He was in that warehouse. In danger.
My heart pounded so loudly it felt like a warning drum inside my chest. I didn’t care what I looked like. I didn’t care if he screamed in horror when he saw me. Right now, I would kill for him. I would die for him. And I would do it looking like a monster because my beast made me strong.
There would be no more hiding. No more lies.
I knew when I spoke to the teams, my voice sounded steady. Controlled. Lethal. But inside? I was chaos. Fear. Hunger. Longing. Rage. Not at him—never at him—but at myself, for being too weak to be honest.
I’d stared down cyborgs and killers without fear. Traveled alone through smuggler’s bases and black markets all over the universe. Yet I’d lacked the courage to be my true self with the only male in the universe I’d ever desired.
Mate!My beast confirmed the thought. He was the only one we wanted.
Underneath the declaration, one terrifying, soul-deep truth pulsed through both me and my beast like blood and electricity; if he died tonight—we would break.
15
Ethan
The southern doorblew inward with a muffledwhump, followed by a sweep of flash-bang concussions that lit up the dark like a dying star. I went in behind the Atlans, ion pistol drawn, senses keyed to every whisper of movement.
The warehouse was colder than it should’ve been. Sterile. Almost too quiet.
The Warlords moved in formation—fluid, trained, deadly. I wasn’t sure how many years they’d spent fighting in the Hive war, but they knew exactly what they were doing.
There were only two guards. They were dead within seconds.
Egon grumbled over comms, “Where are they? This is too easy.”
From elsewhere in the building, one of the Prillons responded. “We’re clear. Where did they go?”
The hair rose on the back of my neck. Felt like we were being drawn into an ambush.
The thermal readout in my helmet showed a flicker of activity on the basement level below us. There one moment, then gone. “You see that?” I asked.
Jenkins tapped my arm, pointed to a door with a large glass window. Behind it, a wide hallway the led to the loading docks.
“Bahre? You see that?” I asked.
The Warlord was leading the others up a flight of rusted metal stairs along one wall in the main room. Jenkins and I stood at the bottom of the stairs, watching their backs. I scanned the level above us but didn’t see anything.
“Switch to density scans,” Bahre ordered.
“Density scan?” I thought perhaps the NPU was malfunctioning until the targeting screen inside my helmet shifted at my voice command. The visual field changed into areas of darkness and light. Air was less dense than the stairs based on pure atomic density. When I looked up to scan the level above once more, I could clearly see the darker shadows of concentrated mass where the enemy lurked, their bodies smudges of condensed darkness. The Warlords were dense smudges as well, their implants and weapons clearly visible as streaks for pitch black, much darker than their living cells.
“Holy shit.” Jenkins waved his hand in front of his helmet. “This is incredible.”
“Great on ships. Doesn’t work in caves,” Egon warned us as he moved past us up the steps. “Fucking Hive love their caves.”
I would probably never see a member of the Hive. Still, I filed the information away, just in case.
Just then, the Prillon team leader’s voice—I think it was Krag’s—came through on comms. “Bravo heading to the basement. We’ll take out the stasis pods.”
“Affirmative.” Bahre didn’t stop charging up the stairs to give his orders. “Humans, cover the stairs. Warlords, with me.”
Lyra’s sweet, feminine voice joined the charge. “I have line of sight. You want me to take them out?”
“No.” Bahre’s laugh was that of a cat playing with a mouse he intended to eat for supper. “Don’t fire unless we’re in trouble.” Bahre raced into battle, moving way too fucking fast for a man—alien—that big. Egon and Kovo stayed with him, all three moving like a well-oiled machine. There would be five of these Scion guys on the two levels above us. But if they were the same guys I’d met in the morgue, they looked just as big and mean as the fucking Warlords. The Prillons were going below to wipe out the two cyborgs in their charging stations.
Sounds of combat drifted down the stairs as Jenkins and I stood like lame ducks on the now empty main level. There was nothing here but empty space large enough to fit a fleet of tour buses.
