To the Moon

Chapter 1

SEBASTIAN

Not even this giant cruise ship was big enough for me and my dad. It felt especially small when we were both at the same party on the main deck to celebrate tomorrow's space launch.

Technically, it was my cruise ship, since he'd given me the cruise line on my twenty-first birthday, my first piece of his expansive entertainment empire, Paskal Enterprises. Today marked my thirtieth trip around the sun, the day he'd promised to give the entire earthly venture to me.

That's right. My dad, billionaire Ivan Paska, had been looking up at the stars since he was a small boy in Ukraine, back when it was part of the USSR. He'd built his companies and his reputation from the ground up, and now it was his turn to take a stab at the space race.

He wanted to be the first entrepreneur to colonize Mars.

I liked my feet firmly on earthly ground, thank you very much. Most of the time, he was happy to leave me here, handling his day-to-day operations. This would be the second time he launched me into space.

I'd never amounted to much in his eyes, anyway.

I'd attended all the best aerospace schools, but everything I'd learned taught me we were better off trying to fix our home planet.

Meanwhile, Ivan was ready to scrap it and migrate to the next rock over.

Saving the earth didn't fit with his space colonization plans at all.

Dad sat at the far end of the open-air deck bar with Dr. Samuel Bunting, their heads together, whispering some conspiracy theory or another.

I made my way to the opposite side and ordered two fingers of top shelf bourbon while I watched them.

I couldn't see the good doctor's face, and Ivan spoke with so little movement of his lips, I couldn't read them.

My paranoia and imagination colluded to put words in his mouth.

"Tonight's the night," Dr. Bunting would say. "We need to kill Sebastian so he can't inherit the company. He's a loose cannon. Did you see what he did to the lab after his first space flight?"

"Well, we did turn him into a wolf," Daddy Ivan would say.

I shuddered at the memory of my first shuttle trip. I downed my bourbon and asked for another as soon as the bartender handed it to me.

Dr. Bunting knew. I still wasn't sure how, but he fucking knew I would turn into a wolf the moment the shuttle crossed outside the stable triangular areas influenced by the Lagrange points.

I wished someone would have told me. Instead, when we veered off course, my insides felt funny.

Yes, everyone feels funny around the Lagrange points.

This wasn't, "Oh, my bladder waves are at different frequencies," or, "My brain is sloshing against one side of my skull more than the other.

" This was more unsettling, like sea and air sickness at once.

My insides felt like they were being ripped to the outside.

"I knew you could do it. All that radiation paid off."

The words had made me shiver. How much radiation, exactly?

It had felt good to shake, since I'd ripped through my space suit and now stood in the shuttle's cargo area.

The lack of gravity didn't seem to affect me.

Either that, or the grip of my claws held me to the floor.

I gave another full-body shimmy, really letting it out in my tail. Since when did I have a tail?

All that cracking, rustling, ripping, and pain had left me in the body of a giant gray wolf who could still understand English, even with my father's broken accent.

More disturbing than his words was his approval while he studied me from head to tail. I had always been his favorite science experiment, after all. In my dad's world, people were either the scientist or the experiment. For most of my life, I'd been both.

Now, I didn't know what I was. When he looked at me after that first shift, his eyes gleamed the way they did when someone showed him a new product with his name on it. He viewed me as property. That was unsettling, coming from a man who treated his property as poorly as he treated his home planet.

Ivan's gaze left the good doctor and met mine across the bar. He raised his glass to me, and Dr. Bunting turned and did the same with a fake smile plastered on his face.

The bartender returned with my third bourbon. I paid him for all three, downed the rest of the second glass, and grabbed the third like a lifeline.

I turned away too quickly and splashed my expensive bourbon over a cheap dress shirt.

"God damn it, do you ever look where you're going?" I glanced down and met my new copilot's narrowed gaze. "No," he said, speaking for me with a high falsetto. "The answer is no. Why would you?"

"Good evening, Gunnar."

"Hello, Sebastian. Or should I call you Mr. Paska?"

"I'm Dr. Paska."

He scoffed.

"Mr. Paska is my father." I pointed down the bar. "If you ask him nicely, he might suck the bourbon out of your shirt."

I'd noticed the way the coding upstart fawned over my father. It was disgusting. My dad had never looked at anyone other than my mother, and this brat thought he could fill her shoes, rest her immortal soul.

"That was fucking uncalled for," Gunnar whispered under his breath. "Jealous much?"

I turned back to the bar and asked the bartender for a damp towel. Taking it, I dabbed it across Gunnar's defined pecs. "Look, I'm sorry, all right? Emotions are a little high tonight."

"Fuck my life." Gunnar twisted away from every touch, so drying his shirt took twice as long. "It's your birthday, right? This whole shindig is for you?"

"I didn't mean to turn the conversation to me," I muttered.

"Why not?" Gunnar rolled his eyes. "Every conversation I've had since I started working here has been about you.

'When Sebastian takes over, he'll hire his own coders.

When you circle the moon, he's in charge of experiments, not you.

When Sebastian wants to use you like a whore, get down on your knees and beg like a good boy. ' Yeah, I've heard it all."

I dropped the towel back on the bar and grabbed Gunnar's arm so he couldn't vanish into the crowd. I pulled him into the corner, thankful for his short, slim build. Since he couldn't see past me, he turned his withering stare on me instead.

"I'm the one who might end up somewhere else after our mission, not you. Bunting fucking loves you." I couldn't keep the disdain from my tone. He was Dr. Bunting's favorite pet, and I didn't know why. When I didn't understand something, I didn't trust it, and I didn't trust Gunnar, pure and simple.

"I will be in charge of our mission," I continued, "but only because I've been up there before, and I don't want what happened last time to happen again."

He frowned. "What happened last time?"

"It's not important. That last thing … I would never treat a teammate like a whore.

I have enough money to pay for entertainment whenever I want it.

" My word choice made his frown even sharper.

He probably won every argument with that withering glare.

"We're coworkers, Gunnar. I would never … I'm not like that."

He pushed at my chest. "Right. You trapped me in a corner to intimidate me, but you're not like that."

I took a step back and sucked in a breath for my rebuttal, but he was already gone, shoving his way through the crowd of tall, beautiful people.

So much for mingling. I no longer wanted to speak to anyone. I pulled out the bar stool I'd been leaning over for the last fifteen minutes and asked for another bourbon. This one, I sipped as I contemplated the too-pretty-for words man assigned to fly a single orbit around the moon with me.

Gunnar was as smart as he was beautiful, but he didn't belong on the team.

Dr. Bunting said his coding for a new airplane flight simulator had been flawless, and I didn't doubt it, but the rest of our colleagues had doctorates more impressive than mine, or had written papers in the aerospace journals I read each week.

Gunnar Grayson was an unknown. Another reason not to trust him.

I sipped my drink and glanced around the boat deck.

After dinner, the crew had cleared the tables away so we could use it as an open-air ballroom.

The breeze was a balmy eighty degrees from the east, probably blowing up that storm from Africa.

It didn't matter. Our morning launch would be well before the storm reached us, and we would depart the space station after it passed, crashing back into calm water to do it all again in a few months.

If I survived the night. The odds were in my favor. Dad would have to cancel the launch without me, unless he already had a backup in place.

During the altercation with Gunnar, I'd lost track of my father. Dr. Bunting still nursed a clear drink at the other end of the bar. A glass of seltzer water, if I knew him at all. I scanned the room, searching for my father, only to find him a few feet away and closing fast. Shit.

"Ivan." I held out my hand, hoping to stall him from whatever speech he had planned.

"You know I hate it when you call me that," he growled. "Why couldn't you call me Dad like a normal child?"

"For starters, you never treated me like a normal child," I reminded him. I held out my drink. "If you're planning to poison me, go for it."

"Poison you?" He glanced around us, as though hoping I'd attracted an audience with my outlandish claims. I hadn't.

Most of the folks here tonight worked with us, and they knew to move out of earshot for plausible deniability, should anything happen.

"Not now, not after all the success we had with the," he paused for effect, "radiation. "

He meant whatever he'd done to turn me into a fucking wolf. I sighed and sipped my drink. "You won't give your company to a guy who turns furry on the dark side of the moon, though, right?"

"I knew you had the potential long before I transferred my earthly assets to you. I have no intention of backing out now."

I blinked. "You fucking knew?"

He glanced over his shoulder. The crowd had shuffled away from us a few steps further.

"Keep your voice down," he whispered anyway.

He studied me for a moment, and then gave a stiff nod.

"It's time to share the files with you, all the research we conducted on you and your mother, that summer we spent in Ukraine. "

The summer we spent too close to the devastating fallout from Chernobyl, in other words.

A driver and two of my tutors had fallen ill on the trip.

When we returned, my mother was diagnosed with stage four uterine cancer, all thanks to the radiation sickness she most definitely brought home with her.

Dad had worn his special suits and spent his nights outside the red zone, but mom and I had been trapped in a concrete facility, waiting to have our blood drawn every few hours.

My numbers rebounded after the first night. Hers did not.

"You killed her," I whispered. "Who's to say you won't kill me, too?"

"I need you, Sebastian. You're the future of this planet. Your people will populate Mars one day."

"My people?" I scoffed. "I'm gay, dad. Unless you want to fill a turkey baster with my sperm and inject a bunch of women with it ..." It was one thing to think it, but speaking it into the universe was a bad idea. I slammed my mouth shut so hard my teeth clicked together.

I didn't need to give him ideas. He was resourceful enough. Hell, he probably collected my sperm every time I ejaculated down my shower drain.

He shook his head, but his disappointment didn't faze me. I'd seen that look often enough over the years. "Complete this moon shot. When you return, I'll share the files with you, the full details of why you can turn into a wolf, and where we plan to go from here."

"Fine." I knocked back the last of my bourbon and shoved my ass off the barstool, landing unsteadily on my feet.

I brushed some nonexistent crumbs from his lapel and tapped his stubbled cheeks with my fingers, the way I'd done when I was a child in his arms. "Is that all?

We've got an early flight and I don't want to miss it. "

He sighed. "Your birthday toast …"

"You'll make excuses for me," I said. "You always do."

With that, I made my way around the clusters of people pretending not to listen to us. Closer to the door, I waded through the throng of workers who either didn't know we were fighting or didn't care.

Five minutes later, I was back inside the ship's inner workings, trudging up the steps to my top-floor cabin.

Inside, I kicked my shoes off and crashed to the king bed without bothering to remove my clothes.

I fell asleep almost instantly to the gentle rocking of the ship, so subtle I almost couldn't feel it.