Page 85 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

I have wanted many things in my life. Victory. Silence. A clean death for men who deserved worse. A night without dreams of burning shelters. I have never wanted anything with the pure animal terror that strikes me when I see her pinned under the trembling slab.

“Ghar,” she says, and the crack in her voice strips me bare.

I wedge both hands under the slab and lift.

The stone resists like a piece of the planet itself. My muscles lock. Pain tears across my wounded side. The shifting gravity pulls against me in uneven pulses, dragging the slab downward, then sideways, then downward again. I snarl through my teeth and force my legs under me, hauling upward until the support rib groans and Anita drags herself free.

The second she clears the space, the slab drops.

It hits where her legs were.

The impact shakes dust from the walls.

I grab her by the coat and pull her fully against me. For several breaths, all I can do is hold her. Her body is warm, shaking, alive. The archive case is trapped between us, its silver light pulsing wildly, but I barely see it. My face is buried in her hair before I know I have bent toward her, breathing in dust, sweat, blood, and the fierce human scent of her that tells every instinct in me she survived.

Anita’s hands close on my arms.

“You’re hurt,” she says, and her voice trembles.

“I thought you were gone.”

The words leave me raw.

Her fingers tighten.

Behind us, Brakk shouts that the path is clearing. Sira calls out that a lower service route has opened beneath the ring. The Choir fire falters as the collapsing geometry divides the chamber into shifting sections, buying us a narrow escape window.

I lift Anita without asking.

She does not fight me this time.

We retreat through a gap Brakk has cut into a lower access panel while the archive nexus thunders above us. Sira guides us through a narrow descent chute where gravity slides us along a curved plane instead of dropping us straight down. Brakk follows last, sealing the panel behind us with a blast from the fusion cutter that melts black stone into a smoking seam.

The chute deposits us into a smaller chamber far below the ring, and the sudden quiet hits harder than the battle.

This room is narrow, warm, and dim, with walls lined in dark ribbed structures that hum softly under their own power. Faint silver light flows through thin channels in the floor. The air smells less of dust here and more of heated stone, blood, and the sterile tang of old machinery. Somewhere above us, the archive nexus continues groaning, but the sound is muted by layers of ruin.

Brakk collapses against one wall and checks his cutter charge with shaking hands. Sira kneels near him, murmuring something in Pi’Rell that sounds like comfort but could be a diagnostic prayer for all I know. Anita stands two steps from me, still clutching the archive case, her face pale beneath dust and blood.

She looks at my chest.

The plasma burn has cut through my shirt and scored the scales beneath. Blood has welled along the edges, dark against iron-red skin. It hurts. I barely care.

Anita steps closer. “Sit down.”

“I can stand.”

“That was not a medical question.”

“Anita.”

“Sit the hell down before I climb you like excavation scaffolding and shove you there myself.”

Brakk laughs weakly from the wall. “I would pay to see that if I had not lost all faith in currency.”

I sit on a low ridge of black stone because arguing costs energy I do not have, and because Anita’s voice has gone thin in a way that frightens me. She sets the archive case down beside her and kneels in front of me with a med patch from Teren’s kit. Her hands shake as she peels the sealant backing open.

When she touches my chest, heat moves through me sharper than pain.