The Comments Told Me To Run, He Wouldn’t Let Me Chapter 09

I flinched backward, both hands clamping over my belly.

“Stay back!”

“Please, don’t feed me to the sharks!”

Alden froze mid-step.

Every tentacle behind him locked still.

Then he closed the distance and hauled me out of the garbage.

His coat swallowed me whole.

His scent-salt and sea-enveloped me.

“Stop talking.”

His voice was wrecked, raw and shaking at the edges.

He carried me straight to the mech without another word.

The hatch sealed. The mech tore into the sky and locked onto a starship hovering in low orbit.

Inside the starship, Alden set me down on a bed so soft I almost sank into it.

Warmth hit me the second we walked in.

He stripped off his coat and flung it to the floor.

The silence pressed in.

His tentacles crawled across the walls and ceiling, striking the metal panels in restless, muffled

thuds.

Every hit said the same thing. He was barely holding himself together.

He dropped to his knees beside the bed, caught my chin, and tilted my face toward his.

“You’d rather scrub dishes by a trash heap. Live off oatcakes.”

“You’d rather get jumped in an alley and bleed out.

“You chose all of that over coming to me?”

His fingers were ice-cold, his grip just shy of painful.

Something in me broke, and the tears came all at once.

“You’re the one who wants me dead!”

“You want to rip my babies out of me and throw me in the ocean!”

“You’ve got Tessa now. I’m just in the way! I ran as far as I could, so why did you come after

me?”

Every word ripped out of me like something I’d been swallowing for months.

Alden went still.

He just stared at me, long enough for the silence to hurt.

Then he laughed, letting out this stunned, broken sound.

His face crumpled into something I’d never seen on him before. Helplessness.

“Do you hear yourself right now?”

He released my chin and cradled my face instead, thumbs sweeping the tears off my cheeks.

“In love with Tessa? I gave her the captain’s seat because I put in for three years of leave.”

“I wanted to be home with you. Be there when you delivered. Raise our kids together.”

“Someone had to run the team while I was gone. That’s the only reason I trained her.”

I blinked at him. The words weren’t landing.

“Then… then why did you want to end my pregnancy?”

He let out a long breath and pressed his forehead to mine.

“Because without the right serum, the pregnancy would kill you.”

“A blue-ringed octopus’s toxin floods the mother’s body during pregnancy. A rabbit’s body

can’t survive it long enough to carry to term.’

“I couldn’t gamble with your life. Not even a little.”

I wiped my nose. “And the sharks?”

“The Sea of Oblivion is where blue-ringed octopuses breed. The pressure and conditions down there make it the only environment that could ease what your body’s going through.”

“The robotic sharks patrolling the perimeter? Base security. They were built to keep predators out, not to keep you in.”

His voice dropped. Something old and terrified lived underneath it.

“Do you have any idea what these last three months did to me?”

“I tore through every system in the sector. Tens of thousands of spaceport logs.”

“If I’d been one minute later today…”

His tentacles uncoiled slowly, wound around my wrists, and pulled me into him. He held on like I might disappear.