Chapter 15 #2
“I’m pregnant,” I say.
The words land like a detonation in a room that was already full of explosives.
Rhyx doesn’t move at first. His eyes widen slightly, then narrow again, as if his mind is rapidly recalibrating to accommodate a new variable that doesn’t fit any known model. The binders hum softly as his hands flex.
The officers at the door go rigid.
“What?” one of them blurts, then catches himself and returns to silence, embarrassed by his own humanity.
Rhyx’s voice is low. “How far along.”
“Early,” I answer, because specifics feel like giving someone a weapon. “Five or six weeks. That’s what medical said. I signed confidentiality. I declined contact notifications.”
His gaze stays on my face, intense enough that I feel exposed down to bone. “You told no one.”
“I’m telling you,” I say, and the admission tastes strange, like copper.
Rhyx inhales slowly, and when he exhales, his voice is rougher. “Why.”
“Because,” I say, and I force myself to keep my tone steady, to keep the sentences long enough to hold my trembling inside them, “Admiral Vol privately offered me institutional protection in exchange for silence.”
The air changes. Even the hum of the storage columns seems to sharpen.
Rhyx goes still again, and when he speaks his voice is quiet in the way danger is quiet.
“He approached you.”
“Not personally,” I say. “Not like he’d dirty his hands. A courier. An invitation phrased like an honor. ‘Strategic reconciliation.’ ‘Safeguarding tribunal integrity.’ All that pretty language that means we will keep you safe if you stop digging.”
Rhyx’s eyes burn pale gold in the dim light. “And you refused.”
“I didn’t answer,” I correct. “I’m… considering how to use the offer.”
He stares at me, and I see the moment he decides something, the way command decisions settle in his posture.
“Then we end this,” he says abruptly.
My stomach clenches. “What.”
“I will rescind my investigation requests,” Rhyx says, voice steady, flat, as if he’s reading off a tactical directive.
“I will withdraw the petition. I will accept execution. If the case closes cleanly, Vol’s people will stop looking at you.
They will stop seeing you as a threat. You and the child—”
“Stop,” I snap.
He doesn’t. “—you will have a chance to live without becoming collateral in a diplomatic firestorm.”
My hands curl into fists on the console edge. The cold metal bites into my palms and keeps me from screaming.
“You’re doing it again,” I say, voice shaking with fury. “You’re doing that martyr thing like it’s a personality trait.”
“It’s not martyrdom,” he replies tightly. “It’s strategy.”
“It’s cowardice dressed up as virtue,” I spit, and the word is harsh, unfair, and absolutely true in the moment because my anger needs something to bite. “It’s you trading yourself again to protect a system that murdered civilians.”
Rhyx’s jaw tightens. “Selene—”
“No,” I cut in, louder now, and the officers at the door shift like they might intervene, but they don’t. “No. You do not get to decide that for me. You do not get to decide that for the kid in my body. You do not get to decide that for forty-seven thousand dead.”
Rhyx’s eyes narrow. “You think I want this.”
“I think you want control,” I say, and my voice is colder now, the anger sharpening into something clean.
“You want to make a choice that you can justify, so you don’t have to sit with the possibility that you couldn’t control what happened and you can’t control what’s happening now.
So you offer yourself up like a neat sacrifice, and everyone gets to call you honorable while the people who actually moved the corridor keep their hands clean. ”
His binders hum louder as his hands flex against them.
“You are pregnant,” he says, and the words sound like he’s trying to anchor himself. “You are a civilian tribunal staffer. You have no institutional protection. Vol has power. The Senate has power. If they decide to make you an example—”
“Then let them try,” I say fiercely.
Rhyx stares at me as if I’ve spoken a language he half recognizes.
“You don’t understand,” he says, voice low, urgent. “They will not come at you like they come at me. They will not make you a clean villain. They will make you disappear. They will ruin you quietly.”
I lean forward across the console, close enough that I can smell him beneath the sterility—something earthy, like heat stored in stone and a faint mineral tang. My voice drops to a controlled hiss.
“I grew up in quiet ruin,” I say. “I am not scared of it.”
His gaze flickers down, then back up, and something in his expression fractures—pain, admiration, fear, all layered.
“You shouldn’t have to be this brave,” he murmurs.
“I’m not brave,” I snap. “I’m furious. There’s a difference.”
Rhyx’s shoulders rise slightly on an inhale, then settle, and his voice turns softer, not pitying, but raw. “I can’t… I can’t watch another innocent life become collateral.”
I feel my throat tighten.
“Innocent,” I repeat, and my hand lifts unconsciously to my abdomen, a protective gesture so instinctive it scares me. “You think this kid is innocent of the world it’s entering.”
Rhyx’s eyes follow the motion, and for a heartbeat the chamber feels too intimate for the walls around it, too charged with grief and defiance and something else I’ve been refusing to name because naming makes it real.
“I’m not asking you to protect me,” I say, quieter now, because my anger has burned down to embers and embers still sting. “I’m telling you to stop trying to protect me by dying. That is not protection. That is you repeating the same move until everyone applauds and the truth stays buried.”
His jaw works, as if he wants to argue and can’t find a clean argument that doesn’t sound like surrender.
I step around the edge of the projection table, closing the physical distance between us, and the officers at the door tense, but I ignore them, because if they drag me back into “appropriate distance” right now I might lose my mind.
Rhyx’s gaze drops briefly to the space between us, then lifts again, steady.
“You shouldn’t be near me,” he says, voice low, rough. “They’re watching.”
“Let them,” I reply.
His eyes narrow. “Selene—”
“I said let them,” I repeat, and the words are a dare, not because I want attention, but because I’m tired of living like my body is a liability and my grief is a scandal and my evidence is a problem to be managed. “I’m done making myself small so everyone else can feel safe.”
Rhyx exhales slowly, and I watch the restraint in him shift, the way a man shifts when he realizes the old rules no longer apply.
“You’re shaking,” he says, softer.
“I’m not,” I lie.
He lifts his bound hands slightly, the blue shimmer of the binders reflecting on his scales. “You are.”
I swallow, and the movement makes the nausea flicker again, a small internal wave. I close my eyes for half a second, steadying myself, and when I open them he’s closer than he was, not touching, but near enough that I can feel his heat through the air.
“You offered me protection once,” I say, voice low. “In the chamber. When you requested I stay on the case. You said you wanted a complete record.”
“I still do,” he murmurs.
“Then act like it,” I whisper. “Don’t you dare trade yourself again to keep the system comfortable.”
Rhyx’s gaze holds mine, and in it I see exhaustion so deep it looks like old wounds, but beneath it there is something else too—something that isn’t resignation, isn’t martyrdom, something closer to anger with direction.
“Alright,” he says quietly. “Alright.”
The single syllable lands like a door opening.
I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding, and my shoulders drop slightly. The relief is sharp enough to hurt.
For a moment, we just stand there, close, with the projection table behind me casting pale light that makes his scars look brighter, more pronounced, as if the room is insisting on showing everything that was done to him and everything he did.
“You told me Vol offered protection,” Rhyx says, voice low. “What exactly did they offer.”
“Safety,” I say bitterly. “Access. A shield from media attacks. A promise that my ‘wellness’ would be supported. They didn’t say pregnancy, obviously, because they don’t know—”
I stop, and my stomach clenches with sudden fear, because of course they might know; institutions have medical policies, and policies have data, and data gets bought and traded like anything else.
Rhyx’s eyes sharpen. “Do you think they know.”
“I don’t know,” I admit, and the honesty tastes like blood.
His jaw tightens. “Then we assume they will find out.”
I stare at him, and my voice comes out rough. “And what, you still want to die to keep them from using it?”
Rhyx looks at me for a long beat, then shakes his head once, slow, as if the motion costs him.
“No,” he says quietly. “I want to live long enough to stop them.”
The words hit me in the chest like impact, because they are so simple and so different from everything he’s been saying.
I inhale, and the air tastes cold and metallic, and suddenly I’m aware of my own heartbeat and something quieter beneath it, a faint internal rhythm I can’t hear but can feel in the way my body insists on itself.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I confess, the sentence slipping out before I can stop it, because proximity strips away performative control.
Rhyx’s voice is almost a whisper. “Neither do I.”
The admission is so human it makes my eyes sting.
I step closer again, and this time there is no table between us, no projection line, no corridor map acting as a buffer.
The officers at the door shift, and I hear a muted click of a compad being checked, but I don’t care.
If they want to record this, let them record it; they’ve recorded everything else that mattered, and they’ve still managed to lie about it.