alive,” she says, guiding The Precision toward the asteroid field with steady hands. “Channel whatever you’re feeling into those enhanced senses and help me navigate this nightmare.”
The shift is immediate. Instead of fighting my biology, I let it fuel my focus. Let my protective instincts sharpen my awarenessof every threat. Let the bond between us become a tactical advantage instead of a distraction.
“Thirty seconds to field entry,” KiKi announces. “Recommend secured positions and conservative navigation protocol.”
“Noted,” Zola says, then promptly ignores the conservative recommendation by angling us toward a gap that looks barely wide enough for The Precision to fit through.
I don’t protest. Instead, I extend my senses through the bond, feeling her confidence, her absolute certainty in her piloting abilities, and I trust it completely.
We slip through the gap with centimeters to spare on either side.
“Perfect clearance,” KiKi reports with surprise. “Continuing to monitor pursuit vessel. Thek-Ka has altered course to follow.”
“Good,” Zola says, her lips curving into a small smile that makes my chest tight. “Let him follow. Every gap we clear, every maneuver we make, we’re showing him exactly how outmatched his ship is in this environment.”
She’s not running scared. She’s leading him into a trap of his own hubris.
The next hour is a blur of increasingly dangerous navigation. Zola threads us through gaps I would have sworn were impossible, around debris spinning with enough velocity to shred hull plating, past mining remnants that still carry unstable charges from decades-old explosives.
And through it all, I channel everything—arousal, fear, admiration, protective instinct—into maintaining perfect awareness of every threat, every potential collision point, every hazard that might endanger her.
“You’re incredible at this,” I tell her, watching her hands move across the controls with the kind of practiced expertise that comes from years of experience.
“I’ve been navigating hazard fields since before I joined the military,” she says, executing another flawless maneuver. “Safety inspectors have to know how to handle the same conditions we’re asking other people to work in.”
Of course she does. Of course my mate is not just brilliant but also dangerously competent in exactly the situations we keep finding ourselves in.
The bond between us hums with shared satisfaction—her pleasure at perfect execution, my pride in her abilities, the growing certainty that we might actually survive this.
“How’s our pursuer?” she asks.
“Struggling,” I report, watching the tactical display. “His larger ship size is forcing him to take wider paths around debris. We’re opening the gap.”
