Page 65 of Zayrik

As mine.

And whatever waited for us on that station...

We would face it together.

21

Nyla

I ADJUSTED OUR COURSE, fingers steady on the controls. Like if I kept my hands busy, my brain wouldn’t have time to catch up. Wouldn’t have time to think about everything that had just happened. Like if I focused hard enough on the approach vectors, I could ignore how my body still hummed with awareness of him.

The truth about Vask.

The fact that Zayrik hadn’t left.

And worse, the fact that I’d let him pin me against a storage locker and fuck the common sense out of me. Let him see parts of me I’d kept hidden for years. Let him in.

I rolled my shoulders. Shoved that memory out of my head and locked it in a box labeled later.

Because that wasn’t the problem I needed to focus on.

Even though my skin still tingled where he’d touched me.

It didn’t matter how something inside me reached for him without my permission.

We had bigger issues.

Like the fact that someone was tracking us.

Like the crystal burning a hole in my jacket.

And the fact that I was about to walk back into my past to fix my future.

Back to where it all started. Where I learned to survive.

I exhaled slowly.

No more distractions.

No matter how tempting they were.

“Approaching Cindrel Station,” Nav announced, dragging me back. “Estimated arrival in twelve minutes.”

Zep chirped from his perch by the viewport, wings fluttering as he caught sight of the station in the distance. His anxiety matched mine. He remembered this place too.

“Yeah, I see it too,” I murmured. “Been a while, hasn’t it?”

The station came into view, a chaotic patchwork of scavenged hulls and rusting struts, like someone had glued a dozen failing outposts together and called it functional. Emergency lights flickered in patterns that spelled danger to anyone who knew how to read them. Unmarked ships dotted the docking bays, each one a potential threat.

Not the worst place I’d been.

Not the safest, either.

But it had been home once. Sort of.

Zayrik sat silent beside me, but I could feel the heat of him, his tension radiating like a physical force. The way his body angled slightly toward mine, protective without being obvious about it. This wasn’t his kind of place, too chaotic, too lawless, too raw.

It was carved from my past.

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