“Alright, let’s hear it.”
I sit up and grab the datapad, tapping into our shared calendar.
“Two days to recover. No exceptions. We’re not running ragged anymore.”
“Agreed.”
“Then recon on the Ghazden Syndicate lead. Light entry only. If it looks dirty, we pull out and re-assess.”
“Confirmed.”
“Three weeks max in any high-exposure zone. After that, we take low-profile work or ghost.”
“Understood.”
I look at him, more serious now.
“And if either of us starts treating the other like a risk instead of a resource, we stop.”
He nods. “That one’s binding.”
We sit like that for a while. Planning. Adjusting. Not making dreams, exactly. Just building scaffolding for something that might look like a life.
It’s new.
But it’s real.
CHAPTER 39
VROK
You know what nobody warns you about? When survival stops feeling like a punishment.
The quiet gets louder.
Not the kind that hisses between firefights or hangs in the air after you’ve cleared a room. No. I mean the kind that settles on your skin when you’ve done the job clean, earned your coin, and walk back into a ship that doesn’t smell like blood and cordite. The kind where your partner looks at you—not for the first time, not for the last—and doesn’t ask if you’re alive, justhow you’re feeling.
That’s new. And I still don’t know what to do with it.
We’ve pulled off six jobs together in just under two months. None small. Every one of them high-profile. Smugglers. Enforcer brokers. A hot-zone extract on Traga-IV that should’ve gone sideways but didn’t. Not because of force. Because of planning.
Because ofher.
Roxy doesn’t just walk into a job. She walks in like it’salready over,like the outcome’s done and dusted and she’s just there to collect on the story people will tell afterward.
And the Butcher? She doesn’t scream anymore. She doesn’t burn. Shewhispers.
Hell, sometimes she doesn’t even speak.
We walked into a renegade hangar outside the Blight Fold two days ago, whole crew geared to the teeth. Nobody shot. Nobody shouted. Roxy stepped off the ramp, one boot in the dirt, coat swinging low—and they folded.
It wasn’t fear. Not exactly. It was belief.
They saw her and believed she had already decided what they were allowed to survive.
And I—standing next to her—felt it too.
“You’re watching me again,”she says now, without looking up from the datapad.
