“Don’t let Selik hear you call him that.”
“Why? Is it offensive?”
“I have no idea. But it seems rude.”
They stood there in silence, watching Mikoz sleep, and she felt something settle in her chest. Not peace exactly—she was too aware of all the ways this could go wrong for peace. But maybe… purpose. Direction. A sense that they were making a choice rather than just being carried along by events beyond their control.
“So what now?” Anya asked.
“Now we find Selik and tell him we’d like to stay a while longer. And we start figuring out what life on this ship actually looks like.”
“And if he says no?”
“Then we’ll figure out plan B.”
“Do we have a plan B?”
“Not even remotely.”
Anya snorted, a sound that was almost a laugh. “Great. Love that for us.”
“Welcome to adulthood, sweetheart. Where we make it up as we go and hope for the best.”
“That’s terrifying.”
“Yep.”
“But we’re doing it anyway.”
“Yep.”
Anya was quiet for a moment, then said softly, “Thanks.”
“For what?”
“For not lying to me. For treating me like I’m old enough to have opinions about this.” She paused. “Dad never did that. He always made decisions and expected me to just go along with them.”
“You’re thirteen, not three. You deserve to have a say in what happens to your life.”
“Even if my say is that we should stay with an alien warrior on a spaceship instead of going home?”
“Especially then.”
Anya’s smile was small but genuine. “Okay. Then let’s do this. Let’s stay and see what happens.”
“Together?”
“Together.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Selik stared at the data screen in his office, but the mission reports blurred into incomprehensible nonsense.
His mind kept returning to the sleeping chamber he’d left before dawn, to the weight of Corinne curled against his chest, to the trust implicit in the way she’d relaxed into sleep in his arms. To the unfamiliar ache in his chest when he’d forced himself to leave rather than wake beside her and risk seeing regret in her eyes. Twenty years of careful emotional control, shattered by a small female who barely reached his chest.
He pulled up the roster for the next patrol rotation, then closed it without reading a single line. Tried the maintenance logs. The supply inventory. The communication backlog. Nothing held his attention longer than thirty seconds before his thoughts drifted back to soft curves and hazel eyes.
This was absurd. He had responsibilities, duties that required his full attention. The patrol didn’t run itself, and his crew deserved a commander whose focus wasn’t scattered across the ship like debris from an explosion. But all he could thinkabout was how right it had felt to hold her. How natural. How necessary.
