“SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING!”
Qeth's voice cracked, jumping two octaves. His clarity was fragmenting. I could see the exact moment it started. His left eye twitched, the pupil dilating independently of the right.
“No, wait, secure the perimeter! The Consortium is here! They're in the walls!”
He spun in a full circle, seeing enemies that didn't exist. Yet. Though if my device was working properly, they'd be here soon enough. Every crime family he'd betrayed would be coming for their pound of flesh.
“In the systems! The algorithms know! They've always known!”
Then he lunged at me.
Not with violence. With desperation. His six-fingered hands reached for me as a drowning man reaches for driftwood. This close, the smell of his deterioration was overwhelming. Sweet rot and copper and the sharp tang of fear.
“You can fix this!” His fingers closed on my arm, grip stronger than his shaking suggested. “You understand the numbers! You'll make the algorithms work! You have to!”
VARRICK
Ihad Qeth's wrist in my hand before the thought fully formed. The bones broke with a sound like dry twigs snapping. Wrist bones and at least two of those extra finger bones his six-fingered species had evolved shattered under my grip. He released Sabine with a shriek that started in one register and ended somewhere else entirely, something primal and broken.
He cradled his ruined wrist against his chest, those copper eyes flickering between lucidity and madness like a failing circuit.
“Touch her again,” I said, keeping my voice soft because soft was more terrifying than shouting, “and I'll remove more than your hand.”
The guards started forward. Professional instinct overriding their uncertainty about their employer's mental state. The Mondians moved in perfect synchronization, scales rippling as combat hormones flooded their systems. The human had his weapon half-drawn. The Krelaxian was already calculating angles of attack.
Then the door opened, and the temperature dropped fifteen degrees in the space of a heartbeat.
Everyone stopped. It wasn't a choice. The primitive part of every brain in that room screamed the same message: predator.
Three figures entered, moving in perfect synchronization like they shared a single nervous system. Seven feet of ethereal wrongness wrapped in expensive dark suits that cost more than most planets' annual defense budgets. The Ixari.
Their translucent skin showed the shadows of organs that weren't where organs should be. Hearts that beat in their abdomens, lungs that seemed to flow like liquid, something that pulsed with bioluminescent light where a liver might have been. Their faces were beautiful the way certain deep-sea creatures were beautiful. Evolved to attract prey before destroying it.
Their eyes were the worst part. No pupils, no iris, just endless black that reflected nothing and seemed to pull light from the room. When the center one smiled, it had too many teeth. Far too many teeth.
“The situation appears to have deteriorated.”
Its voice. I didn't even know if they had different genders, or if gender was a concept that applied to them at all. The sound slid through the air like oil over water. Beautiful and wrong and impossible to ignore. Every word carried harmonics that human throats couldn't produce.
Behind us, Qeth was alternating between whimpering about his broken wrist and shouting orders at invisible enemies. “Kill the spies! No, protect the algorithms! The patterns are screaming!”
The center Ixari tilted its head at an angle that would have snapped a human neck, studying Qeth as a scientist might observe a failed experiment.
“How unfortunate for poor Qeth. All that enhancement, all that borrowed brilliance, and here he is. Broken.” It paused, and those black eyes fixed on Sabine. “No matter. We'll still take the female.”
Everything in me went primal.
The sound that came from my throat made the guards step back, made even the Ixari pause. It wasn't quite a growl, wasn't quite a roar. It was the vocalization of pure possession, the auditory equivalent of bared fangs and extended claws. My fangs extended fully, pressing against my lower lip hard enough to draw blood.
I moved without conscious thought. One moment I was beside Sabine, the next I was in front of her, my body becoming a wall between her and everything that might hurt her. The temperature around me spiked. Vinduthi biology responding to threat by increasing metabolic rate, preparing for violence.
My hand reached back, finding hers, and our fingers interlaced with desperate strength. Her palm was damp with fear-sweat, but her grip was steady. Strong. She pressed against my back, and I felt her heartbeat against my spine. Rapid but rhythmic, scared but not panicking.
Throughout all of this, she stayed with me. Not hiding, not cowering, but present. Her free hand came up to rest on my waist, fingers curling into my shirt, and that small touch sent electricity through every nerve. Even terrified, even facing death, she was telling me she was with me. That we were facing this as partners.
The possessive satisfaction of that nearly broke my control.
“No.”
