Leverage

ASTRA
Six years ago, Dexter Torrence left me to die on a burning station.
He calculated my survival odds, thirty percent, and chose the mission instead. I spent three weeks in enemy hands learning exactly what that choice cost. I spent six years after becoming someone who would never need rescue again.
Then he walked back into my life.
Seven feet of alien warrior with electric blue eyes and bioluminescent skin that glows with every emotion he can’t hide. The man who abandoned me. The man I killed strangers for because they had his jawline, his walk, his ghost.
The man I’ve never stopped loving, and I hate myself for it.
Now we’re hunting the traitor who sold us both: trapped on a stealth ship where the walls are too thin and his empathic abilities let him feel everything I’m trying not to feel. My rage. My grief. The want I’ve buried so deep it should be dead.
It’s not dead.
And when the siege comes, when enemies close in and the station burns, I’ll have to choose: my anger or my answers. The past or the future.
Him or nothing.

DEXTER

I made the right call on Sigma-9. The math was clean. Thirty percent chance of saving her versus eighty percent mission success if I completed the extraction.
I’ve run those ninety seconds a thousand times. The answer never changes.
I left Astra Venn in a collapsing station and completed the objective, and she was taken, and tortured, and when she came back she was harder, sharper, a weapon that used to be a woman.
I did that to her.
Now she’s the head of security on my brother’s station, and she looks at me like I’m every sin she’s ever committed wearing skin. She put a knife to my throat our first day back together. I let her draw blood because I’ve earned worse.
But I can feel her through my abilities; the rage, the grief, and underneath it all, the thing she’s trying to kill and can’t: she still wants me.
I’m not leaving this time. Not when enemies circle. Not when traitors walk our corridors. Not when the woman I destroyed six years ago is the only thing standing between my family and annihilation.
Some equations don’t have good answers.
This one just has us.

Leverage is the second book in the Blood Debt series and features a military hero who left the heroine to die, second-chance romance forged in combat, and an empathic connection that makes hiding impossible. This book has a complete romantic arc but continues the overarching series plot.

Tropes: Second chance romance · Military hero · Empathic abilities · Forced proximity on a ship · Touch her and die (this time he means it) · He grovels · She makes him work for it · Survival romance · Dark sci-fi · Dual POV · Hurt/comfort · Battle couple · Spicy ???????????????