They put me in a room that smelled like disinfectant and wet boots and called it detainment.
Technically, it was a cell. Technically, Marshal Holt could've chained me to a pipe and recited statutes until my ears bled. Technically, I deserved worse than a cot and a desk and a guard who tried very hard not to react when I said things like, "Good evening, handsome," in a tone that implied he might be the doomed love interest in a cheap paperback.
He never reacted.
Professionals were rare. I respected that.
I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling while the refinery's distant hum seeped through the walls—pumps, turbines, the low metallic heartbeat of a place that kept people alive whether they deserved it or not.
And in the quiet, the past showed up.
Not the heroic parts. Not the "ace pilot" highlights. The other parts. The ugly little truths you can't outrun no matter how fast you can make eighty tons of armor move.
Like this:
I've never been in a relationship.
Not once.
Not because I wasn't interested. Not because I didn't want it. Not because nobody ever looked twice.
Because the moment a guy realized I was better than him at the one thing he'd built his ego around, he stopped looking at me like a person and started looking at me like a threat.
And I learned early that most people don't want to date what scares them.
They want to conquer it. Or shrink it. Or turn it into a joke they can control.
So I did what I always do: I turned myself into the joke first.
It was safer that way.
I rolled onto my side and fished the paperback out from under the pillow. The cover was terrible—shirtless man, sword, five women posed like they'd been knocked over by romance—but it was comforting. Predictable. Everyone had a role. Everyone wanted the protagonist. Nobody acted like wanting was shameful.
I flipped to a dog-eared page and smirked at my own margin notes.
**RULE #1: If he needs you smaller to feel big, he's trash.**
**RULE #2: If he calls you "intimidating" like it's your job to fix, bite him.**
**RULE #3: Harem leads are always dense. Don't be dense.**
I'd written those after the thousandth time a man flirted until he saw the footage.
Not even combat footage, sometimes—just training sims, just clean motion, clean aim, a woman in a cockpit who didn't hesitate.
Then the flirting would slow, curdle, turn into "jokes."
"You don't need a guy, huh?"
"Bet you'd kill me if I annoyed you."
"Would you ever let someone else lead?"
Like leadership was a toy they owned.
So no—no relationship. No boyfriend. No girlfriend. No partner. No one who got to call me theirs or got called mine.
Just contracts, cockpits, and harem novels in the dead hours between jobs—because if I couldn't have real romance, I could at least have fictional drama where people admitted what they wanted instead of pretending it didn't exist.
I closed the book and stared at the ceiling again.
"Alright," I whispered. "Backstory time."
Because if I didn't tell it to myself, it would tell itself anyway.
---
I wasn't born special.
People always want aces to be born special—bloodline, destiny, secret gene. It makes the story neat.
My story wasn't neat.
My story was mud and metal and being the wrong girl in the wrong place.
I grew up on a mining colony that existed to feed richer worlds and get forgotten. Everything there was functional: buildings, people, dreams. The militia was half-pride, half-necessity—old machines and older men who loved telling war stories more than they loved maintaining anything that actually mattered.
I was angry as a kid.
Not cute angry. Not "spunky." Angry like a small animal that had learned the world didn't hand out fairness unless you ripped it out with your teeth.
I watched men with less skill get praised because they were loud. I watched women do twice the work and get thanked like they'd done a favor. I watched the way people smiled at girls when they were pretty and then stopped smiling when those girls wanted to be *capable.*
So I joined the militia the moment they'd let me.
They laughed for a week.
They stopped laughing the first time I touched the simulator.
It wasn't magic talent. It was hunger. Cockpits felt like the only place where size didn't belong to men—size belonged to whoever could hold it.
I synced better than anyone else on the roster.
The instructor—an old bastard with a scar down his jaw—stared at the readouts and muttered, "That shouldn't be possible."
I told him, "Your sim's been neglected."
He didn't like me.
He couldn't argue with me.
Then a real pilot died on patrol. Reactor breach. Bad maintenance. The kind of accident people call "bad luck" because admitting negligence would mean admitting guilt.
They needed someone to fill a cockpit fast.
They threw me in like it was a joke.
I didn't die.
That's the part people call heroic.
It wasn't.
It was stubbornness with teeth.
It was me deciding I would rather burn alive than climb out and let them say, *See? Told you.*
After that I stayed. I got better. I got meaner. I got a reputation.
And then the world noticed.
Not the good people.
The people who collect outcomes.
People like Elias Kess.
I never met Kess face-to-face. He was too clean for that. He sent brokers. Handlers. Men in gloves who never said their real names.
Sable.
That name always made my skin crawl—not because he hurt me, not like that, but because he looked at people like inventory with opinions.
He found me, offered money, offered access, offered better machines and better training and contracts that came with the kind of pay that makes you think you've escaped gravity.
I took it.
Because I was young and hungry and convinced steel could replace everything I didn't have.
Funny how that works.
Steel doesn't stop loneliness.
It just gives it an echo.
And whenever I'd get too tired and too quiet, I'd do what I always did: flirt, joke, overtalk, keep everything bright and ridiculous so nobody could see the soft parts underneath.
Because soft parts get grabbed.
---
The guard outside my room shifted. Boots scuffed. A cough.
I listened to the refinery wind for a second, then—because my brain is broken in a very specific way—I started thinking about the duel again.
I could still taste it. Adrenaline. Mud. Heat. The thrill of meeting someone who didn't fold, didn't bluster, didn't play.
The way fighting Dack Jarn felt like stepping into a story that didn't care whether I survived.
I sat up on the cot, elbows on knees, and let the memory run clean.
Not the legend version.
The real one.
---
The salvage yard had been chaos—cutters in the mud, pirate lights darting between work rigs, floodlights flickering, a downed Marauder sitting there like a prize you could buy a small war with.
I stepped in with the Highlander like I owned the place.
Part of that was performance. You don't walk into a contract zone looking uncertain. Uncertainty gets you killed.
But part of it was real.
I was good.
And I'd been hired to test him, not die.
And I wanted to see if the stories were true.
Dack's Dire Wolf turned toward me like a cliff deciding it was done being scenery.
I remember thinking: *Oh. He's disciplined. That's hot.*
I'm not proud of that thought.
Okay, I'm a little proud.
The duel proposal wasn't pure theatrics. It was strategy. A yard brawl would've been ugly—militia panic, fuel lines, stray shots, civilians dying because two professionals decided to settle it messy. A duel gave structure. Structure gave control.
Also… the bond wager?
That part was real too.
Because somewhere deep down, I already knew I didn't want to keep working for Sable.
I just didn't know how to quit without getting killed for it.
So I offered a wager that let me lose into something survivable.
I dragged the Highlander out to the drainage flats because I wanted open ground and room to jump. Assault 'Mechs aren't supposed to be agile, but the Highlander has that little streak of insanity—enough thrust to surprise people who underestimate it.
My plan was simple:
* Pressure him at range.
* Use terrain.
* Force heat mistakes.
* Punish overcommitment.
It was a good plan.
It almost worked.
I opened with long-range pressure—missiles to keep him moving, then a heavy punch whenever he gave me a clean lane. I used slag hills to break lines, tried to bait him into wasting fire into storm noise.
Dack didn't take the bait.
That was the first moment I realized he wasn't just good.
He was patient.
Patient pilots are terrifying.
He answered with measured retaliation—missiles to herd, autocannon to punish foot placement, lasers when I exposed seams. He didn't waste anything. Every shot had intent.
I jumped to shift lanes and close angles. The first landing was clean—mud exploding under my jets, the Highlander settling like it had claws.
I hammered him at close range, layered pressure, tried to break his rhythm.
He didn't break.
Instead he did something worse.
He shaped the ground.
Two slow steps back—toward a patch of deeper, darker mud that looked hungry.
I saw it.
And I thought: He's giving ground.
Wrong.
Dack Jarn doesn't give ground.
He sets traps.
I committed to another jump to hit his flank. Mid-arc, I realized the landing zone was wrong—too churned, too unstable—but you can't renegotiate physics once you've thrown an assault 'Mech through the air.
He fired into the ground where I was coming down—missiles turning the mud into boiling slurry.
I landed and my foot sank deeper than it should've.
Just a fraction.
And he punished fractions like they were sins.
Autocannon bites into my leg plating the moment my weight shifted wrong. He didn't chase my torso. He chased control. Mobility. Inevitability.
I tried to power through it—tried to trade at close range because Highlanders can trade with almost anything if the pilot is stubborn enough.
I was stubborn.
He was more stubborn.
The more I struggled, the more he pressed—short laser cuts to strip seams, then the close-in punishers that finally made my actuator fail.
When my Highlander dropped to one knee, the cockpit went quiet in that awful way it does when you know you're done.
Then Dack held his fire.
No gloating. No cruelty. No finishing shot for pride.
He waited until I admitted reality.
So I did.
"You won," I told him.
And I meant it.
Not just the duel.
The whole exchange.
Because for the first time in a long time, I'd met someone stronger than me who didn't immediately try to shrink me so he could feel bigger.
Dack didn't want to own me.
He wanted boundaries.
Rules.
Accountability.
That's rare.
---
A soft knock snapped me back.
The door opened a crack.
Marshal Holt stood there, raincoat damp, eyes hollow with fatigue. She looked at me like I was a problem she couldn't shoot.
"Jinx," she said, tired.
"Kiera," I corrected automatically, then sighed. "Actually, no. Jinx is fine. It's what my bad decisions answer to."
Holt didn't smile. "Dack's planning the pickup ambush."
"Yeah," I said.
"He wants a full debrief. Everything you know. Now."
I swung my legs off the cot. "Great. Love being interrogated. Feels like foreplay but with less consent."
Holt's stare could've stripped paint. "Don't."
"Okay," I said, hands up. "Serious time."
As she turned to leave, I hesitated.
Then I called after her, quieter than I usually let myself be.
"Hey."
Holt paused.
I swallowed. "Taila… she hates me."
Holt didn't turn back. "She's alive. She can hate you. That's normal."
I nodded even though she couldn't see.
Holt left. The door shut.
I stood there for a moment, breathing, and realized something uncomfortable:
Taila didn't hate me because I flirted.
Taila hated me because I stood beside Dack in a cockpit.
Because I could be there.
And I understood that feeling too well—because I'd spent my whole life being the girl people admired from a distance and refused to stand next to up close.
Now I was the loud intruder in someone else's fragile orbit.
I exhaled slowly and opened my paperback again, flipped to a blank margin, and wrote:
**RULE #4: If you enter someone's life like a grenade, don't act surprised when shrapnel hits the people already close.**
Then I added:
**RULE #5: Be useful on purpose. Not just funny.**
I stared at the words for a second.
Progress.
I set the book down, rolled my shoulders, and put my mask back on—because masks keep you alive—but I kept a sliver of the truth underneath it.
If I was going to be Dack Jarn's bondsman—if I was going to honor the wager and the oath and the weird dangerous trust he'd offered—then I had to do more than fight well.
I had to help.
I opened the door and stepped into the corridor.
The guard followed at a respectful distance.
As we walked toward Holt's briefing room, I let myself think one last honest thought before the lights and voices swallowed it:
I've never been in a relationship because nobody could stand being with someone better than them.
But Dack Jarn?
Dack didn't care about being "better."
He cared about being right.
And that terrified me more than any duel ever had.
Because if he decided I was wrong—if he decided I was a risk to Taila, a risk to the contract, a risk to his principles—he wouldn't hesitate.
He'd cut me loose.
Clean. Final. No drama.
Which meant if I wanted to stay…
I couldn't just be loud.
I couldn't just be skilled.
I had to be worth the space I took up.
I stepped into the briefing room, saw Holt's tired face, saw Dack's unreadable eyes as he entered, and I spoke before my courage could melt:
"Sable," I said. "Gloves. Tight windows. Decoys. And one more thing."
Dack's gaze sharpened.
I swallowed, then added lightly—like it was a joke—because that's how I survived saying scary truths:
"He always says 'make it educational' right before things go bad."
The room went still.
And I knew the ambush was coming.