Page 39 of Star Crossed Delta

MAK

S aba had a point.

Deimos Vale was probably pulling Mak’s chain, wanting him to act impulsively to reveal the hand the Sauvage family held in this game.

However, that didn’t mean he would get away with putting his hands on his woman.

Mak took a deep breath, nodding. ‘You’re right about Vale yanking my chain. But don’t think for a second I’m letting this go. Tonight, he stays untouched, but he’ll soon wish he’d never laid eyes on you.’

Her gaze softened just a little. ‘I know you’ll handle it.’

As the evening continued, Mak couldn’t shake the fury, but he also couldn’t deny his admiration for her at that moment.

She had resisted Vale’s advances and his attempt to unravel him. That took strength, and for the first time in a long while, he realized she was his match when it came to out-thinking the enemy.

He was gazing at her in wonder during an intermission between charity auctions when a figure passed by them.

Deimos.

The Codex man sidled past, his bodyguards in close array, flanking his left and right.

He paused for a beat, turned his head to Mak, and leaned in, addressing everyone at the table of ten guests. ‘Appears the Sauvage men embody their family name, as feral wild beasts who take whores as wives.’

Saba gasped as Deimos smirked, straightened, and marched away, his sentinels in pursuit.

Mak’s vision blurred with blind rage, even as he slipped an arm over his wife’s shoulders.

He’d had enough.

Ignoring the stares around them, he pressed a kiss into Saba’s hair. ‘Let’s go.’

They rose as one, and he nodded to the other invitees. ‘Repeat one word of what he just said, and you can expect the wrath of the entire Sauvage and Signet powerhouses. To turn on not just the person who misspoke, but on all of you.’

With that, he stalked away, gripping his woman at the waist, as the attendees behind them gaped.

Moving fast, Mak kept his eyes fixed on Deimos as he streaked away

Kaal, he’s leaving the place, and I’m going after him. In part, to get what we need from him. Also, to fokkin rip his throat apart.

Brother, Kaal cautioned via their neural link.

Nada . He insulted Saba, the ?arim . According to Akkadian culture, he has to pay for it with his life’s breath.

Fokk, he did?

Naam.

Kaal sighed, then gave a half-chuckle. Then you have carte blanche.

Hell, these were times Mak loved their outdated parochial Code of Honor.

Can you scoop Deimos up once he’s in the void? He’s about to dust off The Lance’s aft deck. It’s the best chance we have to nail him.

Leave it with me. You circle, I collect.

Their mark stepped inside a waiting luxury cruiser.

Vale’s skiff ascended, as Mak rushed Saba to their Corvette.

He turned to his strong man. ‘Koda, take the flyer and follow. Hurry.’

Both Signet crafts soon lifted off in hot pursuit, racing out of The Lance’s rear hold.

Mak guided the controls with predatory precision as he and Koda flanked Deimos Vale’s silver ship in the outer atmosphere.

The stars shimmered cold and indifferent, and ahead of them, Kaal’s vessel carved a jagged, stealthed path across the dark.

Mak’s jaw was tight.

His pulse was steady. Fury had long since burned into a colder, burning rage.

Mak’s fingers flexed on the control panel as Kaal pinged him.

‘He’s bolting west-north, looping toward the Maw sector,’ Kaal reported. ‘His ship is parked somewhere out there.’

Mak’s rasp was clipped. ‘Don’t engage. We’ll box him in and herd him to you.’

Their two crafts, matte-black and modified for combat speed, slipped into position with seamless synchronicity.

Mak took the lead, arcing to Deimos’ right and nudging his trajectory with calibrated thruster bursts. Koda mirrored him on the left.

Vale attempted to outmaneuver them.

Mak smirked. ‘Cute.’

He flicked his comm to Kaal. ‘Bring the rear deck open. We’re delivering a gift.’

Kaal’s timbre crackled in. ‘Receiving. Coordinates locked. I’ll scoop him on your mark.’

Mak peeled off and executed a loop, then dropped velocity till the front of his vessel’s nose aligned with Deimos’ path.

Koda fired a warning burst across Vale’s bow, guiding him clean toward the position Mak had calculated earlier, right into the rear of Kaal’s gunship.

The massive vessel loomed ahead, cloaked until now in shadow and silence.

The airlock unsealed, revealing a vast, gaping maw of steel, lit by docking guides.

Mak triggered the override spike, lancing Vale’s skiff with a virus that jammed his nav controls and forced his autopilot to reroute, straight into the gunship’s gravity well.

Vale’s vessel shook, lights flickering, engines shrieking as it was pulled against its will. Mak observed the spiral on his HUD with grim satisfaction.

‘Welcome to the party,’ he muttered.

Deimos’s flyer locked down with a final jolt inside Kaal’s hold.

Mak followed Koda in, landing hard beside it as the deck sealed shut again.

Mak soared out of their flyer, his pair of silenced weapons primed, and landed in a crouch on the rear of the panel.

His shoes, with gel soles crafted for action like this, helped steady him.

Cold as fokk , he targeted the back window and aimed for the glass using the muzzle of one gun.

An ingenious safety emergency hammer, designed with a hardened steel tip, was built into the butt of the weapon, shattering the tempered sheet with his strike.

Deimos’s face stared up at him as the shards fell away, his mouth agape in a soundless wail. Mak made his three successive shots, a trio of laser bolts in close succession.

One each for Deimos’ kinais in the cruiser who were firing at him, un-aliving them in seconds.

The third, meant for Deimos, hit its mark, sending him falling back, his physique jerking with every impact.

However, instead of convulsing in death, the man’s face contorted, and his body spasmed, his features twisting and distorting as the air around him crackled with dark energy.

His scream was silent but visceral, a soundless wail that echoed in Mak’s mind as shards of light shattered from his form and fell away like broken glass.

When the transformation was complete, Mak blinked in shock.

Deimos’s face lost all humanity.

It morphed into a grotesque visage, his countenance warped into jagged angles, his eyes glowing with violet fury.

A deep, guttural growl emanated from his throat, and Mak stepped back, disbelief freezing him in place.

Deimos was a sachem?

The moment of hesitation almost cost him.

Deimos lunged, his claws bared, and aimed for his jugular.

Mak ducked as Deimos’ creature’s talons sliced through the air where his windpipe had been.

Vale’s foiled attack knocked him off balance, and he staggered, scrambling to regain his footing.

‘We are many, ?ar !’ the sachem snarled. ‘Kill me, and there’ll be more in my stead.’

Mak narrowed his eyes, sizing up the monstrosity. ‘You will die for insulting my woman, the ?arim , and for conspiring against the Sauvage and Signet holdings.’

With a snarl of his own, Mak lunged forward, sinking his fangs into Deimos’s neck just as his claws grazed his shoulder.

The moment he bit down, the soul-sucking began, and it was unlike anything he’d ever experienced.

Deimos’s spirit was thicker and heavier than any sachem’s he’d consumed before.

It surged into him like a torrent of molten tar, suffocating and burning all at once.

His vision blurred as waves of Deimos’s memories and twisted desires crashed into his mind.

Images of cruelty, manipulation, and unrelenting hunger flooded his senses, threatening to drown him in their intensity.

It wasn’t just dominance, it was corruption, pure and unfiltered.

The flavor was bitter and acrid, a searing poison that made his stomach churn even as it fueled his body with raw energy.

Deimos’s spirit clawed at him, trying to latch onto his thoughts, taint him, and pull him into his darkness.

Mak gritted his teeth, forcing the miasma of it back, bending it to his will.

The power was wild and chaotic, a storm threatening to consume him from within. He held firm, channeling the torrent into controlled strength.

Deimos’s form convulsed beneath him, his claws scrabbling weakly at his chest.

His glowing eyes dimmed, the violet fury fading as his essence drained.

When Mak finally released him, he stumbled back, gasping for breath.

Deimos collapsed to the ground, his body crumpling in on itself as the last remnants of his soul disintegrated into ash.

The rear hold was silent, the air still heavy with the lingering echoes of his darkness. Mak wiped the blood from his mouth, his mind racing.

Fokk.

Mak stared at the pile of cinders where Deimos had fallen, his hands still trembling from the encounter.

Whatever this was, it was far more dangerous than he realized.

‘This war just got a lot darker,’ he muttered darkly. ‘We’re nowhere near ready for it.’

He spotted a comm tab open on the skiff’s backseat and reached for it.

With a twist of his lips, Mak retreated to his skiff, thundered through its hatch, and leaped into the front passenger seat beside his woman.

SABA

Kaal appeared in the rear hold, jogging toward Mak and Saba.

Just as he was about to lean into the craft to speak with them, the energy barrier protecting the Corvette’s aft deck ripped with an unholy scream.

The air thickened with the stench of rot and sulfur. Shadows moved fast and unnaturally, melding through the shield like a swarm of winged nightmares.

‘The sachem had come to avenge their fallen master,’ Kaal growled.

Mak cursed. ‘ Fokk , when will this end?’

He didn’t stick around for an answer.

Instead, he reached for a fresh weapon from the extensive selection in the spacious glove compartment.

‘Let’s finish this,’ Mak snarled to his brother. ‘Saba, stay put.’

Saba blinked, unsure she was going to obey him.

He and Kaal swung out, transforming into a pair of formidable spectral lycan venators.

Menacing and wolf-like, they had their fangs extended, as a storm of lightning and arcs of energy crackled over their fur.

In seconds, the sachems were upon them.

Their forms flickered and warped, their wings a grotesque mockery of angelic grace, and their eyes glowing with malice. They were endless.

Mak turned to fight, using his claws and incisors in a blur of precise, lethal strikes.

He cut through the first wave with the efficiency of a war-born killer.

But the numbers kept coming.

Mak stumbled when one of the creatures struck, his balance faltering for a split second.

Saba didn’t think. Instinct took over.

She threw herself from the backseat of the skiff, landing hard on the deck but rolling to her feet.

Without a thought, she darted into the chaos. The first sachem came for her, its shriek splitting the night, claws raised.

She used her wrist comm shield to block its attack.

It bounced off the electronic shield just as another beast lunged at Mak.

A pulse, a burning sensation, exploded inside her chest, expanding outward like a detonation.

A wildfire coursing through her veins, demanding release.

Running towards Mak’s attackers, she engaged, as its demon-like talons raked across her arm, searing pain lashing through her.

A zephyr of whipping energy rose from within her.

Her eyesight tilted and dilated.

She weaved on her feet, but not from pain.

The scorching heat inside her erupted, flooding every nerve, each cell. A deep, electric hum filled her ears, and in seconds, she wasn’t just standing beside a battle.

She was the tempest itself.

Colors bled into each other, sharpening her vision beyond the realm of human sight. The creatures were not just writhing masses of shadow; they were threads, tangled corruption, weak points waiting to be unspooled.

She caught hold of one and lashed out with the storm brewing in her.

The creature imploded.

Mak paused mid-battle and whirled to her.

‘Saba?’

His rasp was edged with awe.

She didn’t register his voice.

The fire inside her had ignited, crackling through her veins, filling the air with a charge she could feel between her fingertips.

The next sachem lunged.

She lifted her hands, willed the inner potency to life, as a glow rippled around her.

The demon stopped, screeching as an unseen energy enveloped it, crushing, pulling, and tearing it apart at the seams.

It didn’t bleed. It just ceased to exist.

The others hesitated. They trembled. She wasn’t done.

The power in her surged, untamed, seeking out its targets.

She closed her eyes, and her sight reached beyond the physical plane, past walls and earth, pulsing with filth beneath the skin of their attackers.

Right to the source of their corruption in an otherworldly dimension.

The atmosphere quivered with an unnatural vibration and glow.

With a ragged inhale, she pushed.

A crack split through reality itself, a distortion of space and pressure that bent the air. A wave of power exploded outward, rushing through the assailants like wildfire.

The sachem shrieked in agony as they burned from the interior out, their forms dissolving in the raw might she had unleashed.

Silence fell.

The rear deck thrummed as the force inside her retreated.

She exhaled, the energy still thrumming within her. Her hands trembled, not with fear, but with knowing what she had just done.

When she turned, Mak was staring at her, having shifted back to his human form.

His weapon was lowered, his brows arched, lips parted as if searching for words.

‘What in fokkin ’ hell was that?’ he asked, stepping toward her.

The air still glimmered over her, like embers lingering after a wildfire.

She swallowed hard, her breath uneven.

‘I believe,’ she forced a shaking exhale. ‘That your mark woke up some type of ability inside me.’

Sheathing his firearm, Mak tracked to her, one arm banding around her waist.

He lifted her face to him and slid a hand over her neck, stroking her wolf sigil as the fierce glow it emitted slowly faded.

He then scanned her face as if seeing her for the first time. ‘Seems you’ve a latent lycan power, ?arim , with the capacity to manipulate energy. Intriguing.’

‘How do I have it?’ she whispered.

A quirk curled the edge of his mouth. ‘I can get Miral to find out, but for now, I see we make a formidable couple, my love.’

Then she was in his arms, his lips to her forehead, rocking her, soothing her, before his mouth fell on hers for a melding kiss.