“Is Tomás safe?”
Drazex blinks, the question not what he expected. “Your brother?”
“Is he alive? Is he here?” Nightmare logic bleeds into waking terror. The dream showed me his face going slack, his hand going limp, his chest stopping. What if it wasn't a dream? What if something happened while I was busy playing detective? “Where is he?”
“He's here. He's safe.” Drazex's brow furrows as he watches the spiral take hold. “Calm down, female.”
“Don't tell me to calm down.” The words come out too fast, too sharp, breath catching in my throat like a stone lodged there. Drazex would have told me if Tomás was dead. Probably. I don't actually know what he would or wouldn't tell me, don't know the rules of this arrangement beyond the contract I signed, don't know if my brother is breathing or bleeding or already gone while I’m distracted by silver eyes and gentle hands.
“He's in the western wing.” Drazex's tone drops lower, the register someone might use with a spooked animal. “He's been mingling with other humans. Eating, sleeping. Causing minor trouble with the staff who bring his meals. He's fine.”
The information should help, but now guilt joins the terror, twisting into a knot that cuts off my air.
“You need to focus on yourself.” Drazex shifts, and I flinch back. “Your brother is safe. You're the one who needs care. Don’t run yourself into the ground for someone who has never done the same for you.”
“You know nothing about my brother.”
“He's the reason you're here.” No accusation in his tone, but the words slam into me. “He accumulated one hundred thousand credits of debt, and doubled it when he ran. You crossed three star systems to sell yourself into service for a male who has never once sacrificed anything for you.” He pauses andhis sleek brows lower as though a thought offends him. “You're too good for him.”
Rage ignites so fast it whites out my vision. “Don't you dare sit there and judge him when you know nothing about what we've survived. He's my brother.”
“He's an anchor dragging you under.”
Nightmares and fury and grief bleeding together until I can't tell where one ends and another begins, because Drazex is right and he saw the truth.
A pressure builds behind my sternum, swelling with every heartbeat. I recognize the warning signs the way I recognize a fever spiking toward crisis. This grief has been compressed for too long, shoved down and locked away because there was never time to fall apart, never space to be anything other than the one who holds everyone else together. The rational part of my brain sends up frantic signals: stop, breathe, this male is not the enemy, this breakdown serves no purpose. But the same part of my brain has lost control of my mouth, my lungs, my racing heart.
The words are coming whether or not I want them to, dragged up from places I've spent years shoving down and down and down. This has nothing to do with Drazex. He's collateral damage, caught in a detonation years in the making. I should apologize. Should swallow it down the way I've swallowed everything else, but I'm so tired of swallowing, and I couldn't stop now if my life depended on it.
“He's been falling since we were children. And I've been catching him for so long I don't remember what it was like not to. I love him. God help me, I love him, and he's all I have left.”
The rage doesn't build. It erupts. One moment I'm drowning in grief and the next I'm burning, fury tearing through me until my skin can barely contain it. I want to scream. Want to throw things, break things, tear this room apart with my bare handsuntil the destruction outside matches the devastation within. My nails dig crescents into my palms, and I welcome the sting because at least it's an outlet.
Drazex doesn't flinch. Doesn't recoil.
He watches me with an expression I can't name at first, and when recognition clicks into place it's worse. Understanding. He looks at me with understanding, his gaze steady on my unraveling, and I realize he's seen this before. Lived it. Survived it and come out the other side with scars he hasn't shown me yet.
I don't want his understanding. Don't want this male who terrorizes planets and breaks bones to look at me with empathy instead of judgment. Horror I could work with. Disgust I could survive. But understanding makes him real, makes him someone capable of wounds that match my own, and I refuse to see him that way. Not now. Not when I need somewhere to aim all this fury and he's the only target in range.
So I aim.
“Don't you think I hate that he never stopped gambling, never stopped chasing the next scheme that was supposed to fix everything the last scheme broke.” My voice breaks on the word, splinters into shards. “On this planet. In this compound. I hate that I'm here because he left me to clean up another one of his messes, and I'm so tired of cleaning up messes that aren't mine.”
Tears spill without permission, scalding my cheeks with salt I thought I'd spent years ago.
The anger drains as fast as it came. What replaces it scrapes me out from the inside, leaves me gutted and aching and so heavy I don’t understand how I’m still upright. The exhaustion isn’t physical, or not only physical. It lives deeper than muscle, settles into the marrow where years of burying names and counting final breaths calcify into something I’ll carry until I die. The deaths I couldn’t prevent, the bodies I lifted when no one else was left, the lies I told to make the dying easier. All of itlodged beneath my ribs, and I’m so tired of pretending it isn’t there.
“I see their faces when I sleep. The soldiers I couldn't save. The ones who died on my table while I worked, who died in transit because help came too slow, who looked at me and asked if they were going to make it and I lied because lying was all I had left to give them.”
I trace the shrapnel scar on my forearm. “There was a medic on Kepler IV. Corporal Chen.” Her name catches in my throat like a fishhook. “She stitched my arm after the shrapnel tore through. Made jokes about the matching scars. Promised we'd get drinks when the evac came.”
I can still hear her laugh in the smoke-filled air. Still see the freckles scattered across her nose, her crooked half-smile, the steady hands that sutured my arm while plasma fire scorched the sky.
“She died before the drinks. Before the evac. Before the sun set on that hellscape we were pretending we could hold.” Each word costs more than the last. “I carried her to the shuttle and buried her name with all the others I couldn't save.”
My breathing is wrong now. Too fast, too shallow, lungs working overtime and still not getting enough air. The thin atmosphere of Vahiri scrapes against airways that forget how to function, and I'm spiraling, falling into darkness.
“Maeve.” Drazex's words reach me from somewhere far away. “Breathe. You need to calm down.”
