I nod slowly, throat tight. “Okay.”
The silence creeps back in.
We sit in it, both of us pretending it’s not filling the room like smoke.
But it is.
And I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to breathe right again.
CHAPTER 15
VROK
The moment I shut the cabin door behind me, I lock it with a flick of my wristband. The security seal hisses into place—a soft click that echoes louder than it should in the quiet corridor.
She stays inside. I don’t need to turn around to confirm it. I can feel her presence on the other side of the bulkhead like heat radiating through a wall. Heavy. Off-balance. Stuck.
Same as me.
My boots carry me down the corridor, each step a controlled exhale of restraint. I don’t pace. Pacing’s for people who haven’t already run the math.
I already have.
Three steps into the cockpit, I stop and brace my palms on the console. The cool metal helps. A little.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
I go still.
Not because I’m calm—but because I’m counting options. The old way. Tactical. Unemotional. Strip it all down and measure the cost.
Terminate her? Easy. Quick. Clean, if I’m feeling generous. This ship could swallow her scream and never burp.
But it wouldn’t be clean, not really.
Don Gnotz sent me to find the Butcher. If I call it now, I’ve got no leverage, no win, no payout. He’ll assume I botched the job or got sentimental. Neither plays well for someone already blacklisted by half the sector.
Besides—she’s not an enemy.
She’s just a mistake. A wrong face in the right place. A glitch in the mission.
But… she’smyglitch now.
And that makes her mine to deal with.
I sink into the pilot’s chair and stare at the stars stretched into frozen motion beyond the viewport. They don’t care. They never do.
The bond—jalshagar—flickers through me like a phantom ache. Not pain. Not yet. But persistent.
Faint tug beneath the skin, like a pulled thread.
It’s always been like this with my kind. You don’t choose the bond. It chooses you. Slips under the skin and roots in places you can’t cut clean. The moment I touched her—reallytouchedher—I felt it shift. Deep. Old. Too real for something that’s supposed to belong to a legend.
It’s stronger now that the lie’s out.
Like the truth gave it teeth.
