No manual prepares you for this.
No guidebook on interspecies pregnancy in the damn Athenaverse tells you what to do when the father of your child is a warbound phantom with gold eyes and enough emotional suppression to choke a gorrak.
I scream into a pillow.
Then I breathe.
Then I sit.
And when the silence stretches too long, I speak into it.
“Okay.”
It’s a whisper, but it’s mine.
“Okay,” I say again, louder this time.
I’m not running.
I’m not hiding.
I’m sure as hell not going to let someone else tell me how to raise this kid—thishalf-Vakutan little mystery.
I’m going to do it my way.
Alaina Southland doesn’t crumble. She rebuilds. Stronger. Meaner. Smarter.
So let the galaxy spin.
Let the father disappear into the stars.
I’ve got a new mission now.
And it starts with me, in this shitty little room, staring down the biggest fear of my life—and saying yes.
CHAPTER 6
TROKA
War smells like burned meat and molten glass.
The ground shudders beneath me as another plasma shell rips through the ravine wall, showering us in dust and broken chunks of red rock. Someone screams—high, sharp, human—and someone else cuts it off with a guttural, wet gurgle. I don’t look. I can’t afford to.
I’m already moving.
Blaster in one hand, pulse-shield sparking in the other, I vault over the mangled remains of a dropship, land hard in the churned-up mud, and fire three rounds at the Birex gunner cresting the ridge.
His head pops like overripe fruit.
One less target.
My armor hums around me, heat radiating from the core generator in the backplate. The HUD flickers—static from interference or damage, who knows—but I don’t need tech to know where the enemy is.
I cansmellthem.
The air is thick with ozone, blood, and fear. The sharp metallic sting of cauterized flesh mixes with the sulfur stink ofthe trench charges. It clings to my tongue, to the ridges under my scales, to the inside of my skull.
This planet—who even remembers the name anymore—is another pit in a war that never ends.
