Page 26 of Swept By The Alien Pirate Prince

“Curse you out there,” I muttered under my breath, to no one, although my choice of words was directed at an invisible Amada.

She was out there floating along in deep space. Eventually, she would become nothing more than a speck of space dust out there in the ever expanding universe.

She would probably be swallowed up by a black hole, unable to escape the pull of its violent gravity. I shuddered. It was an unimaginable horror, an image I never wanted to appear in my wildest imagination, or in my reality.

“Why did you do this? Why did you have to be so stubborn? You dug your own grave.” My jaw tightened, and a huge ball of anguish solidified in my throat.

I was gutted knowing Amada would die out there, alone, and cold. My temper seethed as I brooded around my room, rearranging things to keep my hands busy.

Occasionally I would kick or throw something to let off some steam and release some of the frustrated aggression boiling like a geyser inside me.

I paced back and forth between my bed and the window. I stared at the floor. My eyes unfocused and my feet became green blurs, flecks of wobbling movement before me.

“Why am I blaming myself?”

Amada had been irresponsible and reckless our entire relationship, and even after. Why had I continued to allow her to be my chief engineer? Sure, I made a lot of mistakes. I ignored a lot of red flags. I had to takesomeof the blame.

It was all in the name of keeping the peace, but what peace was there now?

None.

Amada had taken every shred of me and torn it apart like a hawk with its prey gripped in its ferocious talons.

I wanted to move on with Carmela, but it was a challenge when the ghosts of my past wouldn’t stop tormenting me.

Her disloyalty and her thirst for revenge inflicted an unprecedented amount of chaos and damage.

Now, here we were, surviving our best on a ship that could barely chug along. The Blade was on its last leg of life. Keeping it running was going to be nothing short of a miracle.

“You should have made better choices,” I murmured to myself, standing by the window. I placed my hand to the glass, glass that was several inches thick and unbreakable. I chuckled at the irony. “Well, webothmade bad choices, Amada.”

I rolled my eyes and walked to my bed. I collapsed into the mattress and laid flat on my back, staring up at the air ducts on the ceiling.

I wished that I could just fall asleep and erase everything that had happened, and maybe get a fresh start.

It was wishful, impossible thinking.

Why did Ieverthink that I was truly capable of saving Amada, or fixing her? She wasn’t a robot, after all. Robots were easier to fix. You just reprogrammed them or changed out their wiring, or various parts when they shorted out or went bad.

It was different when you were dealing with real emotions, and a soul with a real beating heart, and a mind of her own. Amada was going to do as she pleased, forever and always, plain, and simple.

Only it wasn’t that simple, and now she was going to die, drifting out there in the darkness.

If only you could have given her one more chance.

I gave her all the chances she deserved, and then some. She kept taking advantage of me. I couldn’t believe that she was so scorned by my relationship with Carmela that she thought theonlyway to get back at me for the hurt was to betray me. She handed me to the enemy on a silver platter, endangering the lives of those who felt like they had been safe all along.

Besides, look what good it did me. I was left with a ship in shambles, we could have all lost our lives in the battle, and I was pretty sure Carmela was upset with me for my behavior.

How much blame should I give myself, and how much of it should go to Amada?

These were difficult questions to answer, and no one was asking them but me.

More importantly, was I damaging my relationship with Carmela by shutting her out and asking her to leave me alone? Would she be patient with me? She had always shown proof of that before, but now I was reconsidering things.

Who was I supposed to trust? If I couldn’t trust Amada who I had known for decades, then whoreallyhad my back, and who didn’t?

I didn’t want to make the same mistakes with Carmela that I’d made with Amada. Granted, Carmela didn’t have a substance abuse problem, which certainly contributed to Amada’s downfall.

---