"Are you afraid?"
"Terrified."
He says it without blinking. Without his marks shifting. Without any of the physical tells that would make it a performance. Just the word, sitting between us on the narrow galley table like a loaded weapon with no safety.
I believe him. That's the worst part. I believe him, and it doesn't make me feel powerful. It makes me feel seen, which is worse.
The silenceafter confession is its own kind of violence.
We sit with it for a long time. Him at the table, me against the sink, the ship humming its way through dark space toward a station where a man I've been hunting for three years is expecting a resupply and not an execution. The silence isn't comfortable. It's not supposed to be. It's the silence of two people who've just exchanged information that can never be taken back, and now they have to figure out what shape the room is with those words living in it.
He finishes his drink. Sets the mug down with careful precision.
I watch my own hands, the split knuckles already scabbing, the blood under my nails that I didn't quite get, and I make a decision that feels less like courage and more like exhaustion. Like I've been holding a door shut for so long that my arms have simply given out.
"Do you want to see them?" My voice comes out abrupt. Almost harsh. The vulnerability underneath makes it worse, like exposed wiring sparking behind a panel. "The scars. You've been thinking about them since you saw them."
He goes very still. The kind of still that predators go when they don't want to spook prey, except I'm not prey and he knows it. He's still because he's terrified of getting this wrong, and I can feel that, too. Through the walls. Through everything.
"Only if you want to show me."
I almost laugh. The politeness of it. The careful construction of a sentence designed to put the power entirely in my hands, as if I don't already know he could reach inside my head and take whatever he wanted. He doesn't. He asks. I don't know what to do with that, so I do the thing itself instead of thinking about it.
I turn my back to him. Grip the hem of my shirt with both hands, fingers catching on the rough fabric, and pull it up.
Not all the way off. Not everything. Just up to my shoulders, the fabric bunched at the base of my neck. Enough to show him the map.
The air in the galley hits my bare skin and it's cold, recycled, carrying that metallic taste of filters and distance. I feel exposed in a way that has nothing to do with nudity.My back is a record. Every mission that went wrong, every fight I didn't walk away from clean. Knife scars, thin and white, some of them layered over each other like geological strata. The puckered divot of a projectile round below my right shoulder blade. The long, ragged line that runs diagonal from my left hip to the base of my ribs, where a piece of shrapnel tried to open me during the Kepler Station incident.
And the burn. The worst one. Covering my left shoulder blade like a territory claimed and scorched, the skin there a different texture entirely, smooth in some places and ridged in others, the kind of damage that speaks to sustained heat rather than a flash. It's the one that still aches when the atmospheric pressure changes, the one that wakes me sometimes with the ghost of fire against my spine.
His breath catches.
The sound is small. Barely there. But in the quiet of the galley, with the recycler wheezing and the engines murmuring, it lands like a shot.
His marks flare. I can see the light of them on the wall ahead of me, brightening from that steady pulse to something urgent, something raw. Blue-white light that moves across the metal surface like bioluminescent tide, and in its shifting I can read what he won't say. Or maybe I'm reading what leaks through my walls, because the sorrow hits me like pressure change. Sudden and total, making my ears ring, making my chest tight.
Grief. Guilt. And something underneath both that I don't have a name for, something that might be tenderness if tenderness could survive in a place this dark. It feels like being held without being touched. Like being mourned while still breathing.
Nobody has ever looked at me like this. I know thatwithout turning around, without seeing his face. I know it in the way the light from his marks moves over my damaged skin, slow and careful, as if the light itself is trying not to hurt me. Like I'm something precious and terrible and worth mourning, all at once, in the same breath.
My throat closes. I swallow against it.
The silence stretches. One second. Five. Ten. The ship moves through dark space and the recycler wheezes and his marks paint light across my scars, and I stand there with my shirt pulled up to my neck and my spine exposed and I wait for whatever comes next, because I've given him this much and I can't take it back and I don't want to.
That last part terrifies me more than anything Petrov could have done in that interrogation room.
I feel him move before I hear it. A shift in the air, the displacement of a body standing from a chair. Two steps. Three. He's close enough now that I can feel the warmth of him behind me, not touching, just present, and his marks cast light directly onto my skin, and the blue-white glow fills every scar like water filling cracks in dry ground.
His hand rises. I know this because his shadow shifts on the wall, because the light pattern changes, because every nerve in my body is tracking him the way a targeting system tracks incoming fire.
His hand hovers over the burn. Over the worst of it. Close enough that I can feel the heat of his palm without contact, close enough that the fine hairs on my damaged skin rise toward him like they're reaching.
"May I?"
Two words. A question. The simplest question in the world, and the hardest, because he's asking for permission to touch the place where I was most destroyed, and theasking itself is an act of such careful violence that I can feel my walls crack along fault lines I didn't know existed.
I should say no. I should pull my shirt down and turn around and rebuild every barrier I've spent six years constructing. I should remember what he did, what he is, that the man standing behind me with gentle light and a careful hand broke me so thoroughly that I murdered strangers in his shape.
