Page 15 of Alien Assassin's Heir

Still. The thought of her with someone else. The thought of a man getting to touch her, to hold her when I wasn’t there to stop it.

It boils up inside me like rage and regret had a bastard child and set it loose in my chest.

I know it shouldn’t matter. She has her life. I gave her no reason to wait. Hell, I gave her every reason to run screaming from my name.

But watching her now—watching the way she pulls that little girl into her arms and kisses her forehead like it’s the only thing that matters—I realize something that makes me stagger back from the window.

It wasn’t just intel I gave up.

It wasn’t just Luna’s trust.

It wasthis.

That little girl.

That laugh.

That moment of a future that could’ve been mine if I hadn’t let the Coalition hollow me out and fill me with orders instead.

I pace my quarters, the walls closing in. My boots crunch over dirt and synthetic rubble. There's a photo of my old squad half-burned, tucked under a cracked comms relay—men and women who died screaming under my watch. I can still hear them sometimes, especially when I let my guard down.

But this silence is louder than their ghosts.

I push open the back hatch and step out into the night.

Arkosh’s twin moons are up—one bloodred, one silver pale, hanging like judgment eyes over the ridge. The Wildwoodcanopy creaks softly in the wind. Crickets—or something thatpretendsto be crickets—chirp deep in the brush.

I walk because if I don’t, I’ll rip something apart.

I walk past the market lanes where vendors huddle around solar lamps. Past the faded murals painted by colonists who thought this rock would be paradise. Past the fence line of the crèche where I sometimes hear her child playing, even when I swear I’m not listening.

I’m not supposed to care.

Targen didn’t say anything about Luna having a kid. He just dropped her name like bait and smiled when it hooked something in me.

“Might be useful,”he said.

Useful.

As if she was a tool. A data drive. A lever to be pulled.

But Luna is not a lever. She is a damn tectonic shift. And I knew that from the moment I first saw her standing in that IHC uniform, all fire and focus.

She changed me.

And I destroyed her.

I lean against a cracked comms post and let the wind hit my face. It tastes like dust and old engine fumes.

I should report the child. I should send a supplemental note about Luna’s “civilian entanglements.”

But I don’t.

I never will.

Instead, I reach for the small datapad I keep strapped to my thigh and pull up the old photo I still carry—a stolen moment on a quieter world, before all of it burned. She’s smiling in it. Laughing. Her hand in mine, sunlight in her hair.

She didn’t know I’d already filed my mission report that morning.