Page 32 of Scaled Daddy's Secret Heir
He drives me insane.
The worst part is, I’ve stopped pretending I don’t watch him too. The way his hands move when he’s disarming a corrupted drone relay. The lines of his back when he stretches after a six-hour sit. The low rumble of his voice when he murmurs threats at the tech like it’ll behave better if it fears him.
Spoiler: it might.
But it’s not just attraction. It’s something messier. Denser.
Hegetsit. The silence. The shadows. The feeling that you’ve already died five times and are just waiting for the world to catch up.
And somehow, in that shared language of damage, we’ve found… rhythm.
No touch. No confessions.
But the air between us isthick.
Tonight, he sits across from me at the terminal, our knees almost touching. We’re reviewing heat signatures near a collapsed tunnel. Nothing conclusive. Just flickers of movement and thermal ghosts.
Still, I catch him glancing at me more than the screen.
“Do you think they know we’re watching?” I ask, voice low.
“They’re not careless,” he says. “But they’re not invincible.”
“Neither are we.”
He looks at me for a long beat. “That’s why we move together.”
I nod. The words settle warm in my chest. Heavy. True.
He shifts, and for a second, I think he’s going to reach out. Bridge the distance. But he doesn’t.
Instead, he says, “You’re not the same woman I met outside the coffee stand.”
“No,” I say, “She was running.”
“And you’re not?”
I look at the screen. Watch a blip fade out.
“No. I’m not.”
For a while, we just sit. Side by side. Not speaking. Not needing to.
It’s not safe. Not smart.
But it’sreal.
CHAPTER 11
KALEV
She doesn't flinch when I trigger the tripwire.
That’s the first thing I notice.
Just a soft twitch in her fingers where they hover over the console. Not her shoulders, not her breath. She doesn’t reach for a weapon, doesn’t spin or shout. She freezes—not in panic, but in calibration. Processing. And then her hand dips low, hits the bypass, and reroutes the alarm loop before the echo can bounce back to our coordinates.
She doesn’t even look at me until it’s done.
