I had been taken. By an Arkhevari. By Dravok.
My anger was still surging hot and immediate through my blood, burning through the shock. I pressed my palm to the glass, grounding myself in the cold certainty of it. He had no right. None. And if that wasn't enough, there was the other thing, the thing I couldn't shove aside, no matter how hard I tried.
Hehad been inmyhead.
The thought made my stomach twist violently.
Inmyhead.
Not just hearing my thoughts. Not just reading me like data. He had made medothings. Say things I hadn't wanted to say. Agree to things I would never have agreed to. He was… he was… a fucking psychopath.
A dangerous one.
And I was alone with him, sealed inside a ship that answered only tohim. Because I had no clue how to fly this thing or use the communication devices, even if—and that was a big if—I somehow managed to overpower Dravok.
That wasn't even the worst part. Oh no. The hits kept coming. I wasn't just irate because of the violation of privacy or autonomy; I was irate because whatever he had done shouldn't have been possible. Minds didn't work that way. Consciousness wasn't a door you could simply open and step through, override, and rearrange.
That was fantasy. Delusion. Myth.
Except he had.
I could still feel the echo of it, the pressure, the guiding force, the way my own thoughts had been… redirected. Bent just enough to change my choices. My words. My reality.
If he could do that… My pulse spiked, and a sharp, nauseating wave of fear finally broke through the anger. I squeezed my eyes shut.No. Stop.Panic wouldn't help. Speculation wouldn't help. Therehadto be another explanation. Something technological. Something external. Something I could dismantle with enough time, data, and stubbornness.
Hypnosis?
That was something I could accept and live with. Except that wasn't how hypnosis worked, contrary to many books and movie plots. So what else was there? Some advanced alien tech layered with suggestion, exhaustion, emotional stress, proximity to a dominant personality, maybe some interaction with the translator chip embedded in my brain. Nowthatmade sense. He could have interfered with it, hijacked its pathways, induced compliance through feedback loops. As terrifying as that was, at least it wassurvivable. People didn't just invade minds. That was mythology.
Right?
My body, unfortunately, refused to cooperate with my attempt at rational reassurance. Residual heat lingered as awareness crawled under my skin in a way that made me want to scream. I could still feel his—unwanted—touch, the way he'd lifted me effortlessly and thrown me over his shoulder like I weighed nothing. Like a sack of?—
I cut the thought off, mortified. Because some deep, traitorous, primal part of me hadresponded. Not in fear. Not to the violation. To thestrength. Thedominance. The sheer physical certainty of him. His Maleness. With a capital M.
The realization made me furious with myself. I had never been that person. Never the one undone by proximity, by presence alone. Attraction had always been… manageable. Secondary. Logical. Now?
Now I didn't know what to make of myself, let alone him. He was dangerous. Arrogant. Manipulative. Possibly unstable. Yet I was drawn to him in a way that felt deeply, profoundly wrong. I pushed away from the window and began to pace, forcing my breathing to slow, my thoughts to line up again. Movement helped. It always had.
Think, Nadine.
You don't survive by overpowering people like him. You survive by understanding them. By finding the cracks. By turning inevitability into leverage. I had felt him strain inside my head. I had fought him. I couldn't suppress a small grin of victory at that, but it faded almost immediately as the real problem reasserted itself. The logical impossibility of his having been inside my head. I winced. I had felt him. HIM. Not the microchip. Neural interface interference was plausible. Software bleed. Signal cross-talk. A firmware exploit. All of that I could explain. But this hadn't felt like corrupted input. It had felt like a presence. I tried—desperately—to file it under malfunction.Cognitive distortion under stress. Translation lag from the implant. Psychosomatic projection. None of the hypotheses held. Just like I still couldn't fully account for how the implant translated language in real time without perceptible latency or cognitive overload. I understood the outcome. I did not understand the mechanism.
And I hated that.
I shook my head. My problem wasn't that this defied logic. It defied my current understanding. And that was worse.
All I could do to keep my sanity was to cling to the one victory: I had nearly thrown him out of my mind. That mattered. It had to.
I stopped pacing and looked around the room again, really looked this time. The seams in the walls. The adaptive lighting. The hum beneath the floor. The way the ship subtly adjusted to my presence, responding without being told.
Systems.
Patterns.
Variables.
It was built logic-first.
