She loathed how automatic the movement felt.
The stone at her feet became her focus. She fixed on its pale surface while she tried to wrestle her breathing back under control. Even so, she felt him. The intensity of his attentionpressed against her skin, coiling around her nerves like heated wire.
Her pulse refused to settle.
She despised that too. The way fear and something dangerously close to awe knotted together inside her until she could no longer separate them.
She drew in a careful breath. Let it out. Tried again.
The air remained thick. Nothing about him allowed for calm.
She stood under his scrutiny, every instinct strung tight. The garden felt charged, the atmosphere heavy with his presence. She clung instead to the few details that did not scare her: the muted roar of the waterfall behind her, the faint scent of blooms drifting on the warm air.
The flowers were strange, their colors unfamiliar and their fragrance richer than anything she had known on Earth, yet they reminded her of gardens from childhood—before her father’s ambition had begun to narrow every path. Not the same, but close enough to give her something familiar to hold.
She pulled those sensations closer, using sound and scent as anchors while panic pressed at the edges of her thoughts.
You will survive this,she told herself.You’ve survived cages before. You know how to hold your ground.
She repeated it, letting the words sink beneath the trembling. The stubborn part of her—the deep, wide fault line that had always resisted being controlled—rose slowly. The same part that had pushed back against her father’s plans. The same part that had sent the application to the agency behind his back. The same part that kept whisperingtryeven when it seemed useless.
Her instincts hadn’t vanished. Her intuition still thrummed beneath the fear, sharp as ever. Even here, on an alien world, inside his fortress, dressed as he had ordered and presented like some offering, she was still herself.
And if she still had herself, she still had leverage.
An angle.
Something she could turn.
Because if she surrendered completely, she knew she wouldn’t recognize herself again.
A flicker of movement tugged at the edge of her vision.
His hand.
He lifted it in a simple, universal gesture, fingers curling in a slow summoning motion. At first, she failed to process it: the familiarity of the gesture sitting strangely on such an inhuman frame.
Then…
“Come.”
The word rolled through the garden like distant thunder.
For a heartbeat, she thought it came from him alone, deep and resonant within the armor. Then she felt a faint vibration in the pocket of her overdress: the translator stone activating, overlaying a second voice on top of his.
Two voices, one command.
His own, low and alien, resonant enough to vibrate in her bones, and the translator’s clear English threading over it like a second note.
The combination hit twice as hard.
He didn’t need to raise his voice. Power lived there already. The dual tones wrapped around her with a simple truth: this was someone who expected obedience without ever needing to shout.
Standing in the soft glow of the garden, listening to those layered voices settle inside her like a promise, she knew nothing in her old life had prepared her for this moment.
How could it? Statistically, this should not have existed. A one-in-billions improbability, the sort of event people dismissed in probability models. And yet here she was, on an alien world,facing a creature who had claimed her as if her path had always been meant to intersect with his.
What if I refuse?
