Page 49 of Taken By the Alien Killer
“Bounties,” she says, as if tasting the word. “We can buy CynJyn a church.”
“She is already building one,” I say. “Out of bad ideas and neon.”
“Good,” she whispers, then reaches up with a hand that shakes less than it should and hooks a finger in my collar, drawing me down until our foreheads touch. “You okay?”
“Yes,” I say, and feel the truth of it land in my bones like a weight I want. “Now. Yes.”
She kisses the corner of my mouth where the new bruise hides, and the ship chooses that exact moment to purr differently as CynJyn adjusts a burn. Star’s smile will kill me one day if the universe doesn’t first. “Go be heroic again,” she says. “I’ll be here, being very brave and sleeping.”
“Perfect,” I say, and stand. “Sleep.”
“Yes, Commander,” she murmurs, rolling back into the sheets like a wave.
Back in the cockpit, CynJyn doesn’t comment on my face, which is its own brand of charity. She taps a coordinate and the stars smear, then snap, then smear again as we ease toward our rendezvous with men who have rules and guns and paperwork. She hums. I count. We make a plan for what to say if the patrol asks who we are and why our ship looks like a parade mistake. We rehearse how to hand them the data without giving them our throats. We prepare for the kind of kindness that arrives in uniforms and the kind that doesn’t.
“Hey,” CynJyn says after a while, softer. “Listen.”
I do. At first it’s only the engine, the gentle hiss of air, the tick of a panel settling. Then I hear it—faint, stubborn, steady—the memory of a heartbeat under my ear and the promise I keep building out of it.
“I hear it,” I say.
“Good,” she says, and flips the last switch on the intercept. “Let’s go home by way of a little mercy.”
CynJyn’s voice fades back into the low murmur of systems and the friendly tick of cooling metal. The cockpit’s glow narrows behind me. I carry that map of beacons and timings in my head, but I carry something else louder: the way she saidsleepand meantstay. I palm the cabin door and it seals me into dim and quiet and the particular warmth that’s become a new definition of home.
She’s awake. I know it before my eyes adjust; there’s a way the air changes when she’s looking at me—alert, amused, a little wary as if I’m a cliff and she hasn’t decided whether to jump. The emergency strip throws a soft line of light along her cheek, catching the healing violet at her jaw and the split at her lip already knitting. The citrus-clean scent this ridiculous ship favors lives here too, but her heat beats it back.
“Come here,” she whispers.
I do. The mattress dips. We lie on our sides, facing, our knees finding the old, easy fit and the new, dangerous one. I put my palm near her hip and not on it because I want the choice to be hers every time. She closes the distance by a finger’s width, touches my wrist. That’s all it takes.
“Talk to me,” she says, voice low and unadorned. “Really talk. Not the guard version. Not the church-of-duty version. The you I keep hearing in the cracks.”
I breathe once, the way they taught us to when the words don’t want to come. “I fought,” I say. “After the war ended for everyone else. Underground. Under rules that were mostly pretend. I told myself it was for discipline. For practice. To keep the edge sharp in case the world remembered it still wanted tocut. It was a lie. I did it because peace felt like a coffin and noise was the only thing that made my thoughts stop chewing me.”
Her fingers tighten on my wrist, a small, fierce press. “You got hurt?”
“Often,” I admit. “I gave worse. It wasn’t sport. It wasn’t noble. It was a way to be something other than a wall without the house having to know.” I flex the hand that has broken too many jaws and mended around that truth. “Last time, I didn’t stop when I should have. They pulled me off with a shock staff. Barred me. I deserved the door that shut.”
She studies me like she’s reading a star chart. “You were trying to silence the noise,” she says softly.
“Yes.”
“I know something about noise,” she murmurs. “It’s loud in a palace too. It just uses nicer words.”
I huff a breath that almost smiles. “Then I filed the transfer,” I tell her. “It was honor and it was cowardice and it was strategy, and it was the only thing I could think to do that didn’t end with me failing at my post and failing you. I thought if I moved the board, the game would stop hurting.”
Her mouth tilts. “You saygameand I hear you losing on purpose.”
“I was losing,” I say, meeting her eyes and not looking away. “The moment you said he was coming, I lost something I had been pretending not to carry.”
She swallows, throat working. “I didn’t say it to hurt you.”
“I know,” I answer. “You said it because it was true, and because I was supposed to be the kind of man who could stand in truth without breaking. Some days I am. That day I wasn’t.”
“I thought you hated me,” she says, too fast, like she needs to get the ugly out before it metastasizes. “When you stepped back in the training room. When you didn’t answer. I felt stupid and small and… wrong.”
“Never,” I tell her, and the word comes out with more heat than I intend. “I have hated many things. You aren’t on the list.”
