You want to know what it felt like? Before him? It felt like nothing. My life was a series of quiet, greasy tasks. Check the coolant levels. Reroute the secondary power grid. Wipe the grime from my hands with a rag that was already stained black. I was Anja Nowak, cargo tech on the Stardust Drifter, and my universe was the size of an engine room.
I’m not the kind of woman who gets noticed. I’m built for crawl spaces and heavy lifting—short, compact, with muscles in my arms and thighs from hauling power cells. My hands are calloused. My brown hair is always scraped back in a knot to keep it out of the damn machinery. I have a smudge of grease on my cheek more often than I have makeup. I was fine with that. It was a simple, solitary life. Insulated. Safe.
The first sign that my world was about to end was a shudder that had nothing to do with the engine. It was a deep, violent groan of metal screaming against metal. The emergency lights flared, bathing the engine room in a blood-red pulse. Alarms blared, a synthetic shriek that vibrated in my teeth.
Boarding action.
My blood went cold. We were in deep space, a dead zone between systems. Pirates this far out were usually desperate, which made them brutal. My first thought wasn’t to hide. It was to fight. That’s the kind of stupid I was.
I grabbed the heaviest tool I could swing—a plasma wrench that weighed a good twenty pounds. Its grip felt solid and real in my sweaty palm. I braced myself by the engine room door, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. The ship groaned again, a final, tortured sound, and then there was a deafening boom as the outer hull was breached.
Footsteps. Heavy. Not the sound of human boots on a metal deck. These were heavier, more deliberate. Thuds that echoed with power. I tightened my grip on the wrench, lifting it to my shoulder. The door to the engine room hissed open.
The thing that stepped through had to duck its head to clear the frame.
It was massive. At least seven feet tall, with a breadth of shoulder that seemed to block out all the red light behind it. Its skin was a dusky gray, crisscrossed with thick, raised scars that looked like they’d been carved into leather. It wore black armor that seemed fused to its body, and it held a weapon that glowed with a sick, blue energy.
A Zha'kall warrior. I’d only ever seen them in news vids—a brutal, dying race from the Andromeda galaxy, known for their savagery in combat. They were myths whispered to scare rookie pilots. But this one was real. Its eyes, the color of burnt gold, scanned the room and locked on me.
It let out a low rumble, a sound somewhere between a laugh and a growl. It took a step toward me.
I didn't think. I just swung.
I put every ounce of my weight into it, aiming for its head. The wrench connected with the side of its skull with a sickening crack. For a glorious, stupid second, I thought I’d done it. The creature staggered, its head snapping to the side.
Then it slowly turned its head back to face me. A thin line of dark, purplish blood trickled from a new gash above its eye, but its expression was one of mild annoyance, like it had been swatted by a fly.
It moved faster than anything that large should be able to move. One huge, three-fingered hand shot out and clamped around the wrench, wrenching it from my grasp and sending it clattering across the deck. The other hand wrapped around my throat.
He lifted me off my feet like I weighed nothing. My legs kicked uselessly in the air. My fingers scrabbled at his, trying to pry them loose, but it was like trying to bend steel. Black spots danced in my vision. The pressure on my windpipe was immense, crushing. I was going to die here, in the grease and the red light, choked out by a monster from a nightmare.
Just as my consciousness started to fade, the pressure eased. He didn’t drop me. He just held me there, dangling, and barked a single, guttural word into the comms unit on his wrist. Then he turned and dragged me out of the engine room, my boots scraping against the deck.
He hauled me through the corridors of my own ship. I saw the bodies of my crewmates. Captain Eva, a kind woman who always saved me the last of the real coffee, lay slumped over her console on the bridge, a neat, cauterized hole in her chest. The rest were scattered, their faces frozen in shock. We were a crew of six. He had killed them all.
I was the only one left alive.
He threw me onto the cold metal floor of the bridge. I landed hard on my hands and knees, the impact jarring my bones. I looked up, gasping for breath, and saw him. The leader.
If the warrior who captured me was a mountain, this one was a mountain range. He sat in the captain’s chair like it was a throne built for him, dwarfing its frame. The same dusky gray skin, the same brutal armor, but his was adorned with intricate, silver markings. His face was a roadmap of ancient battles. A long, jagged scar ran from his left temple down across his lips, pulling one side into a permanent, cruel sneer. He wasn't just a soldier; he was a king of killers. He radiated an aura of absolute, lethal authority that sucked all the air out of the room.
His eyes, a shade of gold so dark they were almost black, swept over me with utter disinterest. He grunted something in his harsh, guttural language to the warrior standing over me. It sounded like a dismissal.
I was nothing. The last, pathetic survivor. A piece of human debris to be cleaned up and discarded. The warrior grabbed my arm, ready to haul me away to some dark brig, or maybe an airlock.
And then it happened.
The leader froze.
His head tilted, just a fraction. His nostrils flared. I was sweating, my body slick with the adrenaline of the fight and the terror of my impending death. My scent, the smell of my fear and exertion, filled the small space of the bridge.
His eyes, once cold and tactical, changed. The disinterest vanished, burned away by something else. Something dark and predatory. A raw, animal hunger that made the hairs on my arms stand on end. He rose from the chair. Not quickly, but with a deliberate, terrifying grace. The air crackled with a sudden, unbearable tension.
He took a step. Then another. The warrior holding me went rigid, letting go of my arm as his leader approached. I scrambled backward on the floor, trying to put distance between us, but I hit the base of a console. There was nowhere to go.
He stopped right in front of me, his massive shadow swallowing me whole. He was so close I could feel the heat radiating from his body, smell the strange, alien musk of him—ozone, hot metal, and something else, something primal and male.
He knelt.
The movement was so unexpected it stole my breath. This giant, this king of a dead race, knelt in front of me, a worthless human captive. He reached out, his movements slow, deliberate, as if he were approaching a wild, easily spooked animal. His huge, scarred fingers brushed a stray strand of hair from my face. The touch was shockingly gentle.
Then his hand moved, cupping my jaw, his thumb pressing against my pulse point. His grip was firm, inescapable. He tilted my head to the side, exposing the soft, vulnerable flesh of my neck.
I squeezed my eyes shut, bracing for the bite, the blow, the end.
Instead, he lowered his head and buried his face in the crook of my neck.
His inhale was a ragged, desperate sound. A raw, shuddering gasp, like a man who had been drowning and just broke the surface for his first breath of air. He wasn't smelling me; he was drinking me in. His nose pressed against my skin, hot and rough. His breath ghosted over my flesh, raising a million goosebumps.
It was the most terrifying, invasive thing I had ever experienced. My mind screamed at me to fight, to push him away, to claw at his face.
But my body… my body betrayed me.
A jolt of pure, white-hot lightning shot straight from that spot on my neck down to my core. It was an electric shock that made my muscles clench and my toes curl. Deep in my belly, a strange, unwanted heat began to coil, a slow, syrupy warmth that spread through my veins. Between my legs, my pussy, which had been dry with fear, suddenly clenched and flooded with a slickness I couldn't control.
What the fuck was happening to me?
He stayed there for what felt like an eternity, just breathing me in, his whole massive frame trembling with some barely contained force. Then he pulled back, just enough to look at me. His eyes were no longer gold. They were completely black, the pupils blown wide with a savage, possessive light I had never seen in any creature, human or otherwise.
He let out a low growl, a word spoken in a voice thick with disbelief and a raw, guttural reverence.
“*O-meg-a.*”
The word meant nothing to me, but the way he said it… it was like he’d just found a god hiding in the dirt.
He looked over my head, at his second-in-command. I risked a glance. The other warrior’s face was a mask of pure shock, his jaw slack.
The leader—Khayon, a name I would learn later—looked back down at me. His thumb stroked over the frantic pulse in my throat. He was no longer looking at a prisoner. He was looking at a prize. At a miracle.
He was looking at me like I belonged to him.
And the most terrifying part? Some deep, broken, traitorous part of my body hummed in agreement.
