Chapter 20
KRAJ
Isit outside the safehouse, back pressed hard against the door, claws digging into the dirt until the earth gives way beneath me. My chest heaves like I’ve just run ten klicks under fire, but I haven’t moved. Not really. I’m frozen.
Her words echo through me, over and over, each syllable striking deeper than a blade.
“Mama says my heart is part yours.”
That little voice, high and certain. The warmth of her tiny hand pressed to my chest.
Every instinct I’ve ever trusted—instincts that kept me alive through ambushes and betrayals—screams that it’s true.
The girl. Solie. She’s mine.
I squeeze my eyes shut, but it doesn’t help. I see her anyway. Those golden eyes flashing like fire in the lamplight. That laugh that vibrates in the same rhythm as Luna’s. The small, scaly patches she tries to keep hidden.
The signs were there all along, and I—idiot that I am—told myself it was impossible. That she belonged to someone else. That Luna had moved on, found another, left me behind in every way that mattered.
But she hadn’t.
She hadn’t.
My hands shake so hard I can’t keep still. I drag my pack into my lap, flipping through encrypted files, accessing old medical reports, biometric scans. Cross-referencing images from three years ago with the girl’s features etched into my memory.
Everything matches.
Her eyes. My eyes.
Her laugh. My laugh.
Her blood… my blood.
A low growl rattles in my throat before I can stop it. The sound reverberates in my chest, alien and guttural, born of rage and grief and something I don’t have a name for.
I stand. My legs feel unsteady, but fury keeps me upright. Fury and something sharper. Something worse.
I push the door open and step back inside.
The safehouse is quiet except for the faint hum of the generator and the creak of old boards under my weight.
Luna’s in the kitchen, arms wrapped around herself like she’s holding in all the pieces threatening to spill out.
She doesn’t look up at first. When she does, her face is pale, her eyes rimmed red.
I stop in front of her, every nerve burning. My voice comes out rough, torn.
“She’s mine, isn’t she?”
Her lips part. No sound comes.
She doesn’t nod. Doesn’t shake her head. Just stands there, silent, with tears welling so thick they glisten on her lashes.
That silence cuts deeper than any denial could.
It confirms everything.
The moment fractures me clean through. I stumble back a step, my hand hitting the edge of the table like I need something solid to hold on to. My vision blurs red.
“You lied to me,” I growl, my voice low, dangerous. “You lied every godsdamn day.”
Her face crumples, but she doesn’t back down. “What was I supposed to do, Kraj? Tell you? And then what? Watch as you disappeared again? Watch as the Coalition came knocking because you couldn’t keep them away?”
“Don’t twist this,” I snap, claws flexing. “You looked me in the eye and let me believe she belonged to someone else. You let me walk around thinking you’d given what was mine to another man.”
Her tears spill over now, streaking down her cheeks. “You weren’t here! You left me with nothing. No job, no protection, no answers. Just a shattered life and a child I had to raise alone. What kind of choice did I have?”
Her words slam into me harder than any shell blast. My breath hitches, rage battling with guilt until I can’t tell one from the other.
I slam a fist against the wall, the wood splintering under my strength. The sound startles even me.
“I should’ve known,” I mutter, my voice breaking. “I should’ve seen it the second I looked at her. The way she smiled at me—like she knew.”
Luna’s voice softens, trembling. “She did know. Children know things before we do. She’s always felt it.”
I turn away, chest heaving, trying to pull in enough air. My scales itch with restless fury, my claws aching to tear something apart. But there’s nothing here to fight except the woman in front of me. And I can’t.
I can’t.
I face her again, my vision swimming. “You should’ve told me,” I say, the words ragged. “Even if you hated me. Even if you never wanted me near her—you should’ve told me she was mine.”
Luna’s voice cracks on the answer. “And risk losing her to your world? To your war? Kraj, I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.”
My legs nearly give. I grab the table edge again, my claws carving lines into the wood.
She’s mine. My daughter. My blood. And Luna kept it from me all this time.
I don’t know whether to fall on my knees or burn the whole damn galaxy down.
The sound she makes is less a sob than a cracked thing—small and terrible—and it rips the floor out from under me all over again.
Luna’s shoulders shake, her whole body folding inward like she’s trying to press herself into something smaller, less dangerous.
Her hands curl into fists at her sides until the knuckles blanch white.
She’s standing there in the wan light of the safehouse, hair loose and ragged around her face, and the woman I thought I knew looks like she’s been hollowed out by fear.
“I was going to tell you,” she says, voice raw, ragged. “I was. God, Kraj—every time I tried, I saw it. I saw the killer you used to be. I saw orders with your name on them and my child in the middle, and I got scared.”
Scared.
The word drops like a stone. It’s so human, so sharp and small and final that it stuns me.
My hands go to my face without thinking; my claws scrape the calloused skin there and I feel the sting as if it were myself being cut.
All the muscles in my neck tighten. I want to roar.
I open my mouth to roar. But what comes out is not the red-hot hate of a battlefield; it’s something wider, deeper—grief braided through with something like apology.
“You think I’d leave her behind again?” I bellow, but there’s no venom in the sound.
It shakes the room, yes, but it shakes because everything inside me is shaking—the guilt, the exhaustion, the memory of empty berths and orders barked like verdicts.
“You think I wouldn’t have burned down stars to keep her safe? ”
Luna flinches at the volume, and I hate myself for that, hate the fact that my voice can still be a weapon even when I don’t mean it to be.
She takes a breath, fragile as a moth, and steps forward.
Her hands are trembling now, but she reaches for me anyway, closing the distance as if she needs to prove something to herself—that I am still flesh, that I can be reached.
“I didn’t want her used,” she whispers, tears tracking dark paths through the dust on her cheeks. “Not by the Coalition. Not by anyone. Not even by you.”
It is such an honest thing to say that it breaks something loose inside me.
My head snaps back without control, like I’ve been struck.
The taste of iron floods the back of my throat—leftover from last night’s breathless hunger and the other things that sour the mouth: smoke, guilt, the tiny metallic tang that follows a hard choice.
She kept our child from me to keep her safe, and that—God help me—makes sense and doesn’t at the same time.
“You think I wanted any of that?” I rasp, the words thin and broken.
“You think I liked being the thing they told me to be? The man who kills on command?” My claws dig into the table until sparks leap up, proof that I am still alive, that something fierce still lives under this skin.
“I didn’t choose that life. They put it on me and watched to see if I’d wear it.
I buried men under that uniform, Luna. I buried friends.
I thought—” I choke on the rest and it tastes like ash.
“I thought if I did what they asked, one day I could walk away.”
She presses both hands to my chest, palms flat, and her touch is warm and urgent.
The simple, human heat against my scales steadies me more than it should.
“You walked away,” she says, voice not quite a question.
“You left me with nothing and a belly, Kraj. I learned to be brave the wrong way. I learned to sleep with one eye open. I learned to lie to keep a child alive.”
Her confession slices through years of half-remembered guilt.
I see the nights I wasn’t there like photographs burned at the edges—her face in the white light of an interrogation room, the look she gave me the last time before I was dragged away.
I see the crooked apartment, Solie’s first cry compressed into a single, impossible moment when the world rearranged itself and I wasn’t there to hold it together.
“I am sorry,” I say, a small, brittle thing. It is nowhere near enough. It clatters on the floor between us and breaks into a hundred useless pieces. “I am sorry I left. I am sorry I ever trusted them. I am sorry you had to do it alone.”
She laughs then—an odd, wet sound that has nothing of humor in it.
“Sorry,” she repeats. “Sorry. It’s been sorry after sorry with you, Kraj.
I’m tired.” The ache in her words is the same ache that has pulled me back, again and again, no matter how far I tried to run.
I think for a moment that she will go, that tired will win, but she doesn’t.
She stands there—wounded, stern—and I see the steel in her stare.
The same steel I remember in cramped briefing rooms, the same resolve that used to make her one of the best at her job.
Solie’s small voice fills the space then, a bright, unknowing thread pulled taut between us.
She pads in on bare feet and climbs up onto Luna’s knee, rubbing sleep out of her eyes.
She looks at me with the same open, feral trust that sears my chest. I can feel all the choices I’ve made like a bruise.
“She says my heart is part yours!” Solie pronounces, proud and innocent, as if revealing the simplest truth in the world.