Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
I told Mila it didn't feel decent.
It doesn't. It feels like the worst thing I've ever done, and I've done terrible things. Eleven years of military service. Three years of Bratva enforcement. Things that keep me on upper decks at midnight and in engine rooms at dawn. And none of them sit in my chest the way this does, because none of them were a choice I made to hurt someone who came to my door and asked what did I do and the answer was nothing. She did nothing. She held a handkerchief and said it should be touched and made me smile and fell asleep against my arm in an engine room and she did nothing wrong and I let her believe she had.
Mila's voice: She'll recover. She'll be a story she tells her friends.
The boy touched her shoulder and she let him. She let him because his hands are uncomplicated and his touch is kind and he doesn't bring coffee in ceramic mugs or track her laughter from doorways or say her name like he's tasting something. He just puts his hand on her shoulder and it means exactly what it means and nothing more and she needs that right now because I took everything that was more and slammed a door on it.
The calculation I've been running for two weeks, the one where I weigh her safety against my need for her and my need loses because it should lose, because she matters more than what I want: the calculation is wrong.
The calculation was always wrong. I wasn't protecting her. I was protecting myself from the terror of loving someone in a world that kills the people I love. I took every true thing Mila told me and I used it as a wall and the wall was for me, not for Star, because Star was already on the other side of it, standing in the light, and I left her there.
And she ate standing up. And she folded her towels. And she stopped humming.
I'm moving before the thought finishes forming. Down the walkway, down the service stairs, through the corridor toward the staff mess. My footsteps are fast. I don't slow them. I don't check whether anyone's in the corridor. I don't run the calculation because the calculation is a lie, the calculation was always a lie, and the only true thing left is a girl with flat shoes and rolled trousers walking toward the spa with her chin up and her hands at her sides and I need to reach her before she gets there.
The corridor. Staff deck. She's thirty feet ahead of me, walking toward the spa, her flat shoes silent on the thin carpet, her hair pulled back, her uniform buttoned correctly because she's Star Thornton and she buttons her uniform correctly even when the man who kissed her in a gallery tells her she's reassigned. She buttons her uniform and she folds her towels and she eats standing up and she doesn't cry and she doesn't hum and she does her job and she is, without question, the most valuable thing on this ship.
I stop. She hasn't heard me. She's still walking. Twenty-five feet. Twenty.
"Star."
She stops. She doesn't turn around. Her shoulders are straight and her hands are at her sides and she's standing in the corridor like she stood outside my door two weeks ago. Still. Absorbing.
Fifteen feet between us. Thin carpet. Amber light. The hum of the ship under everything.
I take a step toward her.
Artem
SHE DOESN'T TURN AROUND.
Fifteen feet of corridor between us. Thin carpet, amber light, the hum of the engines through the deck plates. She's facing away from me, hair pulled back, uniform buttoned to the throat, and her shoulders are pulled in. Gone is the professional posture she wears into treatment rooms. Pulled in, curled forward, like a girl trying to take up less space in a corridor that suddenly has someone in it she wasn't expecting.
I did that. I made a girl who presses her palms to glass and weeps over handkerchiefs want to make herself smaller.
"Star."
Her shoulders flinch. A tiny contraction, there and gone. She doesn't turn.
"I have a session in twenty minutes." Her voice is small. Not cold, not angry. Small. The voice of a person who's been practising what she'd say if this moment ever came and now that it's here the script is gone and all that's left is this thin, careful sentence about a session. "I need to get to the spa."
"Mila lied to me."
Her hand, which was reaching for the wall like she reaches for glass cases when she needs something solid, stops mid-air.
Silence. Three seconds. Five.
"About what?" Almost inaudible. Still facing away.
"About you. About what you'd cost me. About what I'd do to you." My voice holds. My hands do not. I can feel them shaking at my sides, a fine tremor running through the fingers, the same fingers she traced through oil every Thursday, and I clench them into fists because she can't see that. Not yet. "Turn around. I need to say this to your face."