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It’d been a ruthless training session so far. Just how he liked it.

He flexed his fingers.

Santiago came at him again, grinning, teeth bared in a snarl, bare feet kicking up dust.

A slick grin sat on the XO’s lips, yet Xander was well aware his friend’s nonchalance masked a deep ache.

Santiago, thepack’s Omega, was a former cartel enforcer turned ghost op.

Quick with a joke and quicker with a blade, he sported a carved physique and charm for days. But the women he flirted with never made it past sunrise.

Santi once loved a woman in the frenzy of a youthful, passionate whirlwind affair.

She disappeared in the riots on Earth following the Great Apocalypse, and what was left of her was found months later, to his utmost despair.

He buried her, and afterward never said her name, but Xander sensed her shadow every time Santiago cracked a grin.

The pair locked arms around each other in a wrestling hold and pivoted in the ring.

Xander’s forearm slammed into Santi’s shoulder.

He twisted, using Santiago’s momentum to drive him to the pit, knee pressed just short of his throat.

Xander stood up, muscles taut, chest heaving.

‘Fokk, boss,’ Santi groaned from the mat, rubbing his neck. ‘You got heavier or more bitter since last week?’

Xander didn’t reply. He just offered a hand. Santi grinned and slapped it.

The buzzer went off.

Switch.

Mak, theDeltaof the pack, sauntered onto the sand with the same shark-like energy he gave in court and board rooms.

He was tall, with honey-skinned arms covered in steel glyph tattoos that seemed to shift with each breath.

He was their counsel, sure, but in the ring, he fought like a philosopher proving his arguments with pain.

Mak was also a scion and former consigliere for the Sauvage cartel, one of Earth’s wealthiest and oldest mob families.

After a private dispute, he parted ways with his kin, joined the rebellion, and has not been in contact with his father since.

He chose to join the Signet pack instead.

Even though the Sauvage capital ship was part of the convoy, he wanted no part of his former life.

Cold, cutting, and brilliant, Mak had few soft spots.

In love and life, he was a loner with baggage who kept a velvet box with a shattered diamond band in the safe behind his cabin wall.

Apart from his brother Kaal, he trusted few.

Not even Xander, at least not in entirety, but the pair shared a mutual respect, and Xander leaned on the man for his cunning mind and strategic thinking.

They were Mak’s weapons; he’d once cross-examined a warlord during a live tribunal feed, with a shiv pressed to his neck just to buy a second more for a sniper to line the shot.

Xander struck without warning. Mak ducked, rolled, and came back up swinging.