We move through corridors that grow quieter, more isolated. The sounds of the compound fade behind us. I see training rooms where Draveki spar with a brutality that makes my combat training look gentle, their bodies blurring with speed. I see a hallway lined with doors without windows, and I do not let myself imagine what waits behind them.
The guard stops at a door that looks identical to every other door we've passed. No marking. No sign of the power contained behind it. That's how it works with the truly dangerous. They don't need to advertise.
“The Enforcer will see you now,” the guard says.
I’ve heard the stories. Everyone who comes to Vahiri hears them. House Draven’s heir, chief enforcer of the Syndicate’s debt collections. The one they send when an example needs to be made. If House Draven is coming for you, you’re already dead. Not a threat, or a warning. Fact, spoken by humans who learn to navigate the currents of this world and understand that some waters you don’t survive.
I'm about to walk into those waters and beg for them to spare my brother.
A tremor runs through me, pulse spiking, chest tight. Every instinct screams to turn and run, because I understand what it is to be hunted, and behind this door waits a danger worse than any battlefield.
I've operated on soldiers while taking fire, held men together with my hands while their lives leaked between my fingers,walked into places where death was a certainty, and come out the other side because giving up wasn't an option.
I can handle one meeting. One monster. One negotiation for my brother's worthless life. I touch my med kit one more time. Straighten my spine. I have survived worse than this.
The lie almost sounds convincing.
Another guard opens the door, and I step through into the dim beyond, into the office of the creature who holds my brother's life, and now my own. Cutting through the darkness is the orange light from a single window. And in that light, silver eyes find mine. The word that surfaces in my mind isn’t monster.
It’s predator.
And I’ve walked into his den with open eyes.
Chapter Two
DRAZEX
The human walks like a soldier. I track her progress through the compound on the surveillance feeds, three holographic displays casting pale blue light across my desk. Her straight spine registers first. A forward gaze. Her eyes scan every corridor, noting escape routes she cannot use. Former Terran Coalition military, according to my file. Two years in the colony wars, decorated service, honorable discharge after her unit was decimated at the Corvan offensive. The file doesn't capture the way she carries herself when she's accepted she might die and faced death standing.
I gesture, and the display zooms closer. She's smaller than I expected. Human-fragile, with brown skin and dark hair pulled back from her face in a practical knot. Her hands are steady as the guards search her, and when they take her weapons, she surrenders them without protest. Two knives, a plasma pistol. Standard protection for a human traveling alone through The Hollows. She knew they would confiscate her weapons. Shebrought them anyway, because appearing unarmed would be a different weakness.
The med kit she guards more carefully. She tightens her hold on the strap when the guard reaches for it, a momentary tension in her shoulders before she forces herself to release. Whatever's in that kit matters to her more than the weapons. When the guard finishes his inspection and returns it, she settles the strap across her body with the care of a soldier checking her rifle. The motion is automatic. Instinctive. She's done it ten thousand times before.
Her brother owes one hundred thousand Vahiri credits to House Draven. Tomás Vance, twenty-six years old, gambling debts accumulated over eighteen months of catastrophic decisions. When his creditors came to collect, he ran. Running is the worst choice a debtor can make on Vahiri Prime, because running means you've decided that House Draven's word means nothing, and House Draven can't allow that insult to stand. His debt doubled the moment he fled. Two hundred thousand credits now, a sum no human could work off in two lifetimes.
The human male’s sister has come to beg. They always do, the family members who still care enough to try. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, lovers who stand in my receiving room and offer things they can't afford to give. Money they don't have. Services they can't provide. Their own bodies, sometimes, because they believe flesh alone can balance ledgers written in blood. I listen to them because listening costs me nothing, and occasionally one of them surprises me with an offer of value. Most don't.
I pull her service record onto a secondary display. Maeve Vance. Twenty-nine. Combat medic with xenobiology training, field surgery experience across three star systems. Kepler IV, where the fighting was close and brutal. The medical facilities at Thessaly Station were overrun for six weeks. She was inthe Corvan offensive, where her unit held a position for eleven days against superior forces before extraction arrived. Seventeen soldiers went in. Four came out. She was one of them.
The record doesn't tell me why she survived when the others didn't. Records never capture the truth of a person, the thing that makes one soldier walk out of hell while another lies down and dies. I've seen males twice her size break under pressure she endured without cracking. Trained killers crumble when the mathematics of survival turned against them. She didn't crumble. She adapted, improvised, kept her people alive as long as she could with nothing but her hands and whatever supplies she could scavenge.
That kind of resilience is worth over one hundred thousand credits. Worth more than two hundred thousand.
I close the service record and return my attention to the primary feed. She's reached the receiving room now, and the guards have left her there to wait. A power play, standard procedure. Make them wait. Let them stew in their fear while the walls press closer and the reality of their situation settles into their bones. Most debtors sit down when they reach the receiving room. They slump into the chairs designed for bodies larger than theirs, and the furniture swallows them, makes them look small and helpless. She doesn't sit. She stands at the window overlooking the canyon depths, her reflection ghosted against the neon lights below, and she doesn't move.
I should send her away. The brother isn't worth this complication. Debt is debt. Syndicate law is clear. Debtors must pay what they owe, or they become the payment themselves. Tomás Vance will work in the mines until his body fails, or until someone purchases his contract for purposes I won't inquire about. That's the natural order of things on Vahiri Prime, and sentiment doesn't enter the calculation.
I should send her away, but I don't.
The surveillance feed captures the angle of her jaw, the set of her shoulders. There's a quality in her bearing that refuses to yield, and that refusal irritates me because it's impractical. She's got no leverage here. She's got nothing to bargain with except her body and her skills, and bodies are cheap on Vahiri while skills are only valuable if they're rare enough to matter.
Which hers are, and why I'm entertaining this meeting.
I gesture the feeds closed and rise from my desk. The office is sparse, the way I prefer it. A single window provides the orange twilight that passes for daylight in The Hollows. Reinforced walls, a desk carved from canyon stone, a few chairs for the rare meetings I can't avoid. No decoration. No softness. Everything in this room exists for a purpose, and the purpose is to remind anyone who enters that House Draven doesn't waste resources on comfort.
The walk to the receiving room takes three minutes. I pass through corridors I've walked since childhood, past guards who straighten at my approach, past doors leading to training rooms and armories and holding cells. The compound is quiet at this hour, most of my enforcers out on collection runs or territory patrols. The silence suits me. Noise is for those who need distraction from their own thoughts, and I've learned to live with mine.
The female is still standing at the window when I enter. The door doesn't announce my presence, but she hears it open. She turns, and our eyes meet, and for one fractured moment I can't remember what I intended to say.
