Page 77 of Alien Assassin's Heir

My palms are slick, my breath shallow. The taste of metal and diesel is everywhere. I crouch for a second in the shadow while the device waits to become history.

When I send the message to Targen, I don’t bother hiding the tone. I craft it like a blade: short, clean, irrevocable.

“Consider this my resignation.”

It’s the linguistic equivalent of walking out with your boots on and your middle finger raised. I don’t expect civility. I expect the old man’s teeth to grind behind that voice, to taste the bile of betrayal like a long, slow burn. That’s the point. I want him to notice. I want him to come.

I watch my channel ping, the return coming slow and cold. The reply is immediate—Targen’s curtness wrapped in threat. Vale feeds the comm-net the clean scrub and masks my primary signature. I feel the network cough as the false trails bloom in the right places—Alliance chatter that looks clumsy and cheap, a courier with a contrived manifest, one opportune transplant of evidence. It’s alchemy, turning my life into rumor.

“You’re mad,” Vale mutters when I step back into the safehouse, boots leaving dirt prints on the floor. He’s tired enough to be cruel.

“Mad keeps people alive sometimes,” I say, and the answer tastes right and wrong at once.

He watches me — the man who soldered me a ghost in a net. “You sure you want him to show? Targen to come out here? You don’t know what his face does when he smells betrayal.”

“I know what it does,” I say. “And I know what I’ll do when it does it to my family.”

His hands are the shape of an apology when he folds them. “Just—don’t break everything you don’t mean to. You’ve got a little girl.”

I look at the photo Vale keeps tacked to his wall—nothing but a faded shot of some kids and a scrap of better days—and I feel it like a hot coal in my gut. “We’re not giving her up,” I say. “We’re taking our name back.”

Outside, in the canyon, things shift. The virus breathes across the net; the micro-detonator waits in the dark like an unblinking eye. My message sits like a challenge: a dare thrown into a pit of vipers.

Targen will come. He has no choice. And he will bring what claws he needs.

But so will I.

I run a hand through my hair, feel the grit of Arkosh cling to my skin. The stench of oil and fried meat and rust hangs in my clothes. In the far room, Luna whispers in her sleep while Solie murmurs and turns, a small life oblivious to the calculations and sins unfolding for her future.

I want to think this is the only way. I’m not sure. All I know is that the world didn’t want me to be a father. The world told me I was a tool, a weapon. Now I aim to become the hand that breaks the mechanism.

When the night swallows the rim of the canyon, I sit on the roof of the safehouse and listen for the world’s answer. The virus crawls its way through the comm-net, Vale’s patch holding like a band over a leak. Somewhere, a courier will trip over the breadcrumb I left and a rumor will begin to boil.

Down in the street a dog snarls at nothing and someone throws a bottle. The small noises of a small town continue; underneath them, like an undertow, a darker wave rises. I think about the pull of storms, the force of weather. I think about how fast everything can change.

I rub my thumbs over the little case in my jacket where the detonators sit and feel the smooth metal shiver under my skin. I have lit the fuse on the rest of my life.

Let Targen come. Let him storm in with his cohorts and his questions. Let him bring the Coalition’s weight to Arkosh if he dares.

I will be ready. I will be the hand that stands between them and the child who crawls in Solie’s bed and calls me “mister dragon man.”

That, I promise myself, in the dark and the dust and the bright, small flush of coffee at the back of my throat.

The safehouse is quiet when I slip back in, the night air still clinging to me, thick with dust and the metallic bite of ozone. My boots scrape softly over the threshold, but the sound feels too loud, an intrusion in the fragile bubble they’ve made here.

She’s there.

Luna is curled on the couch, hair loose and tangled, eyes heavy-lidded with exhaustion. Her head rests back against the cushions, but she’s not asleep. Solie lies sprawled across her lap, little chest rising and falling in the steady rhythm of dreams. One of her tiny hands is curled in Luna’s shirt, the other dangling toward the floor, sticky with whatever fruit she must’ve eaten earlier. The room smells of them—warm bread, sweet soap, the faint lavender oil she rubs on Solie’s hair after a bath. For a moment, I just stand in the doorway, because it feels like I’ve stumbled into a dream I never thought I’d be allowed to have.

“Couldn’t stay away?” Luna asks softly, eyes flicking open to find me. There’s no accusation in her voice, not tonight. Just bone-deep weariness.

I move closer, lowering myself onto the couch beside them. The old frame creaks under my weight, but she doesn’t shift away. Solie stirs, blinking drowsily before reaching for me withthose golden eyes still hazy with sleep. Her small fingers find my hand and curl around it, warm and sure.

Something in me breaks open at the touch.

I cup her hand gently between my claws, careful, reverent. “Easy, firefly,” I murmur.

Her lips move around a mumble I can’t quite make out before she drifts back under. I feel the damp warmth of her breath against my palm.