Page 92 of Stars in Umbra
The image of her gaze, proud, angry, and profoundly wounded, burned behind his eyelids every time he closed them.
At some point that first day, he sent her a single message:
‘If you want to talk, you know where to find me.’
Her response arrived a few hours later. ‘Sante.’
After that came a heavy, suffocating silence that was now tearing him apart.
It wasn’t a dramatic, theatrical heartbreak.
Instead, it was the slow, agonizing erosion of a man who let his guard down with wariness, only to watch the person he invited into his soul walk away.
His chest ached with it.
His heartfokkin’ burned.
His mind, most times so steady and measured, spun in tight, frustrating loops of regret and half-spoken truths.
He replayed the moment in his head.
The way her face changed when SableNet translated the Sacran phrase he whispered while inside her.
He recalled how her voice turned clipped, the instant wall that went up between them, and the accusation she flung at him like a blade: ‘You don’t own me, and never will.’
He didn’t want ownership.
What he yearned for was connection; to hold her, not cage her.
He wanted to protect and cherish her, not possess her.
Perhaps he expressed his desire with haste; maybe it was too fast, a tad raw, and unfiltered.
Maybe its ferocity terrified her, as she believed it to be a form of control.
Regardless of the reason, she was avoiding him.
He had access to the security manifests and was well aware she was still in the city, attending the final high-level meetings of the Pegasi Joint Military Conference.
She was likely seated in some closed-door negotiation room just a few floors away, listening to updates on planetary ceasefires while pretending he no longer existed.
The thought gutted him more than he cared to admit.
Still, he had little time for self-pity; he had a busy day ahead.
The ultimate day of the military gathering was upon them, and the official sessions were drawing to a close.
The air hung heavy with the kind of fatigue that followed countless late-night negotiations and far too many drinks at the previous night’s ball.
Most dignitaries had already departed, leaving their harried attachés to handle the diplomatic fallout and last-minute logistics.
Only a handful of stragglers remained, lingering in quiet corners and nursing hangovers behind dark lenses.
It was now, in the soft afterglow of the public-facing conference, that the real work began.
This was when the most clandestine meetings took place, the ones not documented on any program or broadcast for the media.
Key decisions were made in stealthed high-security rooms that would shape the course of Pegasi’s quadrants for decades to come.
