Chapter 6
GUNNAR
Sebastian was a wizard at the shuttle's helm. He charted a course back to the space station while I transmitted a quick radio broadcast to let them know we were coming. By the time they responded, we were already halfway there. Whatever mess we'd plunged into, we were stuck together now.
Once Sebastian had leaned back in his seat, confident of our flight plan, I drew his attention to the blue link on my monitor. "I found this shortly after takeoff."
"What is it?"
I clicked on it, and the camera feed filled my screen, showing the empty room and incomplete experiments beyond the airlock. "They wanted video evidence."
Sebastian started to sputter about his dad and Dr. Bunting, but he calmed when I placed a hand on his shoulder. "I've disabled the transmission, but I can't turn the camera off from here. They'll have to wait until we land for the physical feed."
"They won't be able to see much," Sebastian said, glancing at the airlock door. "The window's too small, and the angle's all wrong."
"We weren't supposed to shift in the airlock," I guessed. "Something must have gone wrong."
"The explosion that knocked us out of orbit must have destabilized the chamber too much." Sebastian shrugged. "Can't say I'm too upset about it. Photo evidence is the last thing we need." He turned to me. "I'll disable it when we're back on the space station."
I nodded. "Thank you."
"Thanks for letting me know, and thanks for disabling the direct feed."
"I hate secrets." I shrugged in an attempt to give my words some levity, but it was true.
Too often, the state had kept their plans for me and my siblings quiet, especially when they'd split us up into different foster homes.
We didn't know they were doing it until the van stopped and they kicked me out, leaving my wailing sisters behind.
"Then you should know I had no part in this. I guessed you were a wolf, but until you shifted, I didn't know for sure."
I swallowed hard, remembering the strange voice I used to hear in my head when I was a teenager. He'd been quiet for the last few years, but the shift had brought him to the surface. While I was a wolf, that voice could only talk about one thing. He insisted Sebastian was my mate.
"What does your dad want with wolves?" I asked.
"I don't know," he said. "If I had to venture a guess, I'd say superhuman ability. Super soldiers."
I snorted. "Seriously? That's comic book stuff."
"My dad funds several 'comic book' research projects. He calls them something mundane, like 'clean energy initiative' or 'save the ocean gala,' but the money is all siphoned into clandestine laboratories in Russia."
I didn't know what to say to that. I'd studied everything I could about the Paska family fortune, but even I could tell they only shared what they wanted the public to know. I'd looked past it, thinking Mr. Paska was beyond reproach, and anything he hid must have good reason.
As a super fan, I'd been willfully na?ve. I didn't want to push my hero off his pedestal. Now here I was, tearing down the statue I'd built, all on the word of a man I'd once loathed.
When we docked at the space station, the two-person crew seemed relieved. "We received a strange transmission from your headquarters, commanding us to refuse your request to dock for repairs."
"Thanks for disobeying the order." Sebastian rolled his eyes. "They must know what went wrong with the shuttle. We had no choice."
"What happened out there?"
Sebastian explained our failed flight in as few words as possible, sounding every bit like the arrogant billionaire I'd always thought he was. "We couldn't access the zero-gravity area to complete the experiments."
"Sounds like you need a spacewalk." Mari smirked. "I've been dying to get out there."
"Be careful," I said. "We don't know what triggered the explosion."
"What explosion?" Mari asked.
Sebastian pressed his lips into a thin line, halting the words in my throat. "I'll go with you," he said instead.
The Italian, Dom, shook his head. "You're not trained for spacewalks. Mari will assess any structural damage and let us know."
Mari left us, already doing her breathing exercises to aid in the vacuum of space. Dom dismissed us to the empty guest bunks.
"I can help," Sebastian insisted.
"You'll only be in the way. We can't even stay in contact with Paskal's ship. They never should have allowed private space flights." Dom did his best to keep his voice light, but his frown said it all. He'd lost his patience with nepo-billionaires and ignorant coders on the space station.
I shoved off the wall and floated toward the guest bunks, taking the same one as before.
It was nothing more than a little cubbyhole with electronics surrounding the sleeping compartment.
I zipped myself halfway into the sleeping bag to hold myself in place.
Then, I unfastened my phone from my hip and stuck it to the wall beside my head.
I flipped through a few pages of a book on my phone screen, not really seeing them.
Sebastian and Dom still talked on the opposite side of the station, but with all the machinery whirs, I couldn't hear their distinct words.
Sebastian's voice got lower, while Dom's seemed to be getting higher and more heated.
Finally, Sebastian made his way to the bunk opposite mine. "He'll never understand," he grumbled. "They don't have the shuttle schematics. Mari can send us a video feed, but without being there to inspect it myself, I'm afraid we'll miss something."
"Have you done a spacewalk before?" I asked.
"No."
"Trained for one?" I hadn't been trained beyond the basics. When I'd asked for more, a tech had patted me on the shoulder and said in his most condescending tone, "In an emergency situation, you'll need your flight suit and helmet. Without them, you'll die." So helpful.
"No." Sebastian's voice was a low growl. "I'll take it up with management when we get home." He sighed. "If we can even go home. If they send another crew to get us …"
"We can't stay," I said. "They'll run out of food. Isn't another shuttle coming next week?"
"Our competitors, Space Jet, are sending a manned crew."
"Could we ride back with them?"
He laughed. "Dad would absolutely hate it, so I'm tempted, but let's hope we can limp home on our own."
I didn't like the sound of that. I'd seen footage of shuttle explosions. Even if we survived, with perfect conditions, we could end up stranded in the ocean for hours, waiting for the cruise ship to find us.
"Don't worry," Sebastian said. "I'll get us home. I promise."
"Don't make promises you can't keep." Fear made me sassy. This was supposed to be a routine mission, but everything had gone haywire. Add to that the few minutes my wolf had been on the outside instead of a voice I sometimes heard inside my head …
"I'm sorry," I said. "Today's been a lot."
"We should get some sleep." He sighed. "They won't let us help, so what else is there?"
My wolf could think of a pastime to keep us busy until Mari's spacewalk.
Sebastian inhaled sharply through his nose. "What are you thinking?"
"I thought you could read my thoughts."
He frowned. "Only when one of us is—" he curled his fingers like claws and swiped at the air, like that was what we looked like when we were wolves.
I laughed at him and stuck my fingers up on either side of my head, like I had wolf ears.
"You look ridiculous," he said.
"Not as much as you."
He grinned, and my heart melted a little. I was starting to like this nerdy billionaire, against my better judgment.
This time, when he unbuckled from his cot and drifted toward me, my pulse spiked for an entirely different reason.
"What are you doing?"
He pushed my hair from my forehead and trailed his fingers along the shaved edge above my temple. He leaned in, his golden-brown eyes only inches from mine, his gaze as intense as his wolf's. "You smell so good."
"I smell like I haven't had a real shower in three days," I reminded him.
My wolf rose to the surface of my awareness as Sebastian trailed his lips along my neck, sucking lightly at the tendon.
"This is inappropriate," I whispered in his ear.
"Is it? The voice in my head keeps saying you're my mate."
"Mine, too."
"Don't you want to know where that leads?"
Gods, did I, but I also knew nothing good would come from it. A man like Sebastian Paska would never settle for a guy like me. It was unheard of.
"I'm not built for one-night stands on the space station." My whisper sounded harsh in the tight space.
"Wolves mate for life," Sebastian said. Something hot and wet coursed down my neck. I angled my chin, giving him more room to taste me.
Everything about him, about this, felt so right, but it couldn't last. Sebastian's pretty words weren't enough to assuage my fears. "Let's wait until we're on the ground and our lives aren't in danger."
"If Bunting and my dad know what happened on the shuttle, we'll never be safe again." I hated to admit it, but he was probably right. "That means you'll stay with me until we figure this out."
He backed off, leaving a cold void. I took a deep breath and held it, fighting against the urge to unzip from my sleeping bag and follow him across the hall to his bunk. I needed the time and distance to think.
"Where will we go?" I asked.
"I have a few places in mind," he said. "It all depends on where we land."
I missed when we were wolves. I wanted to hear his thoughts. In our human forms, I felt like he was shutting me out. Again.
"Mate," my wolf whispered. That was the only word in my head. The rest were all emotions and the memory of Sebastian's alluring scent.
"Don't shut me out," I said.
He made a point of searching his cubby, as though looking for something. "My dad's never been on the space station, but he could have paid anyone to put a bug in our bunks."
"He didn't even know we were coming here until a week ago," I reminded him. "When would he have had time?"
Sebastian shrugged, relaxing his posture even though there was nothing for him to lean up against in minimal gravity. "True. In that case, I have a resort in Hawaii. I'll try to land near there. We can't stay, though. Dad will come looking for us."
I waited for him to continue, but his gaze fixated on his monitor. The spacewalk had begun.
I pulled myself closer to the bunk's monitors by their handles and watched as Mari exited the space station through the door nearest our docked shuttle.
Almost an hour later, she returned to the airlock. After she followed the decompression procedures, she met us in the space station's central room. The camera angle hadn't been ideal, and Sebastian prodded Mari for details.
"I entered the shuttle through the bay door," she said to explain when she'd disappeared from our view. "The airlock wouldn't budge. How important were those experiments? They looked basic to me."
I almost laughed at Mari's confused frown. They were experiments a dog could do in space. I'd questioned the large equipment with thick handles, and all Dr. Bunting could tell me was, "It'll make more sense when you're up there."
I thought he'd planned to deprive us of oxygen, but no. He'd expected us to be wolf-shaped and possibly with the intelligence of a wolf, not a human.
We still had some secrets, at least. We were both as intelligent as humans in our wolf forms. I would venture even more intelligent. We could communicate with each other mind-to-mind, which was sci-fi level extra.
"I imagine they'll send another team to complete them, since we failed," Sebastian said. "Any risk of it breaking apart on the way home?"
"I saw nothing to increase your risk. There was a dent near the airlock, which might be why it won't open. Something might have hit the side, but it didn't look like an explosion. No scorch marks."
Sebastian nodded. "Thanks for checking."
"Such a strange array of experiments, though," Mari said. "Did they change their minds at the last minute?"
"Change their minds how?" Sebastian asked.
"Sending humans." Mari shrugged her shoulders and chuffed a nervous laugh. "Those experiments were made for dogs."
Sebastian chuckled, and Dom joined in.
"Privatized space travel is for the dogs." Dom gave Sebastian a friendly tap on the shoulder. "Come on. Let's find a good re-entry point for you."
Dismissed from their conversation, I returned to my bunk and tried to bury myself in my book. The words blended on the page, and all I could see were the oversized handles and simple lab tables we'd loaded into the experiment bay.
My grandma had always spoken of the wolf goddess who hid her secrets on the dark half of the moon. I whispered a little prayer of thanks to her. Somehow, she'd kept our secrets, too.