Ten breaths was far too long to listen to a dying man shout.
Kaelen reached into the right pocket of his gray bathrobe and withdrew a thin strip of sanded pearwood.
It was his reading bookmark, stained with tea rings and slightly frayed at the top edge.
Every villain with a shiny command badge thinks blowing up his own fleet makes him a martyr.
It just makes him a terrible accountant.
Across the harbor basin, the air wavered with waves of scorching heat as the four Star-Iron warships hummed toward catastrophic overload.
The crimson veins along the dark hulls pulsed like severed arteries.
Down on the cliff face, Drax’s thumb was still grinding into the crimson collar rune, forcing his dying heart’s blood into the detonation array.
