Page 67 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

“Because you are exhausted.”

“No,” I say, anger rising fast enough to scorch away the dizziness. “Don’t soften it. You don’t want me decoding this because the truth scares you.”

Ghar’s eyes flash.

I step toward him, every bruise and ache in my body suddenly secondary to the need to hurt him before he can drag me away from the work. “That’s what this is really about, isn’t it? You can dress it up as tactics and survival, but every fragment we uncover rips another hole in whatever you were taught to believe. The Precursors weren’t first. They may have lied. They may have buried the truth because the galaxy’s precious sacred framework couldn’t survive contact with reality.”

“Anita,” Sira says quietly from behind me.

I ignore her.

Ghar’s jaw flexes hard enough that I see muscle shift along his scarred cheek.

Good.

Let him feel cornered too.

“You don’t want me to stop because I’m tired,” I continue. “You want me to stop because if I keep going, you might have to admit your Grand Design is built on edits, omissions, and somebody else’s leftovers.”

The silence afterward has teeth.

Brakk mutters, “That was probably past the recommended dose.”

Ghar moves so fast I barely track the first step.

He does not touch me. He does not loom over me by accident or instinct this time. He simply closes the distance between us with controlled fury, stopping close enough that I feel the heat coming off him through the cold damp air.

“You think I want ignorance?” he asks.

His voice is low enough to make the chamber seem quieter around it.

I lift my chin. “I think you want shelter.”

His laugh is harsh and humorless. “Shelter.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what shelter looked like during the war?”

My anger falters because the question is not rhetorical in the way I expect.

Ghar’s golden eyes burn with something raw and old. “Shelter looked like children packed into underground rooms while officers above them debated acceptable casualty ratios. Shelter looked like medics marking survivors by whether they could return to battle, not whether they could be healed. Shelter looked like warriors telling themselves the dead were necessary because the Grand Design required sacrifice.”

His words land harder than my accusations because there is no performance in them. No polish. No attempt to win.

Still, he keeps going.

“I do not want ignorance because it comforts me,” he says, his voice roughening. “I want one piece of my life to have meant something other than obedience dressed in sacred language. I want the battles I survived and the people I failed to save to belong to a universe where suffering at least bends toward purpose.”

My throat tightens.

Ghar leans closer.

“Yes, the truth frightens me,” he says. “It terrifies me because every fragment you decode dismantles the belief system that once justified my survival. If the Precursors were not originators, if the Design was inherited, altered, or fabricated, then I have to look back at every order I followed and ask whether the only thing holding those ghosts together was a story powerful men found useful.”

The chamber hums around us with faint silver light.

I cannot breathe properly.