“I am not soft,” I say.
“I know,” he replies, still grinning. “But this plan of yours? It’s… different.”
“Different is the point.”
He nods again, more firmly this time. “Alright,” he says. “We prep the crew. Tight strike team. No unnecessary damage. We keep it controlled.”
“Exactly,” I say.
“And if it goes wrong?” he asks.
“It won’t,” I reply.
He snorts. “That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one that matters,” I say.
He studies me for a moment longer, then finally shrugs. “Fine,” he says. “Your plan. Your call.”
He turns and starts toward the exit, then pauses, glancing back over his shoulder.
“You really think this changes anything?” he asks.
I look back at the projection, at the name, at the web of connections surrounding it, and something shifts in my chest that I don’t bother to define.
“I think it starts something,” I say.
Vihl nods once, then disappears through the door.
The bridge falls quiet again, the hum of the ship settling back into the foreground. I let the projection hover in front of me, watching the data, the patterns, the inefficiencies that everyone else accepts because they have never considered anything else.
Baronet Kleid Lorens.
A small name in a large system.
A weak point.
An opportunity.
I lean back in the chair, my claws resting lightly against the armrests as I let the plan settle into something sharper, more defined.
“This isn’t about the debt,” I murmur to the empty bridge.
It never was.
This is about proving a point.
And for the first time in a long time, I can feel something like anticipation building beneath the surface, not the hunger for violence that has driven me before, but something cleaner, more precise.
Something that might actually last.
CHAPTER 3
STACY
Everything here is layered and monitored, but it is not perfect because nothing ever is.
I let my gaze drift across the walls, tracking the seams where panels meet and the faint shimmer of embedded systems beneath the surface. The lighting is too even, which means it is artificial, and the airflow is too consistent, which means it is regulated. Every system has a point of failure, not because it was designed poorly, but because it was designed by something that assumes it cannot be challenged, and that assumption is always wrong.
