Page 34 of Scaled Daddy's Secret Heir
Her eyes are unreadable. Open. But unreadable.
“You’re not testing me to find out if I’ll break,” she says. “You’re testing me because you’re scared I won’t.”
It’s not a question.
And it hits harder than the blast radius at Jossan Prime.
I hold her gaze, then drop into the crawlspace before I say something I can’t take back.
The relay’s shot.
Not the wiring—that’s solid, triple-layered against the League’s scanning pulses. It’s the stabilizer node. Cracked right through, like someone stepped on it. Which they didn’t. Because the only people with access are me and Leah, and Iwould’ve heardthat.
Unless it cracked under pressure.
Too much weight on the same frequency. Too much strain from rerouting every third packet through a decoy buffer while the rest slinks out through the heat exchangers.
Spuel wasn’t built to hold secrets this long.
Neither was I.
I strip the panel, angle the flux torch, and burn through the old joint until the stabilizer loosens with a mechanical cough. The smell’s acrid—melted plast and old coolant. It makes my eyes water, but I don’t blink.
I think about her voice. Steady. Sharp.
You’re scared I won’t break.
She’s right. She’s so fuckingrightit hurts.
If she broke—if she panicked, failed, cracked under the weight—I’d know what to do. I’d have steps. Protocol. Action to take. A way to fix or remove or cover.
But she doesn’t break.
She justbecomes.
And I don’t know how to handle that.
The idea that someone could look at this hell, this pressure, this proximity, and not come undone…
It’s foreign.
Terrifying.
Because if she can stand beside me and still be whole, what does that say about the pieces I’ve left behind?
I finish the patch and crawl back, breath tight in my chest, sweat slick down my spine.
The hatch opens on silence.
Leah’s reading a datapad she wasn’t earlier. Probably one of mine. Something ancient from the off-grid caches. Her lips move just slightly as she reads, and I wonder—not for the first time—what her voice sounds like when she’s not holding it in check.
I drop the toolkit with more noise than necessary. She doesn’t look up.
“Node’s patched,” I say.
“I know,” she murmurs. “Feed stabilized twenty seconds ago.”
I sit opposite her, spine stiff, arms crossed. “Don’t take that tone like you’re proud of it.”
