“Why are you here?”
“Didn’t feel like staying dead.”
“Funny. Try again.”
She shrugs. “Felt like a vacation.”
My blood simmers.
“Jaela—”
“What, Kyldak? You want the truth? You gonna melt down if I don’t monologue my trauma right now? Or maybe you just want to know if I’ve got some Alliance tracker buried in my spine so you can flay it out.”
I lean in. “You’re lying. With every breath.”
She bares her teeth in a smile that’s pure warpaint. “And you’re still the same bastard who thinks growling is foreplay.”
“You found me. Out ofevery damn planet, you foundme.That wasn’t an accident.”
“No,” she says, voice low. “It wasn’t.”
Silence crackles between us.
I want to break something. I want to pull her apart and put her back together until she makes sense again. Until she stops looking like everything I ever lost and starts looking like something I could actuallyhave.
But instead, I grab her.
She shoves me.
I slam her against the nearest wall, metal rattling with the impact. She snarls, wraps her fingers in my hair, yanks my mouth down to hers.
It’severything.
We tear each other apart like we’re starving and the other is the last meal left in the galaxy. Her thighs lock around my hips. My hands map her body like I’ve forgotten every line and need to relearn it from muscle and memory. The sounds she makes—they brand themselves into my bones.
We don’t come up for air until the stars are bleeding light through the cracks in my tent roof.
She lies beside me now, half-covered in a scrap of my warcoat, her chest rising and falling slow like she’s forgotten the world can hurt her.
I stare at the ceiling. The corrugated iron shakes with the wind. Every creak sounds like a countdown.
She hasn’t told me anything. Not really.
And I haven’t pushed.
I should be interrogating her. Tearing apart the hows and whys and which devil she danced with to land here. But all I can do is breathe her in and wonder?—
“Why now?” I whisper into the dark.
She doesn’t answer.
Maybe she’s asleep or she’s pretending.
Maybe the truth is too heavy to speak out loud.
Either way, the question hangs there, suspended between us like a blade waiting to drop.
And I know—deep in my gut, deeper than instinct—that whatever storm’s coming?
