Chapter 15
Ksara
I wake to the smell of recycled air and metal, and for three perfect seconds, I forget where I am.
Then I shift, and the fabric pooling around my thighs whispers against my skin. Too big, dark grey, worn soft from use. His shirt. I'm wearing Haid's shirt, and the scent of him clings to the fabric like a promise I'm not ready to name yet.
My body remembers before my mind catches up. The ghost of his hands mapping my waist. The rough catch of his stubble against my inner thigh. The way he said my name like a prayer torn from somewhere deep and guarded, a place he doesn't let anyone reach.
Heat crawls up my throat. I press my palms to my cheeks and feel the flush burning there, feel my pulse kick up at the memory of his weight pressing me into the desk, tactical projections scattering like stars around us while he took me apart with a precision that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with hunger.
Mine, he'd growled against my skin, and I'd bitten back with only if you're mine, and the look in his eyes when I said it—
Stop. I need to stop replaying it or I'll never leave this bed.
I sit up slowly, cataloging the pleasant ache between my legs, the tenderness in muscles I forgot I had.
The room swims into focus around me. Spartan.
Functional. A weapons rack mounted on one wall, each blade and firearm locked into place with military precision.
A single chair. A trunk that probably holds more armor.
No personal touches, no photographs or mementos, nothing that speaks to a life beyond war and survival.
Except me.
I'm here, tangled in his sheets, breathing his air, and somehow that feels like the most dangerous revelation of all.
The bed beside me is empty, the indentation where he lay already cooling. I run my hand over the pillow, feel the ghost of warmth, and wonder how long he's been gone. If he left because duty called or because he needed distance from what we did. From what it means.
My stomach twists. I should feel regret.
Shame, maybe. I was raised to understand the calculus of my own value, taught that my body was currency to be spent on political alliances and advantageous marriages.
Demeter made sure I knew that giving myself to anyone, let alone the so-called monster of the Tartarus Belt, would be a catastrophic devaluation of the asset she'd so carefully cultivated.
But I don't feel devalued.
I feel alive. Chosen. Seen in a way that has nothing to do with bio-kinetic potential or genetic worth and everything to do with the way Haid looked at me when I told him to stop treating me like glass.
Like I was the bravest thing he'd ever witnessed.
The thought carries me out of bed. I pad across the cold floor on bare feet, his shirt hanging to mid-thigh, and pause at the viewport set into the far wall.
Beyond the reinforced glass, the Tartarus Belt sprawls in all its terrible beauty.
Purple nebula gas swirls between asteroid fragments, backlit by the distant glow of mining lasers carving ore from rock.
Debris and desperation held together by Haid's will alone.
My reflection stares back at me, half-transparent against the void, a ghostly double superimposed over the purple-tinged darkness.
My hair is an absolute disaster, tangled and wild in a way that would have sent Demeter into fits of maternal horror.
The careful styling she insisted upon before every public appearance is long gone, replaced by this chaotic mess that speaks of hands running through it, of being thoroughly and completely undone.
My lips are still swollen from his kisses, slightly parted as I breathe against the cool glass, and there's a mark just below my jaw where his teeth grazed skin.
My eyes are too bright, fever-bright, like I'm burning from the inside out with something that has nothing to do with bio-kinesis and everything to do with the way he touched me.
The way he worshipped me with hands that are usually instruments of control and violence.
I look like a woman who made a choice and doesn't regret it. A woman who chose herself, for once, instead of duty or expectation or the carefully constructed future Demeter had been orchestrating since before I could walk.
The thought should comfort me. Should settle warm and reassuring in my chest, a validation of the reckless thing I've done.
Instead, it makes my chest tighten with something I can't name. Something that tastes like premonition, bitter and metallic, coating the back of my throat.
I turn away from the window and nearly trip over my discarded clothes.
They're scattered across the floor in a trail that leads from the desk to the bed, evidence of our urgency, our complete inability to slow down once we'd started.
I crouch down, gathering fabric, and feel heat creep into my cheeks again when I find my underwear tangled with a tactical belt.
This is real. It happened. I slept with the warlord who kidnapped me, and I'd do it again without hesitation.
The realization sits in my chest like a confession I'm not ready to speak aloud.
I'm pulling on my pants when I notice the terminal on his desk, still active.
The screen glows faintly in the dim room, casting blue light across scattered data-pads and star charts.
I should leave it alone. Respect his privacy.
Walk away and wait for him to return so we can figure out what comes next together.
But there's a notification blinking in the corner of the display. Urgent. Priority one. And the sender designation makes my blood run cold.
INTERCEPTED MESSAGE - APEX CENTRAL COMMAND - DEMETER
My hand moves before I can stop it, fingers ghosting over the interface. The message unfolds across the screen, and each word lands like a physical blow.
Lord Haid,
I believe you have something that belongs to me.
Return the asset within 24 hours, or I will be forced to take corrective action. You may have noticed that the oxygen scrubbers currently keeping your sector alive were manufactured by Genesis BioSystems. My company. Under my control.
Every recycler, every filter, every system responsible for breathable air in the Tartarus Belt contains a remote override code. A kill-switch, if you will. Disable them, and your people suffocate within hours.
Bring Ksara to the rendezvous coordinates attached, or I activate the protocol. Your choice, warlord. Her life, or theirs.
You have until 0600 station time.
Consider this a courtesy warning. I could have simply taken her back.
Regards,
High Minister Demeter
The words blur. I have to read them twice, three times before the full scope of her cruelty sinks in.
She's holding an entire sector hostage. Thousands of people, miners, engineers, families, children with void-cough who are just starting to recover thanks to the oxygen-rich plants I grew, all of them will die if I don't go back.
And she knew. She planned this. Let Haid take me, let me start to hope, start to heal these people, make them depend on what I could give them. Let me fall for the warlord in his fortress made of spite and survival.
All so she could pull me back like a dog on a leash, proving once and for all that I never had a choice. That I was never free.
The rage comes first, hot and blinding. I want to scream.
I want to tear the terminal off the wall and throw it through the viewport.
I want to grow thorns thick as cables and strangle every oxygen scrubber she's corrupted, every piece of tech she's poisoned with her contingencies and kill-switches.
But the rage burns itself out fast, leaving nothing behind but cold, terrible clarity, the kind that settles in your bones like frost, sharp and unforgiving.
She wins. Again. Always. Every single time.
No matter how far I run, no matter where I hide or who stands beside me, she finds a way to wrap her fingers around my throat and pull me back into line.
She doesn't even have to be here to do it.
That's the genius of her cruelty, she's engineered the trap so perfectly that I'll walk into it myself, willingly, because the alternative is watching innocent people suffocate in the dark.
Because she knows I can't let them die. Can't stand by while children suffocate because I dared to want something for myself. Can't ask Haid to choose between me and his people when I already know which choice will destroy him.
I loved someone once who made impossible choices, and it hollowed him out from the inside. I won't do that to Haid. Won't make him carry that weight.
Which means I have to leave.
The thought opens up a hollow in my chest, vast and aching. I press my hand over my heart and feel it beating too fast, panicked and desperate. Every instinct screams at me to wake him. Find him. Tell him everything and let him help me find another way.
But there is no other way. Demeter doesn't bluff. She's too practical, too ruthless. If I don't show up at those coordinates, people die. And if Haid tries to stop her, more people die, and he becomes exactly the monster everyone already thinks he is.
I won't let her do that to him.
I won't let her take the fragile, careful hope I saw in his eyes last night that tentative softness when he looked at me like I was something precious instead of a weapon to be wielded, and crush it under the boot of her ambitions.
I won't let her twist what we found together in the darkness into another reason for him to hate himself, another weight to add to the crushing burden he already carries.
I won't do that to him.
So I move.
Automatic. Numb. I find my boots, lace them with shaking hands. Grab a tactical jacket from his trunk because it's the only thing available and I can't walk through the station wearing just his shirt, no matter how much I want to keep that last piece of him against my skin.