“Have you thought about what to call her?”
The question surprised him as much as it surprised her. He hadn’t planned to start here. He’d planned to start with the CEG briefing, the formation adjustments, the intel Ryzen had delivered about Verya manipulation tactics. The conversation a strategist would have with his commander before a deployment.
But standing on this balcony with the fading stars spread above them and their daughter curled in the space between their bodies, strategy felt very far away.
Selena’s hand drifted across her belly. “A few ideas. Nothing settled.” Her voice carried a softness he rarely heard outside private moments—the voice of the woman beneath the Beacon. “There hasn’t exactly been time for baby name discussions between combat training and war councils.”
“No.” He joined her at the railing, close enough that his arm pressed against hers. “There hasn’t.”
Silence settled. Not heavy. Waiting.
“What do you want for her?”
Selena was quiet for a long time. The ocean moved below them, steady and indifferent, and the early morning sun slowly peeked its first rays over the distant horizon.
“Choice,” she said finally. “I want her to have choices. Not the ones forced on her by genetics or politics or a galaxy that thinks it owns her before she’s even born. Real ones. The kind neither of us got.”
The words landed with precision. She didn’t look at him—didn’t need to. Through their thread, he felt the shape of what she meant. Two childhoods erased by the universe’s hunger for what they could produce.
“I never expected this.” His voice came out lower than he intended. Rougher. “A daughter. Fatherhood. Any of it.”
Selena turned to him.
“I know,” she said gently.
“Weapons don’t have children, Selena. They don’t name them. They don’t stand on balconies early in the morning terrified that they’ll fail the one thing that actually matters.”
Her hand found his forearm. Warm fingers curling over the living suit’s surface, and the material thinned automatically beneath her touch—calibrated to recognize her, to grant access where it denied the rest of the galaxy. He felt the heat of her palm against his skin like a brand.
“You’re not a weapon.” No softness now. Steel beneath the tenderness. “You’re her father. And you’re going to be extraordinary at it, because every single thing you do—every invention, every formation, every sleepless night spent planning our survival—comes from love. Not programming. Not genetics.Love.”
He closed his eyes. Let the word settle into the places where doubt had been excavating trenches for years.
“She’ll have your stubbornness,” he said, after a moment.
“And your mind.” Selena’s smile was audible. “The galaxy isn’t ready.”
A sound escaped him—low, surprised, something too warm to qualify as a laugh but too honest to be anything else. “No. It isn’t.”
The warmth didn’t last.
It couldn’t. Not with tomorrow pressing against the edges of this stolen hour like water against a hull breach. Tomorrow, V’dim and Z’fir would deploy to patrol the sol system—the perimeter around Destima that served as the last line between this sanctuary and everything hunting them. And Selena would board theAbysswith him, Ryzen, Zyxel, and the Royal Guard, and they would fly toward the CEG Space Station where the Chamber waited. Where she’d stand before representatives of every species in the galaxy and speak as the Beacon. Where the stakes weren’t theoretical and the threats weren’t contingencies on a display—they were real, and breathing, and patient.
“I need something from you.”
He turned to face her fully. The early morning threw pale light across the angles of his face, and he let her see what lived beneath the strategist’s mask—the raw, unvarnished thing he showed no one else. Not Z. Not his sisters. Only her.
Selena straightened. She read him the way he read threat matrices—quick, thorough, missing nothing. “What?”
“Promise me something.”
Her chin lifted. He could see the resistance already building—the instinctive bristling of a woman who’d spent her life having people try to cage her for her own protection. He loved that resistance. He also needed to get past it.
“Hear me out. All the way. Before you decide I’m being overbearing.”
Her jaw tightened, but she gave him a fractional nod.
“At the Chamber, I will be right beside you. Every second. But if things go wrong—if the situation shifts in a direction that makes the math stop working—I need you to listen to me.” He held her gaze, letting the weight of every year he’d spent reading battlefields press into the words. “Not argue. Not fight me. Not try to play Beacon while the ground is collapsing under our feet. I need you to trust my read and move when I say move.”
