Page 89 of Saved By the Alien Hybrid

“I am a danger to us all,” Rentir said, finally. “I cannot control myself. You must retire me.”

Thalen’s mouth thinned. He blew out a long sigh, looking away as he shook his head.

“We need to talk.”

CHAPTER 36

Cordelia was pantingby the time she reached her opulent yet sterile room. The door whooshed shut softly behind her, amplifying her anger. She wanted something to slam, damn it. This place and its stupid, pretentious tech.

Her vision was blurred with tears; her heart was an erratic, stumbling mess. With a cry of fury, she grabbed a vase off the dresser and hurled it across the room. It shattered in a shower of ceramic confetti all over the rug. A door slid open down the hall, and then someone was knocking on her door.

“Commander?”

“I’m fine,” she barked.

She hovered over the mess she’d made for a moment, but her blood was still laced with such impotent anger that spite would not allow her to clean it up.

How could she have been this stupid, again? After everything she’d been through, it should have occurred to her to be more skeptical of his character and his intentions. And anyway, his interest in her was always just some weird function of alien biology. Had she really thought it meant something that they’d had a few long conversations and backed each other up in a couple scuffles?

The only hybrid on Yulaira who had betrayed his own kind. That was what Yelir had said. What the hell kind of luck did she have to crash on an alien planet and end up with the singular traitor on its surface?

Cursed.

She didn’t know what to do. Ask Thalen to pull Rentir off the mission? Would he even listen to her over one of his own men? Could she trusthim, for that matter? What if they got all the way into atmo and one of his hybrids started reciting a manifesto?

Not again, the desperate, frightened voice that lived deep in the pit of her stomach whispered.Please, no,no.

She bit her knuckles to keep from screaming in frustration.

She had been a soldier once. A woman trained to rub dirt in her wounds and keep it moving. A woman who saw no purpose in dwelling on things—wound, failures, old hurts. The job had worn her down. After the mission where she’d lost her whole squad, she never had quite the same pep in her step, but she had been good at faking it. Damn good. She had faked her way into that first mission on theLeto, and it was all going to be worth it.

Then theLetoblew, and Felix blew, and Olga and Jia and Kenji and four hundred sleeping, helpless?—

There had been no more pretending. Not for a long while. Bit by bit, she’d pieced that facade back together over the years. She’d landed command of theCassandra, and for one brief moment, she’d almost believed her own lie again.

That she was competent, brave, and capable. Someone worth following. Someone who didn’t get everyone else dead.

Her gaze drifted over the room, landing on the mirrored door of the towering wardrobe, where her own sad, sallow face looked listlessly back at her.

No more facade.

She paced over to it, meeting her own bloodshot eyes as she approached, enraged by the puffy-eyed evidence of hermisplaced vulnerability. Anger flared again, so much less painful than defeat.

“Idiot,” she hissed, enraged at the sight of her reflection condemning her right back. “You fucking moron!”

She launched her fist without the awareness that she was doing it. The glass crunched beneath her knuckles, shattering into sharp, jagged pieces that still clung to the frame. Pain lit up her arm, reverberating all the way to her shoulder, but she punched it again, and again, and again, until her knuckles were numb and full of glass and the blood was dripping down her elbow.

“Commander!” A different voice, now. Nyx, she thought.

She didn’t answer. Instead, she dug her hands into the gap between the wardrobe and the wall, and with a hoarse cry of effort, sent it plummeting onto its face.

The door hissed open, but she didn’t look. She couldn’t. She just put her boot through the back of the wardrobe, taking grim satisfaction in the splintering hole that opened beneath the force.

Hands caught at her as she kicked another hole in the expensive piece of furniture that had flown across the galaxy from a planet she had never seen just to be destroyed by her. She fought their grip, shouting a sound of wordless rage as she kicked the thing again and again.

More hands grabbed her other arm, and she was being hauled back while she kicked and flailed and shouted. She turned her fury on one of the women who believed they had the right to intervene; her bloody, glass-encrusted fist cracked across Nyx’s jaw with staggering force. For a moment, she was sure she’d broken her knuckles. The white hot pain was a brief reprieve from the mindlessness, but she fought it, fought the return of good sense.

“Goddamn, I take back the diss about her limp wrist, already,” Nyx slurred, wriggling her jaw back and forth.