Page 8 of Scaled Daddy's Secret Heir
Not officially. Command doesn’t know. I flagged the leak in the system, then buried it again. A dead-end note filed under “logistics anomaly” with a timestamp that predates my arrival.
They’ll see nothing. Hear nothing. Because I’m not writing reports anymore—I’m writing history.
The woman at Terminal 12-B isn’t a traitor. She’s not some deep plant for the Ataxian Coalition or a naive civilian playing spy games with military-grade fire.
She’s a survivor.
And I know the look of one.
The first time I see her in person, I’m crammed between two half-drunk dockhands in a customs queue, sweat soaking the back of my collar despite the chill in the station. She stands in front of her terminal, boots braced wide like she’s daring the floor to shift beneath her.
Leah Monroe.
Earth-born. Compact build. Sharp eyes. And a mouth that moves even when her voice doesn’t. I watch her reroute cargo on the fly, override bot pathways like she’s been in their guts before. Efficient. Clean.
But what strikes me isn’t her precision—it’s her restraint.
She flirts with the edge of what the system will allow, pulling just enough to keep herself and her enclave protected, but never tipping over. Never greed. Never panic. It’s surgical.
She reroutes water purifiers away from the League's preferred vendors toward an enclave-sanctioned clinic. She tags two crates of synthetic protein for “reinspection,” and those crates? They go missing later that cycle. I check. They end up redistributed among civilian shelters.
She’s covering people.
Even when it costs her.
I spend four days in Spuel’s underbelly. Civilian layers. Cafés, queue lines, transit nodes. I ditch the operative posture. Dial myself down from razor-edged Vakutan agent to worn-in, off-duty port tech. Slouch more. Smile less like it’s carved in granite.
She doesn’t notice me. At least, not as a threat.
But I notice everything.
The way she snarks at the scanner drones like they can hear her. The way she takes her stim-caf black and bitter from the same vendor stall every morning. The way she flinches—not visibly, but internally—every time armored boots echo near her station.
One afternoon, a sanitation drone sparks and drops from its rail above. She’s the only one who moves before the warning chime hits. One hand yanks a coworker back by the collar, the other grabs a crate support to keep it from tipping.
Fast reflexes. Faster instincts.
You don’t learn that. You survive it.
Alliance protocol says I should report her. Feed the data upstream. Let higher-ups decide if she’s a problem to be fixed or an asset to be flipped.
But protocol doesn’t know what it’s like to wake up soaked in blood you barely remember spilling. Protocol doesn’t dream in screams.
I’ve followed too many orders. Left too many bodies cold because someone said “greater good” like it was a cleansing prayer.
No.
This time, I make the call.
I won’t report her.
I’ll recruit her.
Which is, of course, going to be a bastard of a job. She’s smart. Guarded. Carries herself like someone who’s learned the cost of trust and pays in silence now.
So I need subtle.
I engineer a run-in at the Vakutan coffee shop two corridors from her terminal. Not the closer one—the one she uses when she’s dodging a headache and needs real caffeine. The barista knows her by name, but mispronounces it every time.
