Chapter 15
VROK
The moment I shut the cabin door behind me, I lock it with a flick of my wristband. The security seal hisses into place—a soft click that echoes louder than it should in the quiet corridor.
She stays inside. I don’t need to turn around to confirm it. I can feel her presence on the other side of the bulkhead like heat radiating through a wall. Heavy. Off-balance. Stuck.
Same as me.
My boots carry me down the corridor, each step a controlled exhale of restraint. I don’t pace. Pacing’s for people who haven’t already run the math.
I already have.
Three steps into the cockpit, I stop and brace my palms on the console. The cool metal helps. A little.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
I go still.
Not because I’m calm—but because I’m counting options. The old way. Tactical. Unemotional. Strip it all down and measure the cost.
Terminate her? Easy. Quick. Clean, if I’m feeling generous. This ship could swallow her scream and never burp.
But it wouldn’t be clean, not really.
Don Gnotz sent me to find the Butcher. If I call it now, I’ve got no leverage, no win, no payout. He’ll assume I botched the job or got sentimental. Neither plays well for someone already blacklisted by half the sector.
Besides—she’s not an enemy.
She’s just a mistake. A wrong face in the right place. A glitch in the mission.
But… she’s my glitch now.
And that makes her mine to deal with.
I sink into the pilot’s chair and stare at the stars stretched into frozen motion beyond the viewport. They don’t care. They never do.
The bond—jalshagar—flickers through me like a phantom ache. Not pain. Not yet. But persistent.
Faint tug beneath the skin, like a pulled thread.
It’s always been like this with my kind. You don’t choose the bond. It chooses you. Slips under the skin and roots in places you can’t cut clean. The moment I touched her—really touched her—I felt it shift. Deep. Old. Too real for something that’s supposed to belong to a legend.
It’s stronger now that the lie’s out.
Like the truth gave it teeth.
I lean back, staring up at the ceiling like it’s going to hand me a strategy. All I get is silence.
I tap a few commands into the console, rerouting our heading. No more dead space. No more drift.
We need fuel. Supplies. Weapons I trust.
So I punch in the coordinates for Eltar-9—a black-market asteroid hub that doesn’t ask questions and won’t report odd cargo. Like passengers with no IDs and murder in their eyes.
The nav computer chirps confirmation. Course adjusted. ETA: sixteen hours.
She doesn’t need to know where we’re going yet.
Hell, she doesn’t need to know anything until I say so.
Still, I can’t leave her locked in there forever. That’s not strategy. That’s cowardice. And I don’t get to be a coward.
I initiate internal systems control and carve out a narrow access path—galley, sanitation, and lower deck corridor. Doors marked, firewalled. One false move and the ship locks down tighter than a smugglers’ vault.
She gets controlled space.
Monitored air.
I want to see what she does with it.
When I stand, my body protests. Muscles sore, jaw tight from clenching. I haven't moved this cautiously since my last real war. And even then, the enemy wasn’t sleeping under my roof in nothing but my borrowed shirt and an open wound for a secret.
I return to the cabin and disengage the lock. She’s seated on the edge of the bed, back straight, face unreadable. Still.
But her hands betray her—fingers laced too tight, knuckles white, like she’s trying to keep herself from shaking apart.
I say nothing for a moment. Let the silence sit heavy between us, like a second gravity.
Then I speak.
“You have access to the galley and lower corridor. That’s it.”
She nods once, small and quick.
“You stay where I tell you. You eat what I give you. You don’t touch my controls. You try to bolt, I will stop you.”
Another nod.
“I’m not turning around,” I say, voice flat. “You lied. You’re here. You’re useful now. That’s your job.”
She flinches, barely. “What does ‘useful’ mean?”
“Means you’ll keep pretending. You’ll learn what I teach. You’ll act the part long enough to scare Large Marj into second-guessing herself.”
“And after?”
I tilt my head. “After depends on whether you screw it up.”
The way she exhales—shallow, broken—it’s not relief. It’s survival.
I know the difference.
I walk past her to the panel near the door, press my wristband to the scanner, and gesture. “You’re cleared for corridor movement. Bathroom’s on your left. Galley’s forward. Don’t try the other doors.”
She stands but doesn’t move.
“Vrok,” she says, quiet. “Why… why aren’t you mad?”
I stare at her.
“I’m furious,” I say. “But anger’s not useful right now.”
She swallows hard. “You’re not going to hurt me?”
My eyes narrow. “Not unless you give me a reason.”
She blinks fast. Too fast. I almost expect tears—but she doesn’t cry. She squares her shoulders, nods once, and walks past me into the hall, her spine too straight and her steps too careful.
She’s not afraid of me.
She’s afraid of what she’s become.
Good.
Fear shapes action.
And if she wants to survive Kaerva, she better learn fast.
I close the cabin door behind her and lean my forehead against it for a second longer than I mean to.
This isn’t how it was supposed to go.
But the mission’s not dead.
And neither is she.
I can work with that.
Even if it costs more than I want to admit.