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Salvadore’s face twisted. He released the weapon and threw back his head, roaring as his body cracked and reformed, clothes shredding from him.

He and hiscaposshifted into Lombardi wolves, jet-black with a silver sheen.

In size, they stood larger than most natural were-forms, muscles stacked atop muscle, eyes searing like lunar shards.

Their snouts were shorter, teeth long, their claws gleamed like daggers, and their markings pulsed with oil-black ink, each a badge of blood earned and lives ended.

Still, they were no match for the Signet pack, each a larger, even more phantasmal nightmare.

One lunged at Xander.

Another at Savvine.

Mak and Boaz surged from the shadows, shifting into spectral wolves.

They lunged and snarled within a bloom of violet-gilded energy, with amethyst-glow veins and ember trails flaming through their fur.

They collided with the Lombardis with such force that the entire deck vibrated.

Boaz, his pelage streaked with war-ash and lightning, caught an enemy wolf mid-air and crushed its ribcage with a single, brutal twist of his jaws.

Mak tore the legs from another and dragged him screaming across the floor before slamming his skull into the bulkhead.

Savvine got into the fray, her laser blade slicing a throat clean open, and a geyser of black blood fountained.

She ducked beneath a leaping beast and fired twin arc blades through its spine. It shrieked, twisting, and exploded in a burst of dark matter when Xander raked through its gut mid-air.

Xander bounded, his form pulsed with lycan fury as he clashed with Salvadore’s XO, teeth devouring, claws gouging as they wrestled.

Savvine’s eyes locked onto Xander’s aura, coiled around him like a firestorm.

The Lombardi consigliere fought hard, his talons digging deep, jaws tearing. But Xander was wrath incarnate. With a final roar that echoed through every panel of the ship, he clenched his jaws onto the wolfish brute’s throat and tore.

Silver-black light erupted. The Lombardi beast convulsed, then shattered into nothingness.

When another Lombardi lackey lunged, Xander flicked his wrist, and his assailant screamed as a lashing of violet gold aether snaked into his flesh and combusted him from the inside out.

With a leap, Xander’s spectral form landed on Salvadore, sinking his gilded fangs into the wolverine mob boss’s neck.

Tendrils of dark aetheric force snapped outward like leashed lightning, wrapping around the Don’s limbs in fractal webs of living force.

The energy pulsed, once, then sank deep into Salvadore’s cellular structure.

As the Lombardi boss screamed, Xander withdrew the nucleic cells fueling the Don’s enhanced strength, stripping them from his DNA and absorbing them into himself.

The Don, having lost his werewolf abilities, collapsed into human form and onto his knees with a choking grunt, his muscles locked, spitting curses through gritted teeth, his sweat beading like oil down his temples.

‘You bastard,’ he rasped, quivering. ‘You just stripped me of my lycan legacy.’

‘I did. You don’t deserve it.’

The Don cried out, inconsolable. Holding onto the last tendrils of his defiance, he snarled. ‘Youfokkin’ mongrel. You’re no alpha, you’re a freak, your lycan powers are unnatural, freakin’ alien. You and your men are abominations, created by a nuclear accident, not handed down in generations through pure blood.’

The room fell silent.

Limping, bleeding, and trembling, the remaining Lombardi wolves transformed into humans again.

They stood stock still but brandished their weapons, which they must have scooped off the floor during the fight.