Page 5 of Alien Devil’s Prey (Vinduthi Stolen Brides #1)

T his piece of junk was already dying when I'd cut my way aboard. The human had just finished killing it—and my ship along with it.

Through the viewport, I could see the Nightfall drifting dark and dead, its hull scarred by the power surge. My ship. Another link to the past, severed because of one desperate woman's choice.

My hand found the pendant at my throat—the Sovereign's personal seal. I'd failed him once. I would not fail my crew.

The viewscreen showed our trajectory—a graceful arc that would end with us becoming a brief, bright flare in the gas giant's atmosphere.

The Conclave interceptors were dead in the water, their systems fried by the same surge that had crippled us.

They tumbled helplessly, doomed. We were right behind them.

"What did you do?" The words came out low, dangerous.

The woman stood frozen by the navigation station, her face pale in the emergency lighting. "And my choices were?" she shot back, her chin lifted in that stubborn way I was beginning to recognize. "No weapons, nowhere to run. What else was I supposed to do?"

She wasn't wrong. But her solution had traded capture for death, and now the ship's emergency lockouts had frozen everything. I could fly this dying vessel by hand, or I could help her reboot the core systems. Not both. Not when every second counted.

I needed her.

The irony was a bitter pill. I wasted no time on threats. Three quick strides brought me to her side, my hand closing around her arm like a steel vise. "The manual flight controls are dead. I need you on the system bus, now. Find me a way to override the security lockouts."

I shoved her toward the secondary console as I dropped into the pilot's seat, my hands finding the dead manual yoke.

"The lockout protocols are military-grade," she said, her fingers already flying across the interface, pulling up schematics. "It'll take time to reroute power."

"Then work fast." I looked from her to the gas giant filling the viewscreen, its swirling storms beautiful and deadly. "I'll keep us from becoming a meteor."

The air around her was a mix of her fear and the sharp, clean scent of sheared plasteel from the damaged console. I could feel the ship shuddering as we hit the outer edge of the atmosphere, the frame groaning under the strain. My muscles burned as I fought the controls.

"The primary conduits are fused," she said, her voice tight with concentration. "I'm trying to bypass them and pull power directly from the engine core, but the system is fighting me."

"I can't hold her much longer," I grunted, sweat beading on my forehead. The ship bucked, threatening to tear itself apart. "Talk to me, Tamsin."

"The encryption is nested, but it's sloppy. I'm creating a recursive loop to bypass the final layer... I'm in!"

"Now?"

"Not yet! The systems are coming online, but they're unstable. Give me ten more seconds to stabilize the power flow."

The ship screamed as it plunged deeper, the hull glowing red from atmospheric friction. "Ten seconds is a lifetime we don't have!"

"Five. Four. Three. Two... Now! Full throttle!"

I slammed the throttle forward. The ship's systems roared back to life, and the engines screamed, pressing us both back into our seats.

The Stardust Drifter shuddered violently, but slowly, agonizingly, our nose began to lift.

We hung suspended between salvation and destruction, fighting against the gas giant's pull.

The critical moment came when we hit an unstable pocket of the gas giant's electromagnetic field, sending us into a violent spin. The artificial gravity failed, and I found myself fighting to regain control.

"Left rudder," I said, my voice rough. "Compensate for the spin."

She moved as I directed, our bodies working in perfect synchronization. For those few seconds, we weren't captor and captive, weren't enemies forced into alliance. We were simply two people fighting for survival, moving as one.

The ship stabilized. The spin stopped. We broke free of the gas giant's atmosphere with a final, shuddering lurch that left us both breathing hard.

In the sudden quiet that followed, I became acutely aware of her. She was still at her console, her hair tickling my chin from the proximity. Her heart was racing—I could feel the energy of it across the small cockpit.

The last time I'd fought for survival alongside someone like this, it had been with my team. We'd won, but the cost had been high. This woman was alive. Breathing. Safe. The knowledge unnerved me more than I cared to admit.

I pulled back, putting distance between us. "We're clear."

She slumped in her chair. "Are we safe?"

"For now." I turned back to my console, checking our position and fuel reserves. We were alive, but we weren't out of danger yet. "We need to find somewhere to make repairs, if we can even get that far."

The immediate threat of death had receded, but it was replaced by something else. Something that made the air in the cramped cockpit feel charged, electric.

My hand drifted toward the restraint cuffs on my belt—standard procedure for securing hostile assets. The motion was automatic, ingrained by years of training. But I stopped myself. She wasn't going anywhere. The ship was barely holding together, and she was the only one who could fix it.

That wasn't why I hesitated, though. The truth was simpler and more dangerous.

I didn't want to see those defiant hazel eyes go cold with the knowledge that she was truly my prisoner.

Even if she was the most dangerous thing that had ever happened to me.

The victory felt hollow. The console displays flickered, throwing unstable light across Tamsin's pale face. Dark circles shadowed her eyes, and her hands trembled slightly where they rested on the inactive controls.

"What's our status?" I asked. "Give me the damage."

She stirred, straightening in her chair. "Primary engines at sixty percent efficiency. Navigation sensors are unreliable—too much interference from the gas giant's magnetic field. Life support is stable, but the recycling systems took a hit."

I ran my own diagnostics. The communications array was dead. The EMP hadn't discriminated.

"The debris field," I said, studying the sensor sweep. The dead hulks of the interceptors drifted in lazy spirals, dark and silent. "In a field of wreckage this size, with sensor interference still playing havoc with our instruments, we can't be certain we've accounted for every hostile."

"The Conclave will send reinforcements," she said, her voice flat.

"Standard protocol," I agreed. "If a strike team doesn't report in, they send a search party. We have maybe six hours." I moved to her station, checking the propulsion readings over her shoulder. "Can you get us to jump distance?"

"The hyperdrive motivator is fried. We're stuck in normal space until I can reroute power through the secondary systems." She pulled up a schematic of the ship's internals. "It'll take time."

Time we didn't have.

"We use the wreckage as cover while we work," I decided. "How long for the repairs?"

"Six hours minimum. Maybe eight if we run into complications." She rotated her chair to face me, and I saw the guilt in her hazel eyes. "The failsafe wasn't supposed to be this catastrophic. My father designed it as a targeted surge, but I must have modified something wrong?—"

"You saved us," I cut her off. "Without it, we'd both be in Conclave interrogation cells right now."

She blinked, surprised by the absence of accusation in my voice. Good. She needed to understand that this was a partnership now, not a capture scenario.

"I need your expertise with these systems," I continued. "I can handle standard repairs, but this ship has modifications I've never seen. You know it better than anyone."

She nodded, some of the guilt fading from her expression. "The power coupling that controls the hyperdrive is three decks down. The access route isn't easy."

"Show me."

We made our way through the Drifter's corridors, emergency lighting casting red shadows on the walls. The ship groaned around us, stressed metal settling after the trauma of our escape. Every sound made me tense, waiting for the catastrophic failure that would end us both.

The power coupling was buried deep in the ship's mechanical spaces, surrounded by a maze of conduits and support struts. The compartment was barely large enough for two people, forcing us to work in uncomfortably close quarters.

"Hand me the plasma cutter," Tamsin said, wedged halfway into an access panel. "I need to bypass this burned-out relay."

I passed her the tool, our fingers brushing in the confined space. Her skin was warm, a sharp contrast to the cold metal surrounding us. The simple contact sent an unexpected jolt through me—not attraction, exactly, but awareness. Recognition of her as more than just an asset or obstacle.

"You're good at this," I said, my voice lower than I'd intended. "We might just survive." I paused, the moment stretching in the humming silence. "I'm Talon, by the way."

She glanced back at me from the access panel, a flicker of surprise in her hazel eyes before it was replaced by her usual guarded focus. "Tamsin," she replied. "And I have no intention of dying in this tin can."

I didn’t need to tell her I already knew her name. But she was competent. That counted for more than I wanted to admit.

"There." She emerged from the panel, sweat beading on her forehead. "Try the diagnostic now."

I activated the test sequence, watching data flow across my handheld scanner. "Power levels are climbing. You got it."

"One down, about fifteen to go." She wiped her hands on a maintenance rag, leaving dark smears. "Next is the sensor array. We'll need to physically replace the primary coupling."

We worked for hours, moving from system to system like surgeons repairing a patient.

Her knowledge of the ship's quirks proved invaluable—she knew which circuits could handle overload, which components had built-in redundancies, where her father had hidden backup systems that weren't on any official schematic.

"How do you know all this?" I asked, watching her reroute power through a conduit that looked like it should have been dead. "These workarounds aren't in any standard manual."

She didn't look up from her work, her expression a mixture of concentration and old grief. "They're not. My father left notes for himself in the code, commented out so only another programmer would find them. Little reminders about redundancies, hidden backdoors... It's how I learned."

The admission hung in the cramped space between us. She wasn't just a good navigator; she was the inheritor of a secret language, one only she and her father's ghost could speak.

I found myself watching her work, noting the economy of her movements, the way she anticipated problems before they manifested.

I realized her paranoia was a survival strategy.

She knew every weakness in these systems because she'd spent years looking for them, waiting for the day they would inevitably fail her.

Smart. Paranoid, but smart.

"Sensor array is coming back online," she reported, checking her readings. "And I'm picking up something."

I leaned over her shoulder to study the display. A single contact, moving slowly through the wreckage field toward our position. Too small to be a ship, too regular to be random debris.

"Probe," I identified. "Automated scout. The Conclave must have launched it before their ships went dark."

Tamsin's face went white. "If it finds us?—"

"It won't." I was already moving toward the weapons locker, pulling out a portable disruptor. "Keep working on the hyperdrive. I'll handle this."

The probe was small, about the size of my fist, but its sensor package could identify ship signatures from a thousand kilometers away. I watched it drift closer through the Drifter's airlock porthole, a sleek black shape threading through the dead ships.

I armed the disruptor and waited.

The probe paused fifty meters from our position, its sensors sweeping back and forth. I could almost feel it probing for signs of life, electromagnetic signatures, anything that would mark us as survivors.

Then it moved on, continuing its search pattern deeper into the field.

I lowered the disruptor and returned to the repair bay. Tamsin looked up as I entered, question marks in her eyes.

"We're clear," I said. "For now. How long until we can jump?"

"Two more hours, maybe three." She turned back to her work, but I caught the tension in her shoulders. "Assuming nothing else goes wrong."

I settled beside her in the cramped space, picking up tools and components as she called for them. The work was methodical, almost meditative—the kind of focused activity that pushed everything else to the background.

But I remained aware of her beside me. The competence of her hands as she worked. The way she bit her lip when concentrating. The scent of her hair when she leaned close to examine a damaged circuit.

Partnership, I told myself. This was partnership born of necessity. Nothing more.

Even if it was starting to feel like something else entirely.