Chapter 8 NADINE
The door sealed behind him with a sound far too soft for something so final. I stood there, staring at it, half-expecting it to slide open again, like this was all some grotesque misunderstanding that could still be corrected if I just waited long enough.
It didn't.
The cabin was… comfortable. It almost felt like an insult.
Clean lines, muted lighting that adjusted to my breathing, surfaces that looked like they'd been designed to soothe rather than restrain.
Not a cell. Not a prison. A room. That realization scraped something raw inside me.
The Cryons hadn't bothered with comfort.
They hadn't pretended. Their ships had been all sharp edges and restraint fields, cold efficiency and the constant, gnawing terror of not knowing what would happen next.
This was worse.
Because it was designed to feel safe.
I crossed the room on unsteady legs and stopped at the window.
Outside, the emperor's massive ship dominated the stars for one last heartbeat, then began to recede.
Its vast hull slipped away with agonizing slowness, until it was just another shape swallowed by distance, by darkness. By inevitability.
My chest tightened, my breath caught in a way that felt disturbingly familiar at the realization that I was all alone again. Worse. I had felt safe aboard the emperor's ship. Safe! Among aliens. What a joke.
Now I was alone with him.
The realization hit harder than fear ever could. I'd been kidnapped before. By the Cryons. That had been violence and noise and terror. Detached, dehumanizing. Panic layered on panic, my mind scrambling to catalog threats faster than my body could react.
This, I admitted, was different. This was quiet and controlled. Personal.
I had been taken. By an Arkhevari. By Dravok.
My anger was still surging hot and immediate through my blood, burning through the shock.
I pressed my palm to the glass, grounding myself in the cold certainty of it.
He had no right. None. And if that wasn't enough, there was the other thing, the thing I couldn't shove aside, no matter how hard I tried.
He had been in my head.
The thought made my stomach twist violently.
In my head.
Not just hearing my thoughts. Not just reading me like data. He had made me do things. Say things I hadn't wanted to say. Agree to things I would never have agreed to. He was… he was… a fucking psychopath.
A dangerous one.
And I was alone with him, sealed inside a ship that answered only to him. Because I had no clue how to fly this thing or use the communication devices, even if—and that was a big if—I somehow managed to overpower Dravok.
That wasn't even the worst part. Oh no. The hits kept coming.
I wasn't just irate because of the violation of privacy or autonomy; I was irate because whatever he had done shouldn't have been possible.
Minds didn't work that way. Consciousness wasn't a door you could simply open and step through, override, and rearrange.
That was fantasy. Delusion. Myth.
Except he had.
I could still feel the echo of it, the pressure, the guiding force, the way my own thoughts had been… redirected. Bent just enough to change my choices. My words. My reality.
If he could do that… My pulse spiked, and a sharp, nauseating wave of fear finally broke through the anger.
I squeezed my eyes shut. No. Stop. Panic wouldn't help.
Speculation wouldn't help. There had to be another explanation.
Something technological. Something external.
Something I could dismantle with enough time, data, and stubbornness.
Hypnosis?
That was something I could accept and live with.
Except that wasn't how hypnosis worked, contrary to many books and movie plots.
So what else was there? Some advanced alien tech layered with suggestion, exhaustion, emotional stress, proximity to a dominant personality, maybe some interaction with the translator chip embedded in my brain.
Now that made sense. He could have interfered with it, hijacked its pathways, induced compliance through feedback loops.
As terrifying as that was, at least it was survivable.
People didn't just invade minds. That was mythology.
Right?
My body, unfortunately, refused to cooperate with my attempt at rational reassurance.
Residual heat lingered as awareness crawled under my skin in a way that made me want to scream.
I could still feel his—unwanted—touch, the way he'd lifted me effortlessly and thrown me over his shoulder like I weighed nothing. Like a sack of—
I cut the thought off, mortified. Because some deep, traitorous, primal part of me had responded. Not in fear. Not to the violation. To the strength. The dominance. The sheer physical certainty of him. His Maleness. With a capital M.
The realization made me furious with myself. I had never been that person. Never the one undone by proximity, by presence alone. Attraction had always been… manageable. Secondary. Logical. Now?
Now I didn't know what to make of myself, let alone him.
He was dangerous. Arrogant. Manipulative.
Possibly unstable. Yet I was drawn to him in a way that felt deeply, profoundly wrong.
I pushed away from the window and began to pace, forcing my breathing to slow, my thoughts to line up again. Movement helped. It always had.
Think, Nadine.
You don't survive by overpowering people like him.
You survive by understanding them. By finding the cracks.
By turning inevitability into leverage. I had felt him strain inside my head.
I had fought him. I couldn't suppress a small grin of victory at that, but it faded almost immediately as the real problem reasserted itself.
The logical impossibility of his having been inside my head.
I winced. I had felt him. HIM. Not the microchip.
Neural interface interference was plausible.
Software bleed. Signal cross-talk. A firmware exploit.
All of that I could explain. But this hadn't felt like corrupted input.
It had felt like a presence. I tried—desperately—to file it under malfunction.
Cognitive distortion under stress. Translation lag from the implant.
Psychosomatic projection. None of the hypotheses held.
Just like I still couldn't fully account for how the implant translated language in real time without perceptible latency or cognitive overload.
I understood the outcome. I did not understand the mechanism.
And I hated that.
I shook my head. My problem wasn't that this defied logic. It defied my current understanding. And that was worse.
All I could do to keep my sanity was to cling to the one victory: I had nearly thrown him out of my mind. That mattered. It had to.
I stopped pacing and looked around the room again, really looked this time. The seams in the walls. The adaptive lighting. The hum beneath the floor. The way the ship subtly adjusted to my presence, responding without being told.
Systems.
Patterns.
Variables.
It was built logic-first.
Which meant it could be understood.
Hah! He thought he'd secured me. That was his mistake.
Because whatever he thought I was… I was not helpless.
I wasn't done fighting. My eyes moved to a palmtop lying on a hovering cube that served as a nightstand.
It looked smaller than the newest model on the emperor's ship; still, I grabbed it like a lifeline.
"Okay," I muttered. "Let's start simple."
If I could call for help—any help—this whole situation changed.
I brought the interface up with a thought-command; relief flickered when the familiar lattice of icons bloomed into existence.
Network access. Feeds. Streams. I scrolled automatically, my brain half a step behind my fingers.
Pandraxian news channels, commentary threads, live feeds from colony worlds.
And there—absurdly—entertainment. Streamers.
I snorted despite myself. One name jumped out immediately.
Nock.
I'd watched him before; on the rare occasions I allowed myself to do anything besides cramming through archives while I was still on Astrionis. I had done everything in my power to learn about the new worlds I had been thrown into, and that had included the Galactic Union's version of social media.
Nock was one of the most famous streamers, so it wasn't just a coincidence that I stumbled across his feeds.
They'd caught my interest because he talked about the Space Guardians, the very same ones who had rescued me.
I'd watched one of his streams once with Silla, purely out of morbid curiosity. He was… annoyingly funny.
For half a second, hope flared. If I could message him, if I could get anyone's attention…
I tapped the interface. Nothing happened.
I frowned and tried again, routing through a different channel, then another.
The palmtop responded flawlessly… right up until the point where anything external should have gone through.
I realized there was no outbound signal.
My stomach sank. I pulled up the system diagnostics.
Internal functions: green. Local access: unrestricted. External communication—disabled.
My jaw tightened.
"When?" I whispered, "When did you do that?"
Had he planned this all along? Shut it down before abducting me? Or had he done it from the bridge in the moments after he brought me onto his ship? It didn't really matter. The result was the same. I was cut off.
I set the palmtop down slowly, forcing myself not to throw it across the room. Panic pressed at the edges of my thoughts again, sharp and insistent. No. Focus. If I couldn't call for help, I needed information.
Which meant I needed to think about him. The Arkhevari. I picked the device back up, logged into my account, and pulled up familiar files. Classified summaries, fragmented historical references—things even the Pandraxians treated carefully.
I learned that the Arkhevari weren't gods. No matter what Dravok claimed.
At least not… exactly. They were… something in between.
That was something I thought I could live with.
Thinking of Dravok as a god was simply… unacceptable.
They were—he was—an ancient entity born of the Luminis, older than any recorded civilizations.
They didn't rule empires. They didn't demand worship.
They existed to balance, to counter excess, to intervene when creation tipped too far into chaos. They aged. They died.
But… somehow, they were reborn.
Not as infants. Not as new beings. As continuations. Minds that shed overload the way a star sheds mass before collapse, making room for more knowledge, more memory.
They weren't omnipotent. They were just…
operating on a scale that made everyone else feel small.
Which made Dravok worse, not better. Because he wasn't some unhinged tyrant playing god.
Dravok was—according to Emperor Daryus' files, given to him by Zapharos—a sort of specialist. An Infiltrator.
Spymaster. Hunter of treachery. The one who went where others couldn't. The one who manipulated outcomes before anyone else realized there had been a choice.
My fingers curled against the edge of the table.
And that was who had decided I needed to be on his ship.
Not because of destiny. Not because of prophecy.
But because I was useful. That realization steadied me.
If he'd taken me because I mattered strategically, then I still had leverage.
Still had value beyond whatever twisted pull existed between us.
I needed to go deeper, so I opened system menus and watched how the ship responded to my queries. Driven by the simple calculation: Learn the environment + Learn the rules = Learn him.
If Dravok thought he'd secured a compliant asset… he'd underestimated the part of me that survived Earth, the Cryons, and everything that came after. I fully intended to make him regret that mistake. One calculation at a time.