Chapter 16
KYLDAK
She’s alive.
I keep telling myself that, but the words slide off my brain like oil on steel.
Jaela. Alive. In my camp.
It doesn’t feel real. My hands keep curling into fists just to ground myself—feel the bite of my own claws. The way she looks at me, like I’m both the man she used to love and the monster she never stopped running from—it chews through my insides like acid.
I can’t breathe around her.
She stalks across my command platform like she owns the place, muttering curses under her breath in languages half my crew wouldn’t dare fake understanding.
She’s wearing my jacket again, sleeves rolled to her elbows, grease on her cheek, hair tied back in that same messy knot she wore the day she disappeared from my life like smoke off a battlefield.
My second-in-command tries to report on the western patrols.
I wave him off.
“Out. All of you.”
There’s no hesitation. They scatter like shadows under floodlight. Smart.
She doesn’t flinch as I walk toward her. Doesn’t blink. But her fingers twitch at her sides like she’s weighing whether to go for a blade or a lie.
I stop two feet from her. Close enough to smell ozone and engine oil and her. Always her.
“Start talking.”
She crosses her arms. “You gonna bark or bite, Red Eye?”
My jaw ticks.
“Why are you here?”
“Didn’t feel like staying dead.”
“Funny. Try again.”
She shrugs. “Felt like a vacation.”
My blood simmers.
“Jaela—”
“What, Kyldak? You want the truth? You gonna melt down if I don’t monologue my trauma right now? Or maybe you just want to know if I’ve got some Alliance tracker buried in my spine so you can flay it out.”
I lean in. “You’re lying. With every breath.”
She bares her teeth in a smile that’s pure warpaint. “And you’re still the same bastard who thinks growling is foreplay.”
“You found me. Out of every damn planet, you found me. That wasn’t an accident.”
“No,” she says, voice low. “It wasn’t.”
Silence crackles between us.
I want to break something. I want to pull her apart and put her back together until she makes sense again. Until she stops looking like everything I ever lost and starts looking like something I could actually have.
But instead, I grab her.
She shoves me.
I slam her against the nearest wall, metal rattling with the impact. She snarls, wraps her fingers in my hair, yanks my mouth down to hers.
It’s everything.
We tear each other apart like we’re starving and the other is the last meal left in the galaxy. Her thighs lock around my hips. My hands map her body like I’ve forgotten every line and need to relearn it from muscle and memory. The sounds she makes—they brand themselves into my bones.
We don’t come up for air until the stars are bleeding light through the cracks in my tent roof.
She lies beside me now, half-covered in a scrap of my warcoat, her chest rising and falling slow like she’s forgotten the world can hurt her.
I stare at the ceiling. The corrugated iron shakes with the wind. Every creak sounds like a countdown.
She hasn’t told me anything. Not really.
And I haven’t pushed.
I should be interrogating her. Tearing apart the hows and whys and which devil she danced with to land here. But all I can do is breathe her in and wonder—
“Why now?” I whisper into the dark.
She doesn’t answer.
Maybe she’s asleep or she’s pretending.
Maybe the truth is too heavy to speak out loud.
Either way, the question hangs there, suspended between us like a blade waiting to drop.
And I know—deep in my gut, deeper than instinct—that whatever storm’s coming?
She brought it with her.