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A Wolf At The Door

SAVVINE

R iding a star-kissed heaven, while sipping on kahawa in utter silence, was Savvine Bianchi’s idea of bliss.

The dark-haired, emerald-eyed pilot liked the quiet of her bridge, the beauty of a distant jewel box stellar cluster, and the purity of space.

Most of all, the calm of a well-behaved perimeter, away from duty, responsibilities, worries, and cares that sometimes threatened to choke her.

She was still reeling from her dream earlier in the day.

It was the same one that repeated every month since she left Earth.

It reminded her too much of the burning home that she and her entire ark ship had fled from.

What also niggled at her, was the vision of the massive spectral being who saved her each and every freakin’ time. Who the hell was he, and why was he haunting her sleep?

Fokk .

She pushed him and the frisson of arced energy the thought of him always ignited, out of mind.

She sat back as her racer glided with agile ease over the Venantia Eterna’s spine, the massive ship’s silvery hull stretching beneath her like the back of a sleeping titan.

One hand wrapped around a warm-to-go steel cup, the other resting on the throttle of her racer, fingers tapping idly to the rhythm of a song playing softly over the airwaves.

The dorsal run was familiar now.

Her gaze tracked past rows of satellite dishes, yawning toward the murky, long-range artillery cannons dormant for the night cycle.

Beyond, surveillance drones bobbed in their programmed loops.

Each checkpoint pinged green as she passed.

She called out to two other ships in the network, cracking jokes, getting her kaffeine hit, and keeping to the same regular beat she had taken these last few years.

Her comms flared.

‘Well, well, if it isn’t the Ice Queen of Orbit Patrol,’ came the lazy drawl of Javier, voice rich as molten caramel and twice as dangerous. ‘’Tis moi , the King of Celestial Sizzle, gracing you with my presence yet again.’

She smirked. ‘Still calling yourself that? I told you to retire the title. You’re a space traffic controller, Javier.’

‘Correction: I’m the best-looking dispatcher in this sector. Maybe even in the entire galaxy.’

His voice dripped with the shameless flirtatiousness that he wore like a second skin.

He even had a door frame lean that made gravity jealous.

Add to that his dark melanin, and smile like a solar flare. Half the crew swore he was some forgotten minor god slumming it in a flight suit.

‘Are you asking me out again, Javier?’

‘Whenever I get the chance, Chief Savvine Bianchi. At some point, you’re going to crack and melt into my sinewed arms.’

She chuckled. ‘One of these days, you’ll run out of women to recycle those lines on.’

‘Oh, come on. Don’t be like that. Come join me in the love shack.’

‘Is that what you’re calling the comms tower now? Hard pass. I’m loving it right where I am. It’s much more alluring among the stars.’

He chuckled. ‘How does a slender beauty like you always wound so hard? Why won’t you date and settle down with me? I’m talking forever, Chief.’

‘Logging off,’ she teased, switching channels with a flick of her fingers. ‘Try a new angle next time, my friend. Emphasis on friend .’

The link disconnected to the sound of his fake, wounded groans.

Still grinning, she leaned forward and slid into the last arc of the route, letting the pinnace dip low along the Eterna’s ventral curve.

She mused about Javier and his comments.

She knew her refusal to settle down and focus on her career had confounded most men on their ark ship.

While drawn to her curves, flawless nails, and polished looks, they were also staggered by her ability to flatten warriors twice her size and leave them broken and begging for mercy.

Her unyielding endurance and explosive power were her armor, which she wore with pride.

Under it, however, in her quiet private moments, she admitted that she wanted forever with someone.

She was undoubtedly complicated, but she knew that when she encountered her man, she’d love him for eternity.

She just hadn’t met him yet.

The racer’s hum was steady beneath her palms.

The vacuum beyond the safety beacon grid was ink-dark, lit only by the pulse of navigational beacons and the slow drift of stars across her HUD.

With nothing but clear space and cold stars as her companions.

Still, she stayed alert. Always. Because out here, even in the silence, danger had a way of arriving in whispers.

So far, nothing unusual, she leaned back into her couch with a happy sigh.

With no warning, her proximity sensors screamed so loudly that she jerked and poured scalding liquid on the front of her suit.

‘ Fokk !’

A Lombardi stealth fighter de-cloaked a few hundred meters off her flank, black as death, edges angular, burning a trail of blue reactor flames through the void.

She identified the sigil of a silver and black beast and braced, hissing as she tossed the cup in her hand.

It wheeled mid-air, its auto seal shutting as it tumbled upside down and hovered in zero g.

‘Manual control,’ Savinne muttered, tightening her seat restraints.

The console responded, switching to her flying hands and tactical mastery.

Her neural node flared to life, sending her urgent, flashing telemetry.

She banked hard, almost grazing the massive generational ship’s hull beneath her, the g-force punching through her stabilizers.

It followed. Close. Too close.

‘Not today, succubus , not on my watch.’

The enemy gave chase, and she ran.

Her body reacted on instinct.

Her right hand tapping with furious intent on the controls, her left hand on her wheel and throttle.

Dodging, weaving, and spinning through tight spirals between antenna arrays and drifting debris.

They were out in the open in moments, streaking away from the Bianchi fleet.

Plasma rounds lit the darkness behind her like a trail of falling suns. Her steely calm held, her inhales even, her jaw clenched.

Until her display panel blinked.

Incoming threat.

A sleek, bone-white torpedo locked and deployed from the Lombardi fighter’s undercarriage, inked with glyphs she didn’t recognize.

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.

Fokk it!

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.

‘The fokk ?’

That maneuver was impossible, improbable!

The kinai executed the perfect park before her while caught in a mad dash.

How in freakin’ stronzo was 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.

Fokkinshitandhell.

The missile was almost on her.

The stranger took another impossible jump, arms outstretched, and caught it.

He fokkin ’ snatched it.

Savvine’s jaw dropped as her HUD stuttered with inconceivable readings, and an energy bloom coalesced around his frame.

She swore, as he appeared to transform.

Into a giant, snarling wolf.

She blinked and confirmed she was indeed looking at a spectral lycan creature that materialized mid-air, fur crackling with aetheric flames.

Its eyes glowed in a wild violet and brass, and its gilded fangs bared as if about to tear down its prey.

Her heart lurched as the vision before her matched that of her dreams.

The form shifted again, coalescing into a ball of purple and gilded fire.

She thought the man dead, but in seconds, the flames died and he re-emerged, unscathed. Hovering midair as if he’d somehow absorbed the missile’s momentum.

He appeared to growl, and she gasped when she caught sight of aureate-tipped fangs. As he snarled, his body lit up in an amethyst corona of a lightning storm.

Twisting midair, he hurled the weapon back.

The Lombardi stealth fighter hunting her attempted to veer, but it was too late.

The payload struck home.

The explosion was silent but brilliant, swallowed by the dark like a collapsing star. Radiation flared across the void in shimmering bands, casting molten reflections on her cockpit glass.

She blinked, rocked to her core, not only by the blast, but by the impossible sight.

Her savior, the man who’d intercepted death with nothing but his body and will, hovered before her, untethered to ship or suit, and burning with spectral fire.

Savvine’s breath caught as he glimmered back into human form.

She had never, ever, seen anything like it.

Mouth parted, her eyes tracked the stranger gliding back toward her at high speed.

He landed again in a rippling thigh power squat on the nose of her racer.

He gave her a casual two-fingered salute.

She shook her head, stunned, in disbelief as adrenaline crashed in her bloodstream.

Pressing her lips together to stop from gaping, Savvine freakin’ saluted him back.

Their eyes locked through the reinforced glass of her canopy.

Without warning, a searing, scorching heat rocked her.

Not from the explosion, but from him.

A wild, surging energy hit her hard, as though his essence passed through her, through every cell, and lit a fuse she didn’t know she had.

He gave her a head tilt, eyes gleaming, brutal, beautiful, and enigmatic as sin.

Then he vaulted backward, seamless, vanishing into the cockpit of his Corvette as it reversed with unnatural grace and streaked away into the stars.

Savvine inhaled, limbs locked, her craft hovering in space, as the wash of his engine’s kinetic waves rolled over her ship.

Her body trembled, her insides shuddering, and she swallowed hard.

‘Who, wait, what the fokk was that?’