The quiet hum of the Bastion faded, her own breath evened out, and the tension in her shoulders eased.
For a moment, the garden felt separate from everything else: separate from alien politics, from claims and rituals, from the cold halls and the fear that had stalked her since the night she disappeared from her balcony.
She let herself be pulled into the rhythm of the pond, the gentle patterns on the water, the strange fish weaving between the leaves like threads of living light.
This is madness,she thought, though the words carried less heat now.My life on Earth is gone. Everything familiar… it’s all out of reach.
They are never letting me go.
The evidence was everywhere around her—technology she couldn’t comprehend, creatures from two species working in seamless coordination, star-travel so advanced it made Earth’s sciences feel primitive.
If they wanted to keep her, then humanity had no power to stop them.
A shiver crept across her skin.
She exhaled slowly, watching the lilac creatures flicker like dancing lights beneath the water. The sight steadied her in a wayshe didn’t expect. Beauty had a way of breaking through fear, even briefly.
But the moment didn’t last.
A shift moved through the air—so soft she almost missed it. A faint stirring, like a change in pressure just behind her. The back of her neck tingled as the tiny hairs rose, a ripple of awareness sweeping down her arms.
That deep, instinctive feeling told her she was no longer alone.
Slowly, very slowly…
she turned.
CHAPTER 12
She saw him, just beyond the threshold of the garden, half-caught in a shaft of amber light spilling from the wall above. The glow traced over the angles of his armor, carving him out of the shadows with unforgiving clarity.
Her heart lurched, so sharply it almost felt as if it missed a beat. Heat and cold rushed through her at once, leaving her skin prickling while every muscle locked.
Instinct urged her to step back, but something more powerful held her where she stood.
Fear moved through her, not the frantic kind that sent a person running, but the heavy, bone-deep awareness of standing before something powerful enough to redirect her entire life with a single choice. Something that already had.
And threaded through that fear, so fine it almost hid from her, was a bright sting of anticipation.
She forced her fingers to uncurl and failed. Her pulse pressed hard in her throat as she stared at the figure in the light, at the impossible being who had shaped every moment of her life since the night she vanished from her balcony.
She knew.
This washim.
The architect of her capture.
The one whose order had torn her off Earth.
TheVykan.
He stood in the middle of the garden, motionless on the pale stone, the filtered sunlight striking his armor and turning it to molten gold. Every scale-shaped plate caught the light differently, turning his form into a shifting mosaic of burnished metal over a body built for war.
For a heartbeat, her lungs forgot how to work.
He was immense.
He resembled a man only in outline—a torso, limbs, a head—but the proportions were wrong. His shoulders stretched broader than any human frame could sustain, buried beneath thick, overlapping plates that curved like the hide of some ancient beast. Even with the armor, the mass of muscle beneath it was obvious. Power radiated from him as if it lived under his skin and seeped through the metal.
