He waits. He watches. Hehunts.
I power through the last paragraph, voice tight, smile brittle. The scissors lift in my hand.
My fingers ache.
I feel every thread of pressure. Every beam of light. Every distant hum of the station's power grid. The weight of a thousand expectations. The hush of a million eyes.
I feel my heart beating like it’s trying to punch through my ribs.
I hear myself say the final line:
“With this cut, we open the future.”
The ribbon is just silk. But it feels like a tether.
I snip it.
The blades close.
The crowd cheers.
And I...
...I don’t breathe. I forget how. The only thing that pulses in my brain is a word/sound/concept/nameI have held close and silently to my heart for two years.
Garokk
CHAPTER 20
GAROKK
Idon’t need to kick down the doors to make a point.
Brute force is for amateurs and braggarts, and I’ve been both. But this—this is something else. This is war by memory. And I want her tofeelit. Not the steel, not the blast—just the presence.
I slip into the station’s outer ring like a ghost with a grudge.
One breath and I’m in.
The corridor lights stutter as I pass under them. Not from anything I’ve done—just old wiring and a ship that wasn’t meant for anything real. This whole mall is a shell, a glamour-fueled carcass floating in pretty orbit, polished like a coin in a beggar’s palm.
No alarms. No bodies. No mess.
Yet.
I slide through the docking port like I belong there. I’ve seen the blueprints. Memorized the shift rotations. The security cycles. I hacked the ventilation hours ago, opened the pressure valves slow so no one noticed the shift in equilibrium.
There’s a utility corridor five levels above the main promenade. It smells like oil and citrus disinfectant. There’sa drip from a busted coolant pipe somewhere behind me. It echoes.
Perfect.
I crouch in the maintenance crawl. Steel grating beneath my claws. A cut-out panel gives me a direct view of the stage below. The whole damn platform sits under me like a toy theater.
And there she is.
Isolde.
Isolde fucking Verrix.
