Then I delete it.
No hesitation.
I wipe the transmission log, run a silent diagnostic for trace signatures, and kill the comm’s power core before it can ping again.
I sit there, numb, holding her in my arms, while my world shifts again beneath me.
Because it doesn’t matter who sent that message.
It doesn’t matter if it’s true.
She’s not compromised.
They are.
Because if they think I’ll leave her now, if they think this bond is something they can command me to sever, they have no idea what I’ve become.
What we’ve become.
I press my lips to her forehead.
She sighs in her sleep, leaning into the touch.
I swallow hard.
They won’t take her from me.
Not now.
Not ever.
Even if it costs me everything.
CHAPTER 11
MARA
Iwake up alone, even though he’s still in the room.
The bed is warm where I was curled against him, but the rest is cold now—cold in that way metal gets when the heat’s been drained from it too long. My arm reaches across empty space and hits air, and that’s how I know: he got up without waking me. Slipped away from the tangle of us and put all that armor back on.
I sit up slow, the sheet dragging across my skin like a question I don’t want to answer yet. The taste of him is still in my mouth—sharp, metallic, like static before a storm. My muscles ache, used in ways they haven’t been in too long. My body remembers last night with the clarity of confession. My brain… hasn’t caught up.
He’s pacing.
Back and forth, in that deliberate way of his—like even his uncertainty needs to be efficient. He’s dressed again, every inch of him locked behind plating and protocol. Commander Tatek is back, and the man I let kiss me like I was the only war that ever mattered has disappeared behind his own skin.
“Tatek,” I say, voice scratchy.
He doesn’t stop. Doesn’t look. Just one more pass across the sterile floor.
“Hey,” I try again, firmer. “What’s going on?”
He finally halts. His eyes meet mine for half a second—long enough for me to see the fracture underneath.
“Get dressed,” he says. Clipped. Flat. Nothing soft.
I pull the sheet tighter around myself, a slow burn starting under my ribs. “That’s it? No good morning? No ‘sorry I went cold right after wrecking my entire soul against yours’?”
