Chapter 9 #2
My breathing was coming faster now, shallower. Nansar's hand moved from my hair to cup my cheek, his thumb brushing away a tear that had escaped without my permission.
"He left me alone after that. For weeks. I thought..." I laughed, but it came out shattered, all jagged edges. "I thought maybe he'd realized I wasn't worth the trouble. That I'd proven I'd rather die than let him touch me. I was so stupid."
More tears were burning behind my eyes now, hot and insistent.
"Then one night after dinner, I noticed this cloud of dust coming through the AC vents—air conditioning, it cools the air.
I didn't think anything of it at first. Just dust. Just nothing.
" My voice dropped to barely a whisper, each word an agony.
"But then... God, then my body started burning.
Like someone had lit a fire under my skin.
I was horny as hell, desperate, aching. And when Declan came in, when he offered, when he asked. .."
The words stuck in my throat.
"I climbed him like a tree." The admission tore something open inside me, something that had been festering. "I begged him. I did things I would never, ever—"
I couldn't finish. Couldn't force out the rest.
A sob wrenched itself from my chest, violent and raw, and Nansar's arms tightened around me like he could physically hold the broken pieces together.
"He kept it up. Once, twice, three times a week.
The dust would come through the vents, and then he'd walk in, and I'd..." Shame burned through me, hot and acidic, eating me alive from the inside.
"I was enthusiastic. Desperate for it. For him.
My body would betray me even when my mind was screaming against what was happening.
He made me do depraved things. Things I can't even say out loud.
Things that replay in my head every night when I try to sleep. "
The tears were flowing freely now, carving hot paths down my cheeks.
"He shared me with other men. Other women. Passed me around like a party favor while I smiled and moaned and begged for more. Always drugged. Always helpless. Always betrayed by my own body."
I was shaking now, trembling so hard I thought I might fly apart.
"The things I did..." My voice broke completely, splintering into pieces. "The things I let them do to me... They shame me. Every single day. Every single moment. I can't escape it. Can't wash it off. Can't pretend it didn't happen."
A ragged breath tore through me.
"The only thing that kept me sane was my hate.
" The words came out raw and bleeding, scraped from the deepest part of me.
"Every time the drug wore off and I realized what I'd done, what I'd begged for, what I'd become.
.. I hated him more. I hated myself. But mostly him.
That hate was the only thing that was still mine.
The only thing he couldn't drug away or steal or twist into something else. It was all I had left."
Nansar's whole body went rigid beneath me. When he spoke, his voice was rough as gravel, barely controlled.
"Mumje." The word came out like a curse, like poison on his tongue. "He used mumje on you."
I pulled back slightly to look at his face. His features had transformed—stricken, twisted with a horror so profound it seemed to age him in seconds. And beneath that horror, something that looked dangerously like guilt.
"What?"
"The dust you described." His jaw clenched so hard I heard his teeth grind.
A muscle ticked in his cheek like a warning signal.
"It's mumje. A drug from my world. It strips away a person's will.
Makes them... compliant. Eager to please.
" His voice dropped to something darker, more haunted.
"It doesn't just remove resistance—it creates desire where there should be none. It turns your own body into a traitor."
The way he said it made my stomach twist into knots. He knew. He knew exactly what it did, understood the violation in a way that went beyond sympathy or imagination. This was the knowledge of someone who'd seen its effects firsthand.
"How do you—"
"I'm so sorry, Chloe." His voice cracked like breaking ice.
"When I worked with Ambassador Yaard, I was involved in the mumje mining operation on a Gilese moon.
" He closed his eyes as if the memory physically pained him, his expression tortured.
"I had no idea about Hewes. No idea the drug was being transported to Earth.
If I had known what he was doing to you—"
The guilt in his voice hit me like a wave, but not in the way he probably expected. I didn't feel betrayed or angry at him—I felt something else entirely. A strange, fierce protectiveness that surprised me.
But even as the words left my mouth, I could see they bounced off him like rain off stone.
He didn't believe me. Couldn't believe me.
The self-recrimination was written all over his face, carved into the lines around his eyes, in the way his shoulders hunched slightly inward, in the darkness clouding those blue-green eyes like storm clouds.
He was carrying this like a weight, like he'd personally handed Hewes the weapon and watched him use it.
And maybe that's what hurt most—not what he'd unknowingly been part of, but watching him torture himself over it. Watching him look at me like he expected me to recoil, to blame him, to see him as just another monster in a world full of them.
When all I felt was...
Safe. I felt safe with him.
How ironic was that? How utterly, impossibly strange? The man who'd helped mine the drug that had been used to control me, to violate me in ways I still couldn't fully process, was the first person who'd made me feel like I could breathe again.
"You didn't know," I said quietly, though my mind was reeling, spinning through implications. Mumje. The med-tech George had mentioned it when I'd received my vaccinations. But no one told me what it did. No one told me it could turn me into a puppet in my own skin.
"I should have known." His voice was raw, scraped hollow.
"I should have questioned where it was all going, why Yaard needed so much of it.
Why the quotas kept increasing." His arms tightened around me again, almost desperately, like he was afraid his confession might make me disappear.
"I was complicit in the supply chain that gave him the weapon he used against you. "
I felt his guilt like a physical weight pressing down, threatening to crush us into the ground.
Part of me understood why he blamed himself—the connection was there, undeniable and damning.
But the larger part of me, the part that had lived through Hewes's manipulation, that had survived his calculated cruelty, knew the difference between someone who unknowingly provided a tool and someone who deliberately wielded that tool as a weapon.
"It's not the same as what Hewes did." My voice was steady now, certain. "You didn't drug me. You didn't watch me lose myself and laugh about it. You didn't orchestrate my destruction for your own pleasure."
His eyes squeezed shut tighter, as if my words caused him physical pain rather than offering absolution.
"Nansar, look at me." When he didn't respond, I reached up, my fingers trembling slightly as they touched his jaw, feeling the tension there. "Please."
Those blue-green eyes opened slowly, reluctantly, and what I saw there took my breath away. Raw emotion swam in their depths—guilt and anguish and something else, something that made my heart stutter in my chest.
"If you had known—if you had even suspected—would you have stopped it?"
"Yes." The word came out immediately, vehement and certain, with no hesitation. "Without question. Without hesitation. I would have burned the entire operation to the ground and salted the earth where it stood."
"Then that's all I need to know." My thumb brushed across his cheekbone, feeling the warmth of his skin, the slight roughness of his alien features.
Touching him felt strange, but not uncomfortable.
"You're not responsible for this. That's like blaming the person who mined the metal for a knife used in a murder. "
"It's not the same—"
"It is exactly the same." My voice came out sharp, but I needed him to hear this, needed the words to penetrate that wall of guilt. "I won't let you carry Hewes's sins. I won't let you take on his evil as your own."
I pulled back enough to look at him properly, my hands pressing flat against his chest, feeling his heart hammering beneath my palms. "Nansar, you didn't do this to me.
Hewes did. He's the one who chose to use it.
He's the one who looked at that drug and saw an opportunity to break someone. He's the monster, not you."
"You should hate me." His voice was raw, stripped of all pretense. "You should look at me with disgust. I helped put that poison in his hands." He started to pull away, as if he didn't deserve to hold me, as if proximity to me was a privilege he'd forfeited.
"Nansar—"
"No." He shook his head, the movement jerky and pained. "You should never forgive me for this. I was so focused on the profits, on advancing my own position, on climbing the ranks—" His voice broke again, fracturing. "I never asked the right questions. Never looked beyond my own ambition."
The anguish in his eyes was so profound it made something inside me twist and crack.
"Is that what you want?" I asked softly, holding his gaze. "For me to hate you? Would that make you feel better? Would it ease your conscience?"
He flinched as if I'd struck him, as if the words were physical blows. "It would be... appropriate. Deserved."
"Well, I don't." The words came out firmer than I expected, stronger. "I don't hate you, Nansar. And I won't let you punish yourself for someone else's evil. I won't let you take responsibility for choices you never made."
His eyes searched mine desperately, looking for something—forgiveness, absolution, permission to stop drowning in guilt. "But I helped make it possible—"
"You didn't know." I pressed my palm more firmly against his cheek, making sure he felt the contact, the connection.
"Hewes knew exactly what he was doing. Every time he used that dust, every time he touched me while I was under its influence, every time he watched me beg and smiled—that was his choice. His evil. Not yours."
Nansar's hand came up to cover mine, his fingers curling around it, anchoring it against his face like he was afraid I might pull away. "I will do everything in my power to see him captured," he said, each word edged with steel. "Whatever it takes to make sure he faces justice."
"Thank you," I whispered, the words barely audible over the wind.
Something dangerous flickered behind his eyes then—something innate and utterly unforgiving. "And when they send him to Palaydium—because they will—I will be waiting." His voice dropped to a growl that rumbled through his chest. "He will not survive his sentence."
I should have been shocked. Should have recoiled at the naked promise of violence. But instead, satisfaction bloomed in my chest, dark and intense and unapologetic.
"Good," I said, and meant it with every atom of my being.
Silence settled between us after that, comfortable and warm despite the weight of what we'd just promised each other.
I became aware of how long I'd been sitting in his lap—how many minutes had slipped by while I let him hold me.
I hadn't pulled away. Hadn't felt that crawling need to escape.
Even with two corpses cooling a few feet away, I felt nothing but safe.
I let myself sink deeper into his embrace, my head finding the curve of his shoulder like it belonged there.
His arms tightened around me, solid and warm and unwavering, and I waited for the familiar panic to appear—the fear, the shame, that sickening feeling of being dirty or wrong for craving comfort.
But it never came.
Nansar's touch didn't frighten me. It didn't make me feel like I was betraying some part of myself. There was no cruel voice in my head hissing that I was being slutty or pathetic for accepting this tenderness.
He just felt... safe.
I liked that. I liked the steady rhythm of his breathing, the rise and fall of his chest beneath my cheek. I liked the way he held me like I was something precious rather than something to be conquered. I liked that I could be here, wrapped in his arms, and still feel like myself—whole and real.
Such a simple thing. But after everything Hewes had stolen from me, every way he'd corrupted touch into something toxic and vile, this felt like reclaiming territory I'd thought was lost forever.