He turned back to Emily and stopped dead.The fight had drained out of her.She stared at the floor, fists clenched, swallowing tears.Small.Beaten.
Her gaze dropped to her boots.“I’m sorry,” she whispered.“I didn’t think...I just wanted to be comfortable.”
“Comfort is for people who don’t matter,” Miranda snapped.“You are an important person now, Emily… An empress.Try to act like one.Fix your hair.Stand up straight.And for god’s sake, burn those boots before the Emperor sees them.”
“Now…” She turned away, dismissing her daughter as if she were a bored customer walking away from a disappointing display, and clapped her hands.“My bags.And some wine, but nothing sweet.I have a headache coming on.”
The silence in the docking bay was absolute.
The young lead warrior looked at Raaevik, eyes wide.The warriors around them stared at the floor.Even the station’s hum seemed to drop away.
Emily didn’t move for long moments, then she lifted her head.
She didn’t look at her mother or the ship.She looked at him.
Her dark eyes were wide, wet with unshed tears.
She thinks I’m judging her,the thought slammed into him.
But he didn’t see a failure.He saw anything but.He saw a female who had faced down an Emperor with shaking hands and held her ground.He saw a female who wore old boots because she needed traction in a world that kept shifting under her.
Beside them, Miranda berated a porter about the angle of her luggage.His lip curled—pure disgust he didn’t bother to hide.She was poison in a nice suit.
He held Emily's gaze.He didn’t speak—he couldn’t trust his voice not to roar—but he let his mask slip a fraction.
I see you,he thought, hoping she read it in his expression.
Her chin came up.Just a little.
Just enough.
* * *
The familiar scenthit her before the door fully slid open… Expensive perfume and chilled wine.
For twenty-nine years, that smell had meant home.It meant the click of heels on marble and the rustle of shopping bags from stores Emily wasn’t allowed to enter alone.It meant the tight, polite silence that always came right before a storm.
Now, in the corridor of an alien space station orbiting Earth, it just smelled like a trap.
Raaevik stood behind her.He hadn’t said a word since the docking bay, but his presence pressed against her back like gravity—warm, solid, impossible to ignore.He didn’t crowd her, but he didn’t give her room to fold either.
The door finished its cycle, and they stepped through.
Miranda Evans had been on Devan Station for less than three hours, and she’d already made the guest suite hers.
The standard-issue Latharian furniture—sleek, minimalist—had been shoved around like it had offended her.The couches were angled toward the massive viewport on the far wall.A silk shawl draped over a chair that looked like spun glass.A bottle of wine on the low table that definitely hadn’t come out of station stores, and a crystal glass catching the blue light of Earth turning slowly beneath them.
Miranda stood at the window with her back to the door.She still wore the white suit and she’d kicked off her heels, but everything else was perfect, like she’d stepped out of a glossy ad and into their lives.
“You took your time,” she said to the window.“I expected you twenty minutes ago.Did you get lost?The layout of this place is atrocious.Circles within circles.”
“I didn’t get lost,” Emily said.Her voice sounded thin, scraped raw.“I had to change.”
She hadn’t.
She was still in the blue silk robe the attendants had shoved her into, but she’d washed her face.Scrubbed the alien oils from her skin until it burned, trying to find herself under the layers of Empress-to-be.
Turning with her wine glass in hand, Miranda's gaze flicked down, then back up to Emily’s face.
