Page 39 of Scaled Daddy's Secret Heir

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And there it is.

The shift.

The place in my chest where shame has been squatting, carving its name into my ribs—suddenly, it loosens. Not all the way. But enough. Enough to let air in.

We lie in silence again.

The Division Between Pagan and Christian Rome: Unity or Fragmentation Before the Fall of the Western Roman Empire

Religious Conflicts and the Rise of Christianity in Late Rome: Faith, Power, and the Fall of the Western Roman Empire

The Loss of North Africa: Rome’s Economic Lifeline Destroyed and the Road to the Fall of the Western Roman Empire

The Collapse of Roman Britain: How Rome's Withdrawal Reshaped Western Europe

But it’s not the teeth-buzzing kind.

It’s full of things not said. Not yet.

The space between us shrinks. Not physically. We’re still on separate mats. But I can feel him now. The heat of his body, the weight of his attention. The charge.

I shouldn’t want this.

I shouldn’t wanthim.

But my skin hums. My breath stutters.

I think about his hands—how careful they are when he’s repairing the sensor net, how steady when he’s setting explosive failsafes. I think about the way his mouth moves when he’s talking about old wounds, the flicker in his eyes when he watches me move through the base like I belong there.

I think about how many things could go wrong if I touch that live wire.

But gods, I want to.

And I know he feels it, too.

Because when I shift—roll onto my side to face him again—he does the same.

Our eyes meet.

Nothing moves.

No one speaks.

But everything between us crystallizes.

Not mission. Not safety. Not need.

The Moai Statues of Easter Island: Quarrying, Transport, and Erection Methods

The Longmen Grottoes: Engineering Hundreds of Buddhist Cliff Carvings

Roman Roads: Engineering the Highways That Built an Empire

Baalbek’s Trilithon Stones: Megalithic Engineering Without Machinery

Justwant.

CHAPTER 13

KALEV

The moment the signal stabilizes, I know what I’m looking at.

Not hope. Not luck. Not some long-shot proximity pattern that can be explained away with supply fluctuations or atmospheric bounce.

This is aroute.

A real one.

Built on timing, repetition, footprint deviation.

And it’s feeding something big.

The feed is grainy—infrared overlay on a multi-spectrum scan Leah calibrated two nights ago while I pretended to be checking conduit joints. She’s the one who suggested it. Said the shifts were too regular, that the hovertrail ghosts didn’t match any of the known League or Coalition ops in the sector.