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  She closed her eyes and dropped her chin to her chest, knowing what choice she had to make. Despair wrapped tight bands of pain around her chest.

  “I’m sorry, Damen,” she whispered. “Dr. Idylle. Raj. Pietre. If the Chekydran-ki live, they will stop the war. They have so much to give our kind.

  “I have to become my parents. I have to choose to sacrifice you without even pretending to ask your permission.”

  Something soft and feathery trailed through the moisture tracking her face. Antenna. The tendril jerked and stiffened. Another antenna joined the first. Then another. And another.

  What did her grief taste or feel like to the Chekydran that so many of them came to sample it?

  “Time . . .” Kannoi began, shouting.

  “Baxt’k you!” Jayleia shrieked.

  She opened her eyes.

  Soldiers and the drone backpedaled, peeling damp antennae from her face.

  They hummed and trilled a clumsy cascade of sound that rendered as embarrassment.

  Why?

  Their vocalizations dwindled to a mutter as Jayleia studied them. They seemed—unsettled. She looked at the drone.

  His presence in her head grew heavier and she understood.

  They’d never seen tears, but in tasting them, they’d recognized an emotion analogous to their own experience of loss. Of grief.

  She climbed to her feet, shoving torment to one side, and glared around the plain. The Temple taught that everyone lost loved ones. When a Swovjiti warrior lost a loved one, she honored the fallen by taking four enemy lives for each loved one she could name.

  The sixteen lives Kannoi owed her wouldn’t be enough. Ever.

  “Get these soldiers back on guard!”

  The drone chortled and Jayleia realized the soldier he’d sent to scout the Sen Ekir hadn’t returned to her post. He touched her bare hand.

  She gasped. The bands of sorrow around her ribcage loosened slightly. Her loved ones were still alive.

  The drone straightened, warbling a battle cry.

  Jay dove for her glove, pulled it on. Cursing, she slid down the side of the mound, rounded the Chekydran defensive line, and crouched behind a nest cap.

  Jay spotted the guild mistress and her troop. Her muscle-bound bodyguards stood out. Jayleia tracked Kannoi’s position by their movements. They flanked her. The seven other soldiers formed a loose semicircle around the trio, ready to close ranks at a moment’s notice.

  They’d stopped short of another pair of concealed Chekydran-ki soldiers.

  Jayleia chewed her bottom lip, considering showing herself to see if she couldn’t bait the group into the trap.

  Then she heard the sound of wings. The missing Ki soldier flew high overhead.

  She drove straight for Kannoi.

  Jayleia shouted, jumped to her feet, and broke into a run.

  The UMOPG personnel opened fire.

  CHAPTER 40

  SWINGING and dodging, the soldier shrilled a battle cry. She banked hard.

  The dull color of the soldier’s carapace flashed and changed color in the light coming through the blue and gray clouds. Her flight was a dance, an expression of devotion that couldn’t last.

  The fire laser bolt seared her thorax.

  She screamed.

  Jayleia screamed with her and stumbled to a horrified halt.

  Another shot hit. Then another.

  The soldier spiraled up above the formation of humanoid soldiers, burbling a death song.

  The final shot tore through her wings. She tumbled out of the sky.

  The guild mistress screamed. The men shouted and the formation of UMOPG personnel broke apart.

  The soldier impacted directly behind them.

  The sound and vibration drove a shard of agony into Jayleia’s heart. She found herself on her hands and knees, fists pounding the soil as tears she didn’t know she still had to cry turned the dust to mud.

  A tentacle wrapped around her waist and yanked her backward.

  Jayleia yelped as her tailbone hit the ground.

  The drone snagged her under the arms and lifted off, backpedaling, drawing her away from the cloud of dust . . .

  “Twelve Gods!” Jayleia choked.

  The soldier had been carrying a payload of spice tree toxin.

  Three of the UMOPG soldiers stumbled into range.

  The Chekydran-ki soldiers burst forth from hiding and ripped the three men limb from limb while the remaining men realized they had a problem.

  Kannoi’s bodyguards hustled her out of range of the toxin cloud, whether by instinct or because their people had called in a warning before they’d died, Jayleia didn’t know.

  The four guildsmen from the back of the formation fell into the wyrl-web. The screaming started.

  “Kill the hostages! Kill them!” she heard Kannoi shrieking.

  Jayleia snarled.

  The drone did, too. He launched them into the sky.

  The speed blinded her. So did the pressure in her head. She understood what the queen’s consort wanted, a merger of sorts. No matter how badly she wanted to, she didn’t know how to give it.

  He seemed to understand the dilemma. He mentally nudged something in her head.

  Something shifted in her brain. Pain laced her body, but he was there, in one particular spot inside her mind. The hurt dwindled.

  They slowed, circled three ships where there should only be two.

  The mercenaries had her family lined up in front of the Sen Ekir.

  Dr. Idylle, Raj, and Pietre knelt in the dirt. Two Ykktyryk mercenaries and one humanoid male stood behind them, holding guns to their heads.

  The man, dressed in a navy uniform with no insignia, watched the drone carrying Jayleia, his posture relaxed, as if he’d been expecting them. Eudal.

  She’d played into their hands.

  Where was Damen?

  The drone hummed a query. It went unanswered.

  Jayleia’s heart clenched tight in fear.

  “Sleeping,” whispered through her head. She had no way of knowing what that meant.

  “Come down, Ms. Durante,” the man called. “Before my friends here decide to disobey orders and avenge their shipmates.”

  Avenge? Jay raised her eyebrows. What had her friends and family been up to?

  The drone hummed. “Attack. Who?”

  “Take out the reptilian mercenaries,” she said. “The tall, scaled creatures. Sufficient blunt-force trauma to the spiny ridge of their backs will incapacitate them. I’m on the third.”

  Because he’s the most dangerous of the trio, she didn’t add.

  The drone dove and dropped her on top of Gerriny Eudal.

  She landed a kick to the man’s face with one foot, bloodying his nose and landed, clasping his pistol. She spun, wrenching the gun from his hand.

  He yelped and struck her lead shoulder with his free hand.

  It was exactly what he should have done. The blow augmented her momentum.

  She stumbled, lost control, and tripped over Dr. Idylle’s legs. Jayleia pitched the gun under the Sen Ekir as she fell.

  Gerriny leaped to keep pace with her as she rolled away. He landed a devastating kick to the small of her back.

  Searing agony rocketed head to toe. She wheezed. Her legs went dead.

  The queen’s consort warbled.

  Desperate, heart-pounding euphoria burst through her. Not hers, the drone’s. The queen was emerging from her cocoon.

  The dwindling song of the drone’s wings spoke volumes.

  She was alone.

  Eudal hauled her upright.

  Her legs wouldn’t hold her, would barely respond at all. Her brain registered the picture: her crewmates, kneeling in the dust, two mercenaries at their backs.

  But there weren’t.

  Where there had been two, she saw only one. And he looked mighty uncertain. Confusion felt like another closed-fisted blow.

  Eudal chortled, snapping her attention back to her predicamen
t. His laugh was a high-pitched, unhinged sound that matched the overly bright glitter of his brown eyes.

  “Did you really think I hadn’t spent your entire life learning how to fight a Swovjiti?” he said. “I want your thrice-damned father. Where is he? He crippled my agency! My work! Work that would put an end to the Claugh nib Dovvyth Empire. Tagreth Federated would dominate this sector.”

  With trembling breath, Jay sneered and spat in his eye.

  “Where.” He slapped her.

  She landed in a heap, tasting blood.

  “Is.” A kick meant to shatter her ribs, but she rolled and the Skeppanda silk absorbed most of the force.

  “Your.” Another kick, to her belly this time.

  “Father!”

  Her breath whooshed from her lungs, but the armor spread out the impact.

  Once more, he grabbed her hair, yanked her to face him, and laughed his high, scratchy titter.

  A memory, dislodged by the hair-raising sound, burst open in her brain.

  Four years old.

  Hands tied. Feet tied. Gagged. Folded up, cramped, hungry, thirsty, and scared to death. She’d cried until she’d had no more tears. She’d wet her pants. Twice.

  She’d lived simply because her nightmare-ridden child’s body didn’t know how to give up.

  She’d been kidnapped at her father’s behest. Not content to allow the legal system to decide the custody battle he’d waged with her mother, he’d sent agents to abduct her.

  To smuggle her off-world, the men had shoved her into an old leather valise and left her there. Once they’d lifted, two of the agents had told the third to let her out and to look after her.

  He hadn’t.

  She’d screamed herself hoarse.

  Only the young man’s high-pitched, hysterical-sounding laugh had answered.

  Awareness jolted her. Gerriny Eudal. He’d been the one who’d tortured her when she was a defenseless child. He’d betrayed the people she’d sworn to protect.

  He’d killed innocents.

  Raw, primitive fury slashed through her bloodstream. It must have shown in her face.

  “Don’t be stupid, little girl,” he sneered. “This isn’t about you. It was never about you. You’re nothing but a pawn.”

  Wasn’t about her? Never had been? She’d said it herself more than once. Yet this time, something broke free within her psyche. If all of the death and all of the pain and all of the striving hadn’t been about her, that left her . . . free.

  She could think and act in ways no one expected.

  And sensed an echo of the drone’s presence in her head. Through him, she caught something that shot exultation through every nerve and fiber.

  Damen.

  Awake. Furious. Bloodthirsty.

  Gods, she adored him.

  Jayleia spat blood and grinned.

  Eudal’s eyes narrowed and he stilled, his grip on her tightening.

  “You studied all that time to defeat a Swovjiti? Did you never work it out?” she whispered, finally getting her feet under her. “Or didn’t it occur to you to ask why the high priestess hated me so much?”

  It didn’t take much of a weight shift to jab a fist beneath Gerriny’s diaphragm. His breath went out in a rush. He didn’t quite double over, but he did release her.

  She got her balance and planted a fist in Eudal’s nose as he flailed, trying to catch hold of her again.

  She danced in close and planted the heel of her heavy expedition boot on his instep.

  The man winced.

  “They hate me because I refused to fight by rote as the training program dictated,” she explained, slamming her elbow into his face.

  He staggered.

  “I think. I adapt.” She followed him, snapping a kick to one of his knees.

  With a grunt, he fell.

  “Once I find out a man knows how to fight a Swovjiti, I don’t have to fight like one anymore.”

  “I should have killed you,” he spat.

  “When I was four?” Jayleia clarified. “You tried that.”

  Jayleia spun away intent on taking down the remaining mercenary.

  Someone had beaten her to it.

  The creature had a smoking hole in his back where his spiny dorsal ridge should have been. He’d fallen across Pietre and Raj, pinning them to the ground. Dr. Idylle was rolling to his knees.

  Damen woke knowing Jayleia was in grave danger.

  The hum of the entire Chekydran-ki population filled his head as, out on the nest plain, the queen emerged from her cocoon, healed. The mental noise of greeting, joy, summary, and warning drowned his initiative for a moment. Then the cacophony dwindled.

  He sensed her, the Chekydran-ki queen. She’d taken up residence in a portion of his head.

  She mentally nudged him.

  He opened his eye and felt the patch covering the right eye socket. Relief left him shaky. He recalled Raj taking him to surgery to repair the paralysis in his face and to implant the still-growing eye that would restore Damen’s sight. It would take a few days for the nerve grafts to take and for the eye to finish developing. When it did, he’d see as if nothing had ever happened.

  Damen glanced around.

  Raj wasn’t in the medi-bay. Neither was Dr. Idylle. Nor Pietre.

  He sat up.

  An Ykktyryk mercenary lay slumped in the medi-bay doorway. Adrenaline dumped into his system. His senses expanded, went on high alert.

  The queen flashed a picture of the Sen Ekir’s crew, bound, and lined up for execution outside the ship. Through her, Damen caught a faint whisper of Jayleia.

  Anticipation shot into his chest.

  Damen rolled to his feet, cased the corridor to the ramp, and found four Ykktyryk rifles inside the main hatchway. He grabbed one as he surveyed the situation.

  Jayleia, dressed in her black Swovjiti uniform, bloody, and bruised, slammed her elbow into a man’s face before taking one of his legs out from under him.

  Pride and love welled up within Damen. He grinned. Gods his mate was beautiful when she was taking someone apart.

  The man dropped into the yellow green dirt. It turned his navy uniform a distressing color, almost the same color as the sole mercenary’s scaly hide.

  Damen shot the reptilian holding a gun to Raj’s head.

  It took the creature several seconds to realize it had died. The corpse fell, knocking Pietre, Raj, and Dr. Idylle to the ground.

  Dr. Idylle rolled to his knees.

  Damen glanced at the man his mate had felled. He was down.

  Jayleia leaped to tug the mercenary off her cousin and her friend.

  It wouldn’t budge.

  Damen slung the rifle over one shoulder and descended the ramp. He grabbed the dead reptilian’s legs.

  She started and stared at him, elation leaping into her beautiful eyes as she studied his face as if memorizing it.

  “Get it off!” Pietre croaked.

  She grinned.

  They heaved.

  Over Jay’s shoulder, Damen saw the man in the navy uniform climb to his feet, loathing in his bloody face as he cocked back to strike at her back.

  Damen didn’t even have time to growl.

  Something alerted her.

  Jayleia let go of the corpse and sidestepped the man’s intended blow. She turned on her heel, coming in close to the man’s hip. She landed a lightning-fast strike into the side of his head.

  He screamed and went down.

  Jayleia returned to drag the mercenary off her crewmates.

  Damen found the neuro-cuff control and freed the men.

  “Did you get it?” Jayleia demanded as the crew of the Sen Ekir beat the dust from their clothes.

  “The formula?” Dr. Idylle asked. “Yes. I don’t know that it will be enough and I pray it works.”

  “What formula?” Damen demanded, frowning.

  “I’ll explain,” Pietre answered. “Help us clear the ship?”

  “What did you do in there?” Dame
n asked, nodding at the Sen Ekir.

  “Tranquilizers are mightier than the laser pistol,” Raj replied as the three men climbed the ramp.

  Jay tottered to his side, a tremulous smile on her face and tears in her eyes.

  Damen wrapped his arms around her. “I appreciate you saving Eudal for me to arrest.”

  “Cheaper than psychotherapy,” she said into his chest. “What did you do with the other mercenary?”

  His pulse faltered. “What other mercenary?”

  “There were two.”

  Instinct put Damen’s hackles up before he smelled the sharp, bitter poison of the man’s hatred.

  Snarling, he shoved Jayleia to one side.

  Blood oozing from his right ear, Gerriny Eudal tottered on his feet, his gaze locked on Damen’s mate, an Isarrite knife in his hand.

  Damen pounced. He bowled Gerriny from his feet, twisting away. The spawn of a Myallki bitch wanted to kill his mate?

  The man smiled. The cunning behind the twist of lips chilled Damen’s blood.

  “Your bitch is dead.”

  Something cold and deadly took possession of Damen. Some things were worth dying for. She was one.

  Humming in time with the Chekydran song of reunion resounding inside his skull, he attacked.

  His first strike dumped Gerriny to the dirt. The knife skittered away.

  The agent scrambled to his hands and knees then dove after it.

  Damen followed, aiming a kick at Gerriny’s ribcage. He connected. At least two ribs snapped.

  Gerriny grunted and stabbed for Damen’s leg.

  He missed.

  Damen didn’t. He caught Gerriny’s knife hand, planted a knee in the man’s diaphragm, crushing his ability to draw breath. Damen bared his teeth and pressed Gerriny’s knife toward the agent’s chest.

  Impotent rage stood out in the man’s crimson face.

  Good.

  For all the pain and suffering he’d caused. For V’kyrri’s death. For trying to murder the woman Damen adored.

  The blade contacted with Gerriny’s shirt.

  A thready plea escaped the man’s lips.

  Damen drove the blade into his heart.

  CHAPTER 41

  “ARE you hit?” Jayleia rasped. Her hands landed on his shoulders. “Damen! The blade was poisoned! Are you hit?”