Page 18 of Claimed By the Alien Assassin
But she smiles. Just a little.
“What changed your mind?” she asks.
I don’t answer right away. I let the moment stretch until her smile falters under the weight of it.
“I’ve seen war,” I say, finally. “I’ve made war. Alone. In the dark. Because I had no one left who could look me in the eye and sayI matter.But you—you looked at me like I wasn’t a weapon.”
“You caught me like I was more than cargo.”
“Because you are.”
The silence after that isloud.The station hums in the walls. The holomap continues to spin, revealing terrain shifts and defense points on Snowblossom’s surface. None of it matters as much as the heat between us right now—raw and tethered and hungry for something it doesn’t know how to name.
Her voice is quieter when it returns. “What’s the first move?”
I step beside her, reaching across her to tap the eastern ridge projection. “Here. Their radar’s weak. We land at night, mask our thermal signatures.”
“And then?”
“We build an army. One mind at a time.”
She laughs—low and disbelieving. “You sure you’re not just here to look good and kill people?”
I smirk. “That too.”
Then she does something I don’t expect.
She leans against me.
Just a fraction of weight. Just enough to feel real.
And I realize I don’t mind it. Not at all.
Her eyes widen, full of light, raw and staggering. There’s no masking it—not even behind the shield of exhaustion or that stubborn twist in her lips. The hope I see there isn’t tentative.
It’s feral.
And it hits me like a slug to the gut.
Not because I’ve given her something she’s been denied—though that’s true—but because of what I see buried in that gaze. She’s not looking at a hired gun. Not even a partner. She’s looking at me like I’mhers. Like the broken, jagged pieces of who I’ve become might still fit into something worth holding.
And that’s dangerous. That’slethal.
My jaw flexes as I look away, swallowing down the instinct to disappear. I’ve done that before. Slipped into shadows. Made myself smoke. That’s always been the plan: do the job, vanish, rinse, repeat.
But this woman… she makes mestay.
“I’ll help you,” I say, and my voice is quiet, but it doesn’t shake. “I’ll help you get your colony back.”
Josie’s breath catches, lashes fluttering like she’s not sure she heard right. But her body says she did—tense and trembling like she’s bracing for another loss she somehow didn’t suffer.
I keep going, because if I don’t now, I never will.
“Not because it’s right,” I say, and she flinches, just a little.
“Not because you believe in the cause?” she whispers.
I meet her eyes again, and something in me pulls taut. “Because your voice won’t leave my head. Because you looked at me like I wasn’t made for killing. Because when you fell into my lap, it didn’t feel like coincidence. It felt like gravity.”
