Page 29 of Claimed By the War Brute
The artificial gravity spools down to emergency level. Weight settles heavy as guilt on my chest. I can no longer see competence in my own reflection—only consequences.
I shift: gear across the communication console. Fingers cut into metal. "Get this thing patched." My command is quiet—but unwavering.
She lifts her head, winces. “Without me?”
“Without you... there’s no point.”
She bites her lip, eyes swirling: anger, fear, hope. Resolve.
Stars whisper by outside the viewport—faint silhouettes against broken comm. Telar-9 drifts behind us: a clouded ring of neon death.
I brace her to the floor, check the oxygen pod’s integrity. Something gentle flickers inside me when she allows me to fit a fresh tube over her mouth. I inhale her scent: burnt hair, blood, defiance, starlight.
“Garrus,” she murmurs after seconds of silence. Her voice is fragile hope. “We’re still together.”
“I will keep us together,” I rasp. “And we will survive.”
Her eyelids close. Exhaustion overtakes her, but a warrior’s spark remains even beneath lethargy.
I press my forehead against the canopy as the life support systems sputter back to standard. I watch her chest rise and fall.
We’re fugitives in the void, hunted by her father’s empire. Our ship is dying. But we are still alive.
And damn it, that means we fight.
Later, we’ll plot revenge. But now, we retie the knotted bond of survival between weapon and soul. If he thinks he can break us with bullets and betrayal—he’s dead wrong.
I stand, rising slowly, blood still dripping from her shoulder onto my greaves. The ship groans its last protest. Malmount’s destroyer lurks at the fringe of sensors—its shadow waiting to strike again.
I tighten my fists. I’ll shield her again and again. I’ll burn down systems before I let him hurt her. And when we survive...
I will make him pay.
CHAPTER 23
SYD
The first thing I feel is pain. Not a sharp stab in my chest or throat, but a dull ache that permeates my bones—like gravity itself has gone rogue inside me, weighing every thought and breath. My eyelids test the flicker of sterile overhead lights. Panels pulse like heartbeat simulators, their clinical hum accentuating the ache in my head. The smell of sterilized metal and scorched electronics races into my sinuses—like a memory dragged through a vacuum of betrayal.
Restraints clamp my wrists and ankles to a padded medical table, the faint blue glow humming underneath. This room isn’t a cell—it’s execution theater masquerading as triage ward. And the large screen on the wall flickers through footage I never wanted replayed: Garrus and me escaping; our kiss after the firefight; moments of vulnerability, of insurrection, of whatever needed to happen so we could fight back together. My stomach churns. Those memories are being used as evidence that I’m expendable.
Footsteps echo through the hallway. The door slides open with sterile inevitability. I don’t need to look to know exactly who’s entering.
My father, Walter Malmount, strides in—slick suit, cold eyes, a predatory grin that’s grown colder than whatever cosmic chill hides in empty space. I cough, blood stinging my throat. He pauses and surveys me like I’m an inventory item that arrived damaged.
“You’re lucky they recovered you,” he says, each word clipped, precise. “Your body would’ve been useful—less… tragic.” As if my worth comes down to convenience.
I spit a smear of blood onto the floor. It toys at the quick disconnects in my restraints. But my voice is steady: “Do it. Kill me. Broadcast it. Show them what a gutless monster you really are.”
His posture doesn’t shift. He kneels just enough to lock eyes with me, pale blue suit gleaming under the high beams. “Opinion doesn’t matter. I make opinion. I control payloads, shipments, information streams. You never mattered.”
Something breaks inside me. Not defeat—but a cold fragility that has no place here.
“You just declared war on your own blood,” I whisper. “I hope you understand what that costs.”
He stands and walks away, the door hissing shut behind him. The screen dims to black. The lights lower to a clinical twilight. He’s gone, but he took something more than me. He took the safety I might once have had.
I wait. Seconds or minutes—I don’t know—until the afterimages of his words fade enough to think straight. I close my eyes. The smell of metal and ozone dim into the background. When I flex my fingers, the restraints hum. Not startling. Just enough to remind me they’re tech—wired, faulty, sentient in their quiet menace.
