not taking any chances,” he snarls, the words barely audible over the rush of my blood in my ears. “If you insist on an explanation, I’ll explain.”
Logically I know I’m bigger than him. A better fighter than him. I could overpower him easily. But I’m so goddamn afraid of him in this moment—of that vicious rage, the blood of his mother—and it freezes me. A terrible question roars in my heart, one that started on the wiretram and has only gotten louder since we made it to the base.
Are we strangers? Are we strangers? Are we strangers?
I stammer, and Gal shakes my shoulders. “There’s only one goal in all of this that matters. If I lose sight of it, I’m dead. We have to get home to the Umber interior. And I can’t afford a liability like that junker girl.”
“She got us to the resistance,” I hiss. And because I can’t think of any other way to fight back, I slip my hands up around his hips. If anyone is watching, they’ll get a very different idea about what’s going on in here.
Gal barely blinks at the contact, but a line in his neck goes taut. “Yeah, she walked us into an active military operation that would string me up if they knew what I am.”
A slow, sinking feeling is dragging down my stomach. A familiar fear, one that’s been eating at me ever since we left Jana behind at the academy. “She doesn’t have to have utility to be worth saving, Gal,” I snap. “Is that all we are to you? Tools to get you to your throne?”
His grip on me loosens. My grip on him tightens, and I lean back to look him in the eye as he grapples with the question. “I’m not…You’re not…”
“What? I’m not like her?” A cruel smile edges out of the corner of my lips. I let it sit there like armor.
“You’re my best friend, and she’s a girl we met yesterday. You’re nothing like her.”
My smile vanishes, and I catch the flash of fear in Gal’s eyes as he realizes how deep his words cut. “Not true,” I say, low and dangerous. “And if you had any idea what that’s like, it wouldn’t even cross your mind to put Wen back on the streets.”
“You don’t know what it’s like!” he shouts, then claps a hand over his mouth as our tiny room throws the sound back at him. After a moment of stunned silence, he bends his head forward, reeling me in with a tug until his forehead brushes my shoulder. He’s shaking even harder than he was in the interrogation room—no reason for him to hide it now. “When I agreed to come here, I thought it would be spies, instigators, a few stolen shuttles. Not a base this huge. Not General Iral. I…I couldn’t even leave the citadel when he was still living, and now I’ve looked him in the eye. And you think I can keep track of a junker girl with a death wish while that’s on my plate? She’s permanently scorched from the last bridge she burned, and I have an empire’s future—”
He pauses, and when his voice is strong enough to come back, it’s suddenly drenched in despair. “I could feel the blood inside me boiling back there. I understood my mother. How she could…How she keeps…”
My hands go soft at his hips, and I slip them around until I’m pulling him into the embrace he so desperately needs. The last notes of my anger rattle through my skull, but the broken fear in Gal’s voice is more important than anything I could yell at him.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” he repeats, the words pulsing against my neck. “No one knows what it’s like. To be alone like this and know it’s never going to change. To be raised for shaping the galaxy, to know that nothing else matters beyond surviving to eighteen. So many people out there are hell-bent on making sure that doesn’t happen. And now—”
His voice catches, and against my better judgment, I hold him tighter.
“The general got right under my skin,” Gal admits. “When I