Excerpt from Chapter 32: All Your Lonely Thoughts and Fears

Heinrix stared at her for a long moment, heart thudding in his chest as her fingers brushed across his face. Yes, he was hurting. But what good did it do to admit it? All it did was give voice to his weakness and invite more attention from the forces of chaos at work here. And yet, against his better judgment, he found himself wanting to confide in her—wanting to entrust her with the pieces of himself he rarely acknowledge. Hoping that somehow it would ease the hurt…

And, Throne preserve him, he didn't want her to pull away.

"To be honest," Heinrix began, his voice a low murmur meant only for Visenya. "I keep having moments where I think I'm back there…on the ship that took me from my home. They're cruel memories, Visenya."

She squeezed at his hand, listening to him as if he were reciting lost Ecclesiastical doctrine rather than confessing to his feebleness.

"We're both being haunted, is seems," Visenya said with a grim sort of humor, her eyes flicking past him and back the way they'd come.

Heinrix's curiosity, and the sudden closeness between them, got the better of him.

"What was that?" He asked, a hesitancy to his words—worrying he may be overstepping. "That manifestation we saw?"

Visenya seemed to draw into herself for a moment, eyes dimming with some troubling thought. Heinrix had been about to apologize for mentioning it when she looked back at him with a small smile.

"A cruel memory of my own, though what it's doing here I don't know." Her hand had slipped from his face to rest on his arm, and when she next spoke he felt her grip tighten. "I don't want to be alone with it, though. Do you, with yours?"

It struck him that no, he didn't. Of course he wanted her near, but "want" should not factor into any of this. Heinrix had, over the last year, developed a concerning attachment to the Rogue Trader—his attention to her safety no longer stemming from professional concern alone. it blurred the boundaries between want and obligation—calling his reasoning into question should he sink too far into his thoughts alone in his bunk at night.