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His smile dropped. His face twitched.

The second slap landed harder, snapping her cheek the other way. Pain seared down her jawline, hot and biting.

‘I’m only just beginning,’ he whispered, his breath sharp with synthetic spice. ‘My almost wife.’

The iron tinge of blood flooded her mouth, but kept her expression steely.

She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her break. Not now. Not ever.

25

The Wolves and Ravens

XANDER

The blue glow of holo-reports bathed Xander’s face, casting long shadows across the metallic lines of his jaw as he sat hunched in his office.

His gaze swept over requisitions and security breach updates, fingers tapping against his desk in a restless rhythm.

Now and then, he scrawled a note with his stylus, his mind flickering between duty and distraction, the former in the image of his lover, whom he was missing.

His neural node pinged.

He glanced up at Miral’s identifier.Naam?

Her utterance came across clipped and tense.Commander, your racer just disappeared from long-range radar.

Xander shot to his feet, the chair behind him scraping back with a screech.Repeat that?

Gone. No trace, no echo. One second, she was in the Aralon Belt on the edge of our safety perimeter, and then, there was nothing.

He was already striding out the doors, moving hard and fast over the polished deck.

‘Bridge. Now!’ he growled out loud.

‘Already at comm controls.’

The portal hissed open.

As he stalked into the command center, his prowling urgency turned heads.

‘Miral, pull up all signals in as extensive a radius as possible. Thermal, pulse, ripple, shadow net, everything.’

The AI’s projection shimmered in the air, her form rigid as she complied.

Whirls of data spiraled outward, layering across the primary holo table at blinding speed.

Then, black. Empty. Nothing but space and silence.

Xander’s fists clenched.

‘Fokk. There is no way her transponder would not ping us even if she were days away. Someone’s taken her.’

His heart thundered against his ribs, a storm of dread rising in his chest.

‘Find her,’ he snapped, voice dark. ‘I don’t care what you must rip apart to do it. Hunt her down and whoever the hell dared take her.’

Ten minutes later, after endless sweeps, a call came through theSombra’scentral console, startling the bridge crew.