He suspected the latter.
The journey would take three days. Three days of transit through mapped corridors and uncharted stretches, slingshotting around gravity wells and punching through fold points that would tear a lesser ship apart. TheVethrakhandled it without complaint, its hull groaning only slightly as reality bent around them.
Makrath had his own chambers—a small suite near the aft of the ship, away from the crew quarters. The Hyrakki who crewed theVethrakwere Sa'keth mostly, with a few Kel'voran engineersand a single Sael pilot who never left the helm. They gave Makrath a wide berth. Not out of disrespect, out of instinct.
Everyone knew what a Kha'Ruun was. Everyone knew what he was capable of, and what he had done.
They left him alone, and he preferred it that way.
He felt restless, anticipation coiling beneath his ribs, sometimes hot and impatient, sometimes dark and seething. The old anger stirred—the one that never fully slept. It lived in his chest like banked coals, flaring when a crew member flinched at his approach, when he caught his reflection in the viewport and saw only the silhouette others saw. The faceless mask. The armored shoulders. The predator they honored and avoided in the same breath.
He had earned that reaction. Decades of service had seen to it.
Wars on foreign soil. Assassinations that turned the tide of conflicts his people could not afford to lose. Suppression campaigns in the outer territories. The quiet, efficient work of a weapon pointed wherever survival demanded. He had killed on stations like this one, in jungles thicker than Ythran's, on worlds so cold his armor had to generate heat to keep his blood moving. He had done what was asked of him, again and again, because that was what a Kha'Ruun was for.
His people were grateful. His people were safe.
His people also looked through him when he walked among them, their scent-lines pulling tight, their bodies angling away. They honored him in official record and avoided him in person, because standing too close meant remembering the blood on his hands. The bodies. The necessity of what he was.
He was tired of it.
A Kha'Ruun warrior was meant to claim one female. One bond. One soul to anchor his own through the long centuries of service. It was not a preference—it was biological imperative,woven into their cells. Without a bond-mate, a warrior eventually frayed. Lost himself to the violence he was bred for. Became something that had to be put down.
Makrath had watched it happen to others. Had been the one to put them down, more than once.
He would not become that. He refused.
But cycle after cycle, Hunt after Hunt, no female had chosen him. Hyrakki females sensed what he was—the death he carried, the darkness that clung to him like a second skin. They respected his service. They were grateful he existed.
They did not want him.
He was the strongest of his caste, and the loneliest. The irony sat cold in his chest.
He was going away from his people, his world. That wasn't new. He'd spent more of his life on ships and stations and foreign soil than he had on Ythran. The Kha'Ruun were weapons, and weapons went where they were needed.
But Earth... he'd never been there before. It was in a galaxy they rarely visited, a backwater system that had only recently caught the attention of species who mattered. The Marak of Luxar had claimed it under his protection, which meant it was no longer quite so backwater, but it was still primitive by galactic standards. A world of soft creatures who had barely learned to leave their own atmosphere.
Its inhabitants would be no match for him. Surely she wouldn't be.
He told himself it didn't matter. This Hunt was a formality—a biological necessity, nothing more. He would claim a female because his body demanded it, because the alternative was madness, because Zhoren had pushed this opportunity into his hands and he was too pragmatic to refuse.
He expected nothing. He had learned better.
Still, he was curious. He'd seen footage of Earth's jungles, and they were similar in some ways to Hyrakki terrain. Dense canopy, heavy humidity, and layered ecosystems that rewarded patience and punished carelessness. Only the plants were different. The creatures were different. The air would taste wrong.
But the principles would be the same.
Hunt. Evade. Capture.
He could do that anywhere.
He queued up the training footage—tactical assessment, he told himself. Standard preparation. He had done this before, with candidates who had blurred together into a single unremarkable mass.
The feed flickered to life.
And everything stopped.
A small female with dark hair and hard eyes.
