Page 6

Not standard. Not legal. Forbidden by both the Accord and Syndicate Commission for the untold horror it might unleash.

She braced, every one of her nerves screaming a warning.

Savvine gritted her teeth, fingers flying over controls, flipping the racer sideways in a last-ditch, desperate evasion pattern.

Fokkit!

She was outmatched.

That missile wasn’t just fast, it was hungry.

Panic bloomed, a rare, unwelcome burn in her chest.

Her eyes dilated as inevitable demise hurtled toward her, a countdown flashing on her neural node.

She had fifty-seven seconds, at most.

A thunderous screech echoed through the channel as another Corvette tore across the darkness and slammed just meters before her, racing backwards, matching her speed with infeasible precision.

‘Thefokk?’

That maneuver was impossible, improbable!

Thekinaiexecuted the perfect park before her while caught in a mad dash.

How in freakin’stronzowas the unidentified craft matching her high speeds,in reverse?

‘What the hell?’ she shouted as her cockpit rattled from the wind shear.

Her breath caught because, like a god shimmering from myth, a silhouette materialized on the Corvette’s bow.

She blinked, not quite believing what she was seeing: a man.

With no freakin’ helmet. No oxygen suit, heck, no fear of the vacuum of space.

‘How in Capricorn’s Hades?’

He glimmered through the ether between ships, no tether, no mag line, jumping from his ship to hers with raw confidence and impossible power.

The man was massive, muscled, and tall as sin.

She couldn’t breathe.

He landed on her hull like thunder, his thick boots crashing and tilting her pinnace’s hood as he crouched.

His neat, dark beard and thick hair, the hue of an inky orchid, flowed like liquid silk.

She glimpsed gems on his ears and spotted a gold choker glittering over his bare skin beneath his mid-chest-zipped suit.

Revealing glowing black, violet, and gold ink that moved and shifted as though alive.

More glyphs licked up his throat and danced across his nape like flames.

His eyes lit with a wild, kinetic tempest.

They locked on her shocked gaze, then with a raise of his chin, he vaulted over her craft to the stern.

She tapped her console with frantic panic, bringing up the rear cams.