로그인"Turn it off!"Elara was already moving before the words finished leaving her mouth, closing the distance to Corvus in three strides and grabbing for the remote with both hands. He didn't so much as flinch.His hand closed around her wrist, and the grip that met her was wrong, too fast, too precise, too strong for a man who'd walked in wearing nothing but a tailored coat and an unbothered expression. Elara gasped as her arm was pinned and twisted with clinical, unhurried efficiency, the remote held just out of reach above her head."You'll want to be careful," Corvus said, mild as ever even as he held her immobile without any visible effort. "I've had considerably more done to this body than your engineer has had done to his. Corporate directors don't survive site visits to places like Aegis-7 on charm alone.""You're a monster." Elara drove her knee up toward him, and he simply turned his hip into the strike, absorbing it, barely registering the impact at all. "You did this to him on
"Trouble I've saved you," Elara repeated, pulling herself up despite the ringing in her skull, planting herself between Corvus and the heaving, gold-lit wreck of the man she loved. "You call this saved? Your men just tried to shoot him full of rounds, and you're standing there talking like you're grading an exam.""I am, in a sense." Corvus stepped further into the hold, unhurried, stepping neatly over one of his own downed soldiers without so much as glancing down at him. "You assume the Everywhere Machine escaped containment by accident on Aegis-7. That the breach was some failure of protocol, some tragic malfunction you two stumbled into and barely survived." He tilted his head, studying Dante the way a man might study a piece of expensive, temperamental machinery. "It wasn't an accident, Elara. It was a field trial. And a remarkably successful one, given he's still compiling coherent tactical responses under this much physiological stress."The words landed like a physical blow. B
"Fire in the hole!"The shout came through the hatch a half-second before the breaching charge went off, and the entire inner seal blew inward in a shriek of torn metal and superheated air, throwing Elara backward off her feet. She hit the frost-slicked deck hard, the impact driving the breath out of her, and by the time she'd blinked the smoke and stars out of her vision, four armored shapes were already through the gap, sidearms raised, moving in the tight, practiced formation of people who did this for a living."Asset secured on the table, hostile female down, moving in," the lead soldier called, voice flattened by a helmet vocoder. "Non-lethal on the target, lethal clearance on anyone else in the compartment.""Anyone else" meant her.Elara scrambled backward, putting the surgical table and Dante's restrained body between herself and the muzzle now tracking toward her chest, and that was the exact moment the last cargo strap gave way.It didn't snap so much as it simply stopped e
"Which one of you is talking right now?"Elara asked it low, right against his ear, both hands still locked around his, and for a long, terrible second there was no answer at all, just the ragged double rhythm of his breathing and the gold light pulsing brighter along his collarbone.Then his human eye blinked, hard, and focused on her."Me," Dante said, and his voice cracked on the single word like it had cost him something to claim it. "It's me. It's still me, it just, it doesn't come as easily as it did a minute ago. Every time I answer you, I have to fight through it to do it.""Then fight through it. Talk to me. Keep talking to me, it's working, don't stop." She pressed her forehead to his, ignoring the wet cold still clinging to his skin, ignoring the tremor running through both of them. "Tell me something. Anything. Tell me what you were going to say to me, back on Aegis-7, before the alarms went off. You started a sentence you never finished.""You remember that.""I remember
"Missile lock confirmed, brace for evasive!"Jax's warning barely cleared the comm before the Sundog rolled hard to starboard, the whole ship groaning like something alive being wrung by the neck. Elara's grip on Dante's hand was the only thing that kept her upright, her boots skidding across a deck now slick with meltwater and frost."Countermeasures," Kaelen barked. "Give me chaff, give me something, this bucket doesn't have point defense-""I know what this bucket doesn't have, I built half of it myself!" Jax's hands were a blur across the helm console, and a dull thud somewhere aft told Elara a flare pod had just fired. "Flares away. If that thing's thermal-guided we might get a bite."Dante's hand spasmed in hers."Elara." His voice had already lost the steadiness from a minute ago, fraying at the edges. "It's louder. The door I told you about, it's not creaking anymore, it's opening. I can feel it reaching for the ship's systems again, for the engines, for anything warm enough t
"Hard to port, now, now, now!"Jax's voice tore through the ship's comm a half-second before the Sundog rolled hard, and Elara slammed shoulder-first into the surgical table, her arms flung instinctively across Dante's frost-rimed chest to keep him from sliding off it. Outside the small viewport, a shattered chunk of hull plating the size of a house tumbled past close enough that she could read the corporate serial numbers still stenciled on its side before it vanished into the dark behind them."That's the third one," Kaelen's voice came back, strained, from somewhere up near the helm. "You want to actually steer, or you want to keep narrating?""I want you to stop screaming in my ear while I'm threading a hundred-ton wreck through a field of other hundred-ton wrecks, that's what I want."Elara barely heard them. She had her hand pressed flat against Dante's sternum again, the way she had every few minutes since they'd left the cargo hold's manual crank behind, feeling for the rhythm
The heavy manila folder struck the polished mahogany desk with a sharp, violent crack. It was a sound that echoed through the cavernous, oppressive silence of the Sterling Estate study, momentarily drowning out the rumble of thunder from the storm raging outside."Sign them, Elara. We are completel
The underground auction house in Astraeus City was a sprawling, subterranean labyrinth carved out of abandoned subway tunnels beneath the financial district. It smelled faintly of ozone, expensive cigars, and desperate money. Julian Sterling, CEO of Sterling Enterprises, stood rigidly near a crumbl
The Mediterranean sun was a brilliant, blinding diamond suspended over the impossibly blue waters surrounding Genesis Island. It was a private, fortified sanctuary that existed entirely off the grid, guarded by a fleet of unmarked, heavily armed gunboats and airspace strictly controlled by the Euro
Three years. That was exactly how long Julian Sterling had been operating on pure, unadulterated ruthlessness and a terrifying lack of sleep.The sprawling penthouse boardroom of Sterling Enterprises was dead silent, save for the frantic scribbling of a terrified rival CEO signing away his life’s w







