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Chapter One
I’m slammed against the wall, and I squeeze my leg up between our bodies before he crushes me. And when I say crush me, I don’t mean in a sexy way. I mean he will literally pound my face in or drive a knife between my ribs.
Good thing I’m wearing shellskin armor.
He, however, is not.
I thrust my booted foot into his gut, and with a heavy grunt, he stumbles backward, hitting the opposite metal wall with a bang.
Damn, that had to hurt.
Score one for me.
I dive for the blaster he kicked from my hand—the warning systems of my ship’s computer blaring: “Evacuate. Evacuate. This is not a drill. Find the nearest escape pod. This is not a drill.” She’s going down, fast being pulled into the gravity of the nearest planet and burning from the inside out. And it’s all because of him—him and his looting barbarians—sneaking on board, setting fire to the reactor.
My hands close around the blaster, and I level it at him, aiming for the center of his chest. At least six of my crew are dead. I will have no remorse in adding him to the pile.
“Your weapon will not work on me,” he drones. His bass voice resonates in the hall over the alarm. How that’s possible, I don’t know.
“It works on everything. Even you.” My voice sounds hollow, toneless from the voice scrambler that disguises my sex. I sound as inhuman as he is. Between that, my shapeless armor, and my helmet screen, no one can tell I’m female. Not even my crew—who are hopefully already propelling from this doomed vessel for the nearest habitable ecosystem.
He doesn’t freeze like he should with a weapon aimed at him, and he doesn’t pull out a blaster of his own. The leather holsters crisscrossing his massive pectorals contain knives of varying lengths, sheathed and available for him to grab.
He stretches his shoulders and flexes his chest. “There is a reason why your entire species is afraid of my kind.”
“Fairy stories.” I don’t care how bright gold and incandescent his skin. It’s penetrable. No matter what the tales tell about his kind being unkillable. I’ve got a laser.
He steps toward me. “Go ahead. Try it.” His accent is strange, his tongue rolling over the consonants in a thick burr.
I should shoot. Now. But my trigger finger hesitates.
I don’t want him dead yet. I need to find out, how did he do it?
How did he and his band of brutes get onto my ship without my knowing? How did he accomplish what no other army or species in the Ten Systems has managed to do—catch me?
I have to know. “How did you get on board this ship?”
He pauses. “You invaded our sanctum air space. You must have expected retaliation.” His dark eyes narrow into slits so menacing, they send shivers down my spine. I don’t know what species he is, but he fits the stories I heard in childhood: the Ssedez descendant from serpents, glowing like sphinxes, with fangs dripping in venom capable of making someone a slave to their desire in one bite. Well, thank God, his teeth seem normal enough, so that last part is likely myth.
But he cannot be a Ssedez. I don’t care how godlike his proportioned body—as though every muscle is chiseled and lined out of fine marble. It has to be coincidence how rigid and angular his jaw is. The Ssedez were destroyed a century ago by the Ten Systems.
“Who are you?” I ask, unable to contain my curiosity. “What do you want with us?” My ship, the Origin, groans another warning. I can’t believe it’s time to abandon her, but we have to—or die.
He snarls, and his voice drops another octave as he hisses and strains to pronounce the words. “We want the same thing for you that you want for us: annihilation.”
Something odd happens to me that has never happened and isn’t supposed to happen.
Not only am I not afraid of him, but I become aware, physically, that he is male, I am female, and that I haven’t had sex since…
I can’t remember.
It shouldn’t matter. I’m a general, a ship captain, a career soldier, with ambitions that leave no time for personal anything. Physical desire serves no purpose in my life.
But the ruthlessness in him, the ferocious gleam in his eyes—it excites me.
The symmetry of his bone structure alone is blinding. The ferocious angles of his cheeks and jaw are paired with an otherworldly elegance in the gold sheen of his complexion. I’m glad my helmet hides that my eyes are wide in fascination.
His hair gleams, too, like it’s laced with gold flecks. The strands hang to his shoulders, unbound, a contradiction. He’s an untamed beast formed with siren-like beauty.
He moves, his lethal muscles stirring inside that gloriously brilliant body.
“Don’t come any closer,” I warn, grateful for the scrambler that hides the shaking in my voice.
His body is physically distracting. Hard, like metallic hard, and big. He is all brawn and possession—the epitome of conqueror in strength as well as deed. And it’s not just his chest and arms. Even his thighs, outlined in black leather, are thickly muscled and bulging. It has me hungering for a glimpse of what is no doubt equally impressive between them. And wondering if what’s between his thighs is as god-like as the rest of him.
Apparently, despite decades of denying it, there’s enough hetero-female left in me to know if I wasn’t supposed to kill him, I would want him to fuck me. Now.
He stalks toward me.
“Stop!” I shout, tightening my grip on the blaster. He will not get closer. The ship jerks, and we’re both thrown off balance. I brace myself against a doorway.
“Your ship will not last long, General Nem.” He knows my name and rank. Which he could only get from hacking my ship’s computer. “Your crew are dead. Like you should be.”
I will not react and give him more of an advantage.
My crew aren’t all dead. Some already escaped in emergency vessels. But I’m not telling him that.
I realign my blaster for where his heart should be, if he has one. “You’ll be dead if you don’t tell me how you got aboard my ship!” Unlike him and his alluringly resonant voice, I have to shout to be heard over the rising alarms.
“No leader wants to find out he has a traitor on board.”
The blood in my veins runs with ice. A traitor? “No one in my crew would betray me!” “Take one more step behind you, General, and I’ll tell you who did.”
I know what door is behind me. “Why would I get in an escape pod with you?” I refuse to let him out of this alive. I have to get to the docking bay and off this ship to join my crew.
I have to grab one thing, though, first.
I rub my finger on the blaster’s trigger. Why haven’t I killed this bastard?
He straightens from the wall. “I will tell you everything about the Ssedez you humans have wanted to know but have never been able to understand.”
He is one of them!
My heart jumps, and I have to reassert my blaster aim. I can’t let him know I’ve been hunting for other species like his. It’s the whole point of the Origin’s mission. “You’ll kill me.”
A growl rumbles through his chest, but he nods. “And then I will kill you.”
I squeeze the trigger, and the neon green bolt of light hits him in the torso, too fast for him to dodge. He should fall. I expect him to land on the deck.
But to my horror, his skin illuminates with the light. He turns bright gold, every part of him glowing. With a roar, he comes at me, body slams me, throwing us into the escape pod.
I twist before I hit the floor, going for a headlock. But he wrenches away from me, moving with a litheness that shouldn’t be possible for a being of his size.
He punches the flashing red button by the door.
And before I have time to scream, it closes with a whoosh, and we’re detached, hurtling through space.
Want more?
Chapter 2 jumps straight into serious sex planet heat SO HOT it had to go behind a password. Get the info here.
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