Page 144 of Scaled Daddy's Secret Heir
The air shifts again.
A rupture in the world.
Not from violence this time.
From change.
From something bigger than escape.
We board the evac transport minutes later.
Clancy is quiet, curled against me, eyes still too wide. Kalev watches the horizon as the base shrinks behind us.
Below us, I see the ripple effect of collapse—troops scattering, comm towers dark, command units severed from central intelligence.
“What happens now?” I ask, voice barely audible.
Kalev doesn’t look at me.
“Now,” he says, “we stop running.”
CHAPTER 39
KALEV
Dowron looks smaller in person.
Not physically, at first glance. The uniform still fits him like it was sewn onto his bones. The medals still sit heavy on his chest, catching the overhead light in clean, ceremonial flashes. The office still smells like polished stone and ozone and that faint antiseptic tang all Alliance command decks reek of.
But the illusion collapses the second his eyes find mine.
They flick.
Just once.
Toward the door behind me.
Toward the wall console.
Toward the panic button buried under the desk lip.
That’s when I know he already understands what I am here to do.
I don’t salute.
I don’t acknowledge rank.
I walk to the desk and set the hard-case down between us.
It hits the polished surface with a thick, terminalthud.
Dowron flinches.
Not much.
But enough.
“Kalev,” he says carefully, voice still tuned to command-frequency calm. “You’ve made quite a spectacle of yourself.”
