Page 17 of Fated in A Time of War

ALICE

T he kiss lingers on me like a second heartbeat, thrumming under my skin with every step.

It isn’t a memory. It’s alive. My lips still burn faintly, my nerves hum, and no matter how I tell myself to breathe, to walk, to keep moving like nothing happened, I know I’ll never be able to untangle myself from that moment. Not now. Not ever.

I don’t regret it. Not for a breath. Not even as the weight of it presses down on me heavier than any restraint he ever tied around my wrists.

Every step through the broken rooftops feels… altered. Not softer. Not safer. Just charged. Like the air after lightning hits too close, when your lungs taste of ozone and your bones buzz as if the world is reminding you that you’re alive.

Krall walks ahead, rifle steady, shoulders rigid. He doesn’t look back at me. Doesn’t say a word. But that stiffness in his spine—too tight, too precise—isn’t dismissal. It’s guarding. He’s protecting something. Not from me, but from himself. Protecting that crack in his armor he refuses to name.

So I give him space.

The path takes us across the broken shell of what used to be a commuter bridge, down into the skeletal remains of an industrial quarter, and finally into the shadow of a crater so deep it swallows the horizon.

At the bottom rests the carcass of a mag-train, twisted on its side like some metal beast felled mid-flight.

Krall motions us inside without a word.

The car’s husk is rusted, ribs of ferro-steel bent inward where the blast caved it, but it’s shelter. Dry. Hidden. And when the echoes of our boots fade into silence, the quiet isn’t like the silence outside—waiting, suffocating. It’s different.

It’s private.

I lower myself onto a half-collapsed bench.

The cushion is long gone, just a strip of corroded frame under me, but my legs are grateful anyway.

My muscles tremble with exhaustion, though I know it isn’t just fatigue.

It’s the residue of him—his grip on me, the press of his chest against mine, the heat of his breath when the world cracked open.

Krall doesn’t sit. He stands in the corner like a sentinel, the barrel of his rifle tilted down but not away, eyes cutting over the wreckage as though shadows might rise up and bite.

I break the silence first. My voice sounds too loud in the hollow car.

“You going to stand there all night?”

His jaw flexes, a flicker of muscle under scar. “Maybe.”

“Not much of a bed,” I say, patting the bent rail beside me. “But it’s better than pacing yourself into a hole in the floor.”

He grunts. A sound that isn’t quite a refusal, but not acceptance either. His eyes flick to me for half a breath, then slide away, as if he’s afraid of what he might see—or what I might see in him.

I let it hang. Sometimes silence is louder than words.

I pull my canteen free, take a small sip, then hold it out. He doesn’t move at first. Then, slowly, he crosses the space, crouches, and takes it. His fingers brush mine in the exchange. It’s nothing. Barely a touch. But the current sparks again, same as before, same as it always will.

He drinks. Wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Passes it back.

“Thanks,” he mutters, so low I almost don’t hear it.

I don’t smile. Not where he can see. But something in me loosens, a knot I’ve carried since he first dragged me from the rubble and tied me like cargo.

We sit in that strange quiet, the walls creaking faintly around us as the wreck settles in the wind. Outside, the night is still, the distant thrum of artillery no more than ghosts in the air.

I speak again, softer this time. “That kiss…”

His head jerks, eyes snapping to mine. A flash of fire, then fear, then something else. Something rawer.

“Forget it,” he growls.

“No.” My voice doesn’t rise, but it hardens. “I won’t.”

His nostrils flare. His claws flex against his rifle grip. “It was a mistake.”

I shake my head, steady. “Maybe. But it happened.”

For a long moment, we just stare at each other. His eyes burn, amber in the fractured light, alive with things he’ll never admit. My chest rises slow and heavy, but I don’t look away.

He’s the one who does.

He turns, slamming himself down onto the wrecked bench across from me, his back to the wall. He props his rifle against his knees and leans forward, elbows braced, face buried in shadow.

“You don’t understand what this means,” he says finally, his voice rough, almost broken. “What it costs.”

“I understand enough,” I reply. My hand finds the edge of the seat, fingers curling against cold steel. “And I’m not afraid of the cost.”

He exhales, sharp and ragged, a sound between a laugh and a growl. His shoulders sag just slightly, that perfect soldier’s frame buckling under weight he can’t carry anymore.

For a long time, we sit in silence again. But it isn’t empty. It isn’t cold. It’s the quiet of something alive between us, something neither of us can kill no matter how hard we try.

The kiss still lives on my lips. In the air. In the space between our breaths.

And though the mag-train is silent, broken, rusting into earth, I can hear it. The hum of something moving forward. Something inevitable.

Even if neither of us has the courage to say it yet.

The scrape on his arm isn’t much. Not compared to the gouge across his side that I stitched together with nanites.

Not compared to the bruises blooming across his ribs from that last skirmish.

But it’s bleeding sluggishly, red streak mixing with that darker undercurrent of his Vakutan blood.

He doesn’t even seem to notice it—like it’s just another tick mark on the tally of pain his body carries.

I notice.

“Hold still,” I murmur, pulling my kit closer.

His eyes flick to me, skeptical, but he doesn’t pull away when I peel back the torn edge of his armor.

The metal’s jagged, bent in, sharp enough to have ripped him worse if it had struck deeper.

I trace the cut with careful fingers, dabbing away the grime with a strip of cloth before uncapping antiseptic.

The moment the cool liquid touches his skin, he flinches hard, a growl caught in his throat.

“Damn it,” he hisses through his teeth.

I raise an eyebrow. “That’s the point. It’s supposed to sting.”

His mouth curls—just barely—into something almost like a smile. A shadow of humor ghosts across his face, the kind of expression I never thought I’d see from him.

“So that’s how you lot do it,” he mutters, voice low, almost amused. “Soft Ataxians prefer slaps to medicine.”

The words catch me off guard. A joke. Not cruel. Not cutting. Not another dagger of blame between us. A joke.

I blink at him, then let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. My lips twitch upward into a smile—small, tired, but real. “Maybe we just like watching big, tough Vakutans squirm.”

His golden eyes meet mine, steady, unflinching. But they’re different now. Softer at the edges. Alive with something other than suspicion or rage.

I tape the bandage down with hands steadier than they should be after all this. For a moment, neither of us speaks. The silence between us isn’t jagged anymore. It’s not a battlefield. It’s something gentler. Tentative.

He leans back against the cracked frame of the bench, stretching his arm experimentally before settling again. His breathing evens out. He doesn’t thank me. He doesn’t need to. That little smile—gone now but burned into my mind—is enough.

I should stop there. Should let the quiet hold us. But the question gnawing at me is louder than my sense of caution.

“What happens,” I ask softly, my voice barely louder than the rustle of the ruined train around us, “when they find us?”

His head tilts slightly. His eyes narrow, searching me like he’s trying to peel away the skin of my words and see the fear beneath. I don’t look away. I want him to answer.

He doesn’t—not right away. He breathes in slow. Out slower. The silence stretches long enough that my chest tightens, wondering if I’ve gone too far. Wondering if I’ve reminded him who I am. What I am.

Then his voice cuts through. Steady. Hard-edged, but not cold.

“I kill them before they kill you.”

The words land like a blade driven into stone. Not boast. Not bravado. Not the kind of hollow promises I’ve heard from commanders or priests, empty assurances meant to soothe.

This is fact.

My throat tightens so hard it hurts. I try to swallow, but it’s like something inside me locks in place.

No one has ever promised me that before.

For a long breath, I can’t speak. Can’t do anything but stare at him, the weight of his vow settling into me like heat into bone.

“You mean that,” I whisper finally.

His eyes snap to mine, gold catching in the faint starlight through the hole in the ceiling. He doesn’t blink. Doesn’t look away.

“I don’t say things I don’t mean.”

There’s no softness in the way he says it. No romance. No flowery words. Just the truth, stripped bare.

Something in me trembles, but not with fear. With something far more dangerous.

I look down at my hands, still stained with his blood, still smelling faintly of antiseptic and rust. My chest feels too tight for the small space of this wreck. Too raw. Too alive.

“You don’t have to,” I murmur, though even as I say it I know it’s a lie.

His jaw clenches. He leans forward, elbows braced on his knees, eyes locked on me with that same unshakable intensity that’s both shield and weapon.

“I do.”

Two words. Nothing more.

But in them, there’s a promise I never asked for. One I’ll never be able to forget.

The silence after stretches heavy, thick with everything unsaid. I press my palms to my knees, trying to steady the tremor running through me, trying to remind myself who he is. What he is.

The enemy.

But the echo of his vow doesn’t feel like the enemy. It feels like something else. Something I don’t have a name for yet.

I meet his gaze again, and I’m not afraid of what I see in him.

I’m afraid of what I feel in me.

The wrecked mag-train creaks with every breath of wind, like the steel ribs of some dying beast shifting in its last dreams. The air inside is stale, metallic, thick with the ghost of long-burnt fuel.

It should feel suffocating. A prison within a prison.

But with him here—silent, looming, too close and not close enough—it feels different. Safer.

I don’t know what makes me do it. Maybe it’s exhaustion, maybe it’s the heat from his body bleeding into mine after days of cold, or maybe it’s that vow still echoing in my chest, the certainty in his voice replaying like a drumbeat I can’t unhear.

Whatever it is, I move before I can stop myself.

I lean in, slow, hesitant, and lay my head on his shoulder.

His body stiffens instantly—every muscle coiled, every breath halted. He’s stone under me, hard as the armor still strapped to his chest, and for one terrible heartbeat I think he’ll shove me away.

But then… something shifts.

The tension eases by fractions. His shoulders lower. His breathing deepens. And then, with a care that feels foreign to the man I first met, his arm comes around me. Not caging me. Not binding. Just there. Solid. Protective.

The weight of it nearly breaks me.

Because I should be afraid. I should be screaming inside my own head at the insanity of this—laying against him, my enemy, my captor, the Vakutan whose people burned villages like mine to ash. I should recoil from his touch like it’s fire.

But I don’t.

I melt into it.

And gods help me, for the first time since this war began, I feel… home.

The ache of it is unbearable. It’s not relief, not exactly. It’s the sharp sweetness of something I never thought I’d feel again. Belonging. Shelter. As if the storm outside could tear the sky apart, and here in this rusting husk, with his arm around me, I’d still be safe.

My eyes sting, but I don’t cry. I just breathe. In time with him.

I realize, with a heaviness that presses down to my bones, that I don’t want to escape anymore. Not really. The thought used to gnaw at me constantly—when to run, how to slip my bonds, where I’d go. Every moment was calculation, the mechanics of survival.

But not now.

Now I want something else.

I want him to choose me.

Not because I’m leverage. Not because I’m useful. Not because of whatever twisted fate the Jalshagar bond has spun around us.

I want him to look at me—not as Ataxian, not as prisoner, not as liability—but as truth. The same truth I’ve seen flicker behind his eyes when he talks about Lakka, when he watches me patch wounds, when he lets me walk beside him instead of behind.

I don’t say any of this aloud. The words would ruin it. Break it. Scatter it like dust in the stale air.

So I keep it inside, locked behind my ribs, heavy as stone and fragile as glass all at once.

His arm stays around me. Steady. Warm.

At some point, exhaustion wins. His breathing evens, slows, deepens into the cadence of sleep. His head tilts slightly toward mine, his weight leaning against me in a way that says trust more loudly than any vow could.

I stay awake.

I watch him like a secret, studying the sharp lines of his face softened by rest, the scar that cuts across his temple, the faint twitch of his jaw even in sleep—as if he’s still fighting battles behind closed lids.

His skin smells faintly of blood and gun oil, of smoke and earth.

And yet beneath it all, there’s something steady, something grounding.

Something that feels like the center of the world.

The war outside doesn’t scare me half as much as what’s growing in my heart right now.

Because this, whatever name this fragile thing might deserve—is more dangerous than every Kru mercenary, every collapsing ruin, every hungry drone that hunts the night skies.

This could undo me.

And I think—I want it to.