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It occurred to me then, very belatedly, that I was naked.

The sight of my body tended to elicit one of two reactions: amazement or disgust. The captain’s gaze never left my face, however, and I saw no reaction to my body at all—revulsion or otherwise. I might have been as human as her or as bizarre as a Hardanian lava squid or anything in between for all she cared. All she apparently saw was an enemy.

When my cramped and aching wings fluttered and changed colors and my antennae leaned toward the captain, her index finger moved on the trigger. I tucked my wings back into the pod at my sides.

She studied me, reading my eyes, face, and body language in the same way I looked at others: as a trained killer assessing a threat and deciding whether to ask questions and then shoot, or just shoot. “Give me one reason not to kill you now,” she said.

“I’m polite?” I rasped.

She scoffed. “I’ve killed a lot of polite men.”

“Fair enough.” I wanted to massage my aching limbs but figured any movement would get me shot, so I stayed perfectly still. “Well, I didn’t put myself in this pod. I think we’d both like to find out who did, so we can kill them.”

“We are not awe.” Her icy blue eyes narrowed. “If you have no information for me, I see no reason not to shoot you.”

“I didn’t say I have no information,” I countered. “I just don’t knowyetwho put me on your ship. It’s got to be someone who wanted me gone. Without me, you’ll have no chance to figure it out. I doubt I’m here because of somethingyoudid.”

In the middle of that sentence, the shape of her eyes changed. That look activated my every cell and flooded my body with adrenaline.

My offhand comment about not being aboard her ship because of something she’d done had the opposite effect than I’d intended and made her think that was exactly why I was here. She must have already suspected I’d come to kill her.

A millisecond before she squeezed the trigger of her pulse gun, I launched myself out of the pod with a desperate leap. My legs and wings had recovered just enough to help me avoid the blast. The bolt of plasma sizzled under me and hit the stasis pod, leaving a smoking hole right where my chest had been.

I landed on an enormous food waste processing machine next to the pod, flipped off of it, and dropped on top of the captain. As we fell, I grabbed the gun to keep it pointed away from my body. She grunted and fired again when we hit the floor. That shot barely missed my torso. The plasma left a white-hot burn on my left side, singed my wing, and melted through one of the legs of the machine, causing it to wobble.

I smashed the captain’s right hand twice against the container’s floor to loosen her grip. The gun went skidding into a dark corner. She already had a blade in her other hand. With astonishing dexterity, she spun it and drove its point straight up at the center of my primary heart like a highly trained killer. She recognized my physiology and knew where to stab, though my kind were extremely rare. Whowasthis woman?

Before she could plunge the blade into my heart, I forced the knife’s point away from my chest and toward her throat as I pinned her lower body with my legs and feet.

The captain’s fiery gaze locked on my face as her chest heaved against mine. In this position, my bare cock pressed into the warmth between her thighs.

I couldn’t tell how much of her fury resulted from being pinned down with a knife at her throat versus the unfortunate location of my dick. I wanted to apologize for the latter, but our position was an accident. And it wasn’t like I’d asked to end up on this ship.

She smelled of grease and her ship and hard work and anger. Whether it was my years of army service, or my brief foray into life as a mercenary, or just my own peculiar tastes in women, I found myself breathing in her scent and enjoying it. I liked how she felt beneath me and wished I did not have a knife in my hand.

Unfortunately, judging by her glare, she understood that nothing prevented me from slicing her throat other than my decision not to. I’d bested her in three moves. Given the chance, she’d likely gut me like a Pallasian mettlefish and toss my corpse out the closest airlock.

“I don’t want to kill you,” I said, holding her knife above her jugular. “I just want to find out where I am and why I’m on this ship.”

“Fuck you, Kerian Nos,” she said coldly. “You’d better kill me now or you won’t get another chance.”

Alarms split the air. The cargo bay plunged into darkness except for red emergency lights.

An ominous rumble rolled through the ship. The deck shuddered and heaved violently, throwing us roughly against the base of the food waste processing machine damaged earlier by the pulse gun blast. I took a painful blow to my ribs and lost my grip on the captain. She rolled away from me toward the container door.

The enormous machine’s other front leg buckled. It toppled over, nearly crushing my stasis pod. The pod held up just enough to keep the machine from killing me outright, but I ended up trapped between the machine and what remained of the pod.

From somewhere to my left, the captain cried out as all the small shipping crates stacked on top of and around the machine fell in a potentially deadly avalanche. Her scream cut off abruptly.

My stomach clenched.Oh no.

As the shaking stilled, more emergency lights activated in the bay, bathing my surroundings in hazy red. I belly-crawled from under the machine and spotted the captain pinned under a fallen crate. A rivulet of blood snaked its way across the floor from her body.

“Captain!” I shouted. “Captain, can you hear me?” She did not respond or move.

I got to my feet and staggered to the captain to assess her condition. One of the small supply crates had landed on her chest. The corner of another had apparently struck her in the head, knocked her unconscious, and left a bloody gash on her forehead.

To my relief, she was still breathing, but the sound was rough and labored. The blood on the container floor came from under the crate and not from her head. She likely had severe internal injuries.