Page 33 of Scaled Daddy's Secret Heir
“Try harder,” she mutters.
And I can’t stop the grin that pulls at my mouth like it forgot what direction it was supposed to go.
I kill the feed and toss the cracked relay disc on the table between us. “Three-second delay. Slower than last time.”
“Maybe next time you’ll find a tripwire I haven’t already patched.”
She’s wearing one of my old overshirts again—swallowed by the fabric, sleeves rolled twice, collar askew—and I hate that it’s become the most dangerous thing in this whole mission.
I’ve buried bombs with more restraint.
The base is fully operational now—if you squint and lower your standards. Signal dampeners run off a black-market generator I jacked from a Kilgari scrap hauler. Motion sensors built into the sewer junctions above us. Emergency purge vents welded from a med evac rig we stripped on day four. Every entrance, every exit, every blind corner mapped and memorized.
It’s the tightest ghost cell I’ve ever built. The kind you design when you know you can’t rely on backup. When you’ve got one partner, and that partner’s not expendable.
Not anymore.
She thinks I haven’t noticed her routines, but I have. I’ve logged every adjustment like muscle memory. Leah sleeps in cycles now, not collapse. She checks our perimeter feeds before I do, just to see if she’ll catch something I won’t. Her boots are quiet on the grating floor. Her breath is slower when she listens—really listens.
She’s adapting.
And she doesn’t complain. Not once.
Even when the dampeners hum too loud to think. Even when the heat coils cut out for two days and we shared body heat without ever touching skin. Even when I push her—like today—to test her reflexes.
She adapts.
And every day she does, I feel something in me break a little more.
Because this—thisversionof her—it was forged in pressureI brought to her doorstep.
The mission was mine. The target mine. The need for silence, the shadows, the constant readiness… all of it, mine.
She didn’t choose war.
She chose me.
And I’m not sure that’s better.
She slides the disc toward me with one finger. “Next test?”
“Later,” I say. “Feed from Dock 12’s starting to degrade. I need to recalibrate the secondary node.”
She leans back, stretching her arms behind her head, spine arched like a bow just shy of snapping. “You could just say you need to crawl through the piss-vent again.”
“It’s not a—” I stop. Frown. “Okay, yeah. It’s a piss-vent.”
“See?” She smiles. “You’re learning.”
“Learning not to trust my nose.”
“Smart man.”
I grab the toolkit and head for the rear hatch, but her voice catches me just before I drop through the panel.
“Kalev.”
I look back.
