Her Possessive Dragons

1. Sophie

SOPHIE

I don’t announce it when I do it. I don’t give myself a countdown or a moment of ceremony. I just reach out and kill the autopilot, the motion so familiar it feels like muscle memory rather than choice.

The tug responds immediately, a subtle shift in vibration under my boots as the guidance system relinquishes control.

The engines dip in pitch, not enough to alarm anyone monitoring traffic lanes, but enough that I feel it through the seat, through my spine.

The Persephone has always been sensitive like that.

She notices when I stop listening to the rules.

“Easy,” I murmur, more to myself than the ship, as my fingers curl around the yoke. The grips are warm, worn smooth by years of use, faintly tacky despite how often I clean them. They smell like recycled air and citrus wipes and something metallic underneath that never quite goes away.

The nav display blooms brighter as manual control engages. The trade lane glows a safe, sterile blue, a ribbon of sanctioned movement stretching out into the stars. Off to the right, bleeding into the darkness like an infection, the Zhankar dead zone pulses red.

Hazard glyphs throb slowly, deliberately. Not urgent. Not panicked. Just…final.

“Yeah,” I say quietly. “I know.”

Space is never truly silent, but it’s close enough that you start hearing your own thoughts whether you want to or not.

The low hum of the engines becomes a kind of breathing, steady and patient, while the deck plates carry the vibration up through my legs.

I tap the lateral thrusters, feather-light, and watch the projected trajectory begin to drift.

The red halo grows.

The computer chirps, polite as ever.

“WARNING. COURSE DEVIATION DETECTED. CONFIRM INTENT.”

I lean forward, close enough that my reflection ghosts faintly across the screen—dark circles under my eyes, jaw clenched so tight it looks like it might crack. “Confirm,” I say. “Log as manual adjustment. Minor.”

There’s a pause, just long enough to feel accusatory.

“MANUAL ADJUSTMENT LOGGED.”

I exhale slowly through my nose. My shoulders don’t relax. They haven’t in months.

Stars bend around Zhankar in ways my brain doesn’t like to process. Light curves, warps, stretches thin, as if gravity itself is layered wrong there. The planet isn’t so much visible as felt , a pressure behind my eyes, a low ache that settles at the base of my skull the closer I get.

I shouldn’t be doing this. That part of my brain won’t shut up about it. Alliance law. Forbidden zone. Energy anomalies. All the words they use when they want to scare people into obedience.

My thumb flicks the console before I can talk myself out of it.

The Alliance report snaps open, clean and crisp and infuriatingly certain.

SUBJECT: HAWTHORNE, ELIAS.

CHARGES: THEFT OF ALLIANCE PROPERTY. TREASON-ADJACENT ACTIVITY.

STATUS: DECEASED.

The word deceased sits there like a verdict and a dismissal all at once.

My teeth grind together, a dull ache flaring in my jaw. “Treason-adjacent,” I say aloud, the phrase tasting like something scraped off the bottom of a boot. “That’s creative. I’ll give you that.”

I scroll.

Paragraph after paragraph of sterile language explains my father away. Unauthorized access. Misappropriation of materials. Compromised integrity. They never say why . They never say what he supposedly stole, just that it mattered enough to kill him for it.

The attached image loads last. Grainy. Off-angle. My father half-turned, coat flaring as if he’s in motion, one hand lifted mid-gesture. His mouth is open, caught between words.

That’s how I remember him—always arguing, always explaining, eyes sharp and alive like he could talk his way out of anything if you just let him finish the sentence.

“They couldn’t even wait for you to shut up,” I whisper.

My vision blurs, and I swipe at my eyes with the heel of my hand, angry at myself for letting it get to me again. The report doesn’t change. The words don’t soften. They never do.

“You didn’t steal anything,” I say, louder now, heat creeping into my voice. “You wouldn’t.”

I slam my palm down on the console. The impact jars the ship, makes the screen flicker.

That’s when the tug answers back.

Not with an alarm. Not yet. Just a wrongness, a subtle stutter in the vibration under my feet. The engine hum wavers, dips, then catches again.

I freeze. “No.”

The lights dim, then surge bright enough to sting my eyes. A warning tone pings—not the standard chime, but something lower, distorted, like it’s being dragged through interference.

“Status,” I say automatically.

“ANOMALOUS ENERGY INTERFERENCE DETECTED.” The computer’s voice warps slightly on the last word. “MULTIPLE SYSTEMS EXPERIENCING FLUX.”

Zhankar’s field brushes the hull like static electricity. The freighter shudders, a deep vibration rolling through the frame that rattles loose items in the cockpit. My stomach drops.

“Okay,” I mutter. “Okay.”

The sensor readouts begin to smear, numbers lagging behind reality, ghosting across the display. I taste metal at the back of my throat, sharp and bitter.

“Route auxiliary power to stabilization,” I say, already moving.

“UNABLE TO COMPLY. POWER DISTRIBUTION UNSTABLE.”

“Try anyway,” I snap.

The yoke bucks hard in my hands, jerking starboard. I fight it, muscles straining as gravity shifts sideways, then corrects, then overshoots. My shoulder slams into the seat restraint.

“Compensate,” I grunt through clenched teeth. “Don’t do this to me now.”

The freighter groans, metal protesting under stress. Somewhere behind me, something pops with a sharp crack, followed by a hiss. Smoke curls into the cockpit, gray and oily, carrying the acrid bite of burnt insulation.

“Shit.”

I slap the emergency seal over the ruptured panel, heart pounding so hard it feels like it’s shaking my ribs from the inside. The smell gets worse, ozone stinging my sinuses.

“Stabilizers offline,” I say, breath coming too fast. “Reroute through secondary gyros.”

“SECONDARY GYROS NONRESPONSIVE.”

I bark a laugh that sounds dangerously close to hysteria. “Of course they are.”

Zhankar looms larger on the display, the planet’s warped gravity tugging at the freighter like it’s impatient. The nav screen fractures into overlapping images, lagging echoes of our descent stacking up until it’s hard to tell which one is real.

Altitude drops faster than it should.

“Computer,” I say. “Explain why I’m falling.”

“GRAVITATIONAL VARIANCE EXCEEDS SAFE PARAMETERS.”

“Helpful.”

The first kiss of atmosphere rattles the hull. The vibration changes pitch, rising into a scream that sets my nerves on edge. External cams flare as friction lights the ship in flickering orange.

Heat blooms fast, pressing in from all sides. Sweat slicks down my back, my flight suit clinging to my skin. The air tastes like burning metal and fear.

I thumb the comm. “This is tug Persephone ,” I say, forcing my voice steady. “I’m experiencing catastrophic system failure during unauthorized atmospheric entry. Broadcasting distress ping on all emergency channels.”

The speaker crackles. Static hisses back at me, thick and unbroken.

“Come on,” I whisper. “Anyone.”

The hull alarm finally loses its patience. It howls, shrill and relentless, red warnings cascading across the display.

ATMOSPHERIC brEACH IMMINENT.

“Not yet,” I snarl. “You don’t get to decide that.”

I haul the yoke back, fighting the roll as the freighter spins into a sickening corkscrew. Gravity slams me sideways, the restraints biting into my ribs as I gasp for breath.

Fire streaks across the external feed, bright and hungry.

“Stabilize,” I plead, voice cracking despite myself. “Just—just hold together.”

A console to my right erupts in sparks, showering the cockpit in brief, blinding light. I flinch, skin prickling with heat.

“Computer,” I grit out. “Emergency stabilization. Full authority override.”

There’s a heartbeat of silence.

Then: “OVERRIDE ACCEPTED. LIMITED CONTROL AVAILABLE.”

The yoke eases in my hands, just a fraction. It’s not much. It’s barely anything. But it’s enough to feel, enough to work with.

I angle the nose, not to slow—there’s no slowing this—but to level out, to trade a straight drop for a screaming skid.

“Okay,” I murmur, breath ragged. “We can do this. We’ve done worse.”

The planet fills the viewport, rust-colored wasteland rushing up to meet us. Jagged rock formations tear across the horizon, sharp and unforgiving. Gravity crushes me into the seat, vision tunneling as the world narrows to the controls and my own heartbeat.

“Dad,” I whisper, the word tearing out of me before I can stop it.

The freighter shudders violently. A deep internal boom echoes through the hull as something critical gives way. The smell of burning metal intensifies, thick and choking.

The comm flickers. I slam the button. “Hello? This is Persephone , do you read me?”

Static roars back, drowning out my own voice.

The ground rushes closer, terrifyingly fast.

“I’m sorry,” I say, to everything and nothing, and then the first impact hits.

The world explodes into noise and pain. My head snaps forward, then back, stars bursting behind my eyes. The freighter slams into the wasteland and skids, metal shrieking as it tears across rock and dirt. Sparks streak past the viewport like a twisted meteor shower.

I cling to the yoke, arms shaking, fighting to keep the nose up just enough to stop us from cartwheeling.

“Hold,” I gasp. “Hold?—”

Another impact. Then another. Each one knocks the breath from my lungs, jars my skull until my thoughts smear together. Alarms blur into a single, overwhelming scream.

Something rips free with a sound like tearing cloth amplified a thousand times. The freighter slews sideways, momentum bleeding out in a grinding, shuddering slide that feels endless.

Then it stops.

The sudden stillness is almost worse. My ears ring. My heart hammers too loud in the silence that follows, smoke hanging thick in the air.

The lights flicker weakly, emergency power bathing the cockpit in a dim red glow. My hands are still locked around the yoke, knuckles white, arms trembling uncontrollably.

I suck in a breath that tastes like ash.

“Status,” I whisper.

The console answers with a final spark, then goes dark.

Pain floods in everywhere at once, a deep, spreading ache punctuated by sharp spikes when I try to move. My vision swims, black creeping in at the edges. The world smells like fire and dust and hot metal, and beneath it all, something alien and dry that doesn’t belong.

“Dad,” I murmur again, and this time it feels like a confession.

The cockpit tilts as systems finally give up, gravity shifting just enough to make my stomach lurch. The cracked viewport frames the wasteland outside, blurred and red-tinged, before the darkness closes in and takes me.