Chapter 1
Good plans needed time to cook, and this one was still raw.
Raaze turned his back on the landing pad, the itch between his shoulder blades staying right where it was.
He needed time to map every angle on that slabcrete before he committed to a play that would either get him off this rock or get him killed.
But it didn’t matter. He’d been studying the comings and goings for weeks, and the departure window for today was closed.
Which meant those pilots weren’t going anywhere. He had time.
Which was good. Because right now, he was stuck babysitting a bunch of over-muscled toddlers who thought tripping over their own feet constituted a tactical maneuver.
Crossing his arms, he surveyed the disaster area the garrison laughably called a warball pitch.
Calling it a pitch was an insult to pitches.
Hell, it was an insult to dirt. It was a patch of baked misery, hard enough to shatter bone and hot enough to fry eggs.
Every idiot out here, him included, was baking.
Which was almost enough to distract him from the fact that the drills the team was running were worse. Almost.
“Left!” He bellowed. “Cover the draanthing left, Bravnak! Lady’s tits, you’re leaving a gap big enough to fly a dropship through there!”
Bravnak scrambled to adjust, his feet skidding on the loose shale. The player on his left wobbled like a drunk on payday, corrected the wrong way, and the pass went wide.
For draanth’s sake.
Raaze hissed through his teeth and scrubbed a hand over his face. Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. Back in the leagues, this kind of incompetence would have had them running perimeter drills until their lungs bled.
Just another Tuesday in hell.
Draanth it, what did he care? He didn’t. He wasn’t their captain. He wasn’t their coach.
But he couldn’t help himself as he tracked the play. Automatically, he dissected angles, calculated velocity, and spotted the weakness in the defensive line.
“Again,” he barked, ignoring the glares aimed his way. “Draanth’s sake, try to at least look like you’ve seen a sphere before.”
They reset. Daavyn, a big draanthic of a male who relied on mass over mechanics, lined up opposite Sorrath.
Raaze narrowed his eyes. Trall. Those two had been circling each other for weeks.
A grudge looking for an excuse. Daavyn was all heavy shoulders and resentment; Sorrath was leaner, altogether meaner, and unfortunately had a mouth that moved faster than his brain.
“Ready… break!”
The sphere flew through the air. Daavyn lunged forward. Sorrath sprinted toward him.
Neither of them even pretended to go for the sphere. Daavyn dropped his shoulder, driving hard into Sorrath’s chest a full second after the pass was gone.
Sorrath didn’t stumble. He whirled around and faced up to the bigger male with a snarl. “Watch it, you piece of trall!”
“Watch yourself, runt.” Daavyn shoved him.
Sorrath shoved back.
Then the claws came out.
Snick-snick-snick.
Black, serrated razors extended from both their fingertips, glistening in the harsh sun. The other males on the teams scrambled back. Standard procedure. When the claws came out, you got clear, or you got bled.
Oh, for draanth’s sake.
Raaze moved before the thought finished and hit the gap between them.
Sorrath was winding up, telegraphing a strike that would gut Daavyn like a fish.
Raaze didn’t bother grappling. He didn’t waste the energy.
Instead, he drove his shoulder into Daavyn, checking him back a step as he slammed a flat hand into the center of Sorrath’s chest.
“Enough.”
The word wasn’t a shout. It didn’t need to be.
Sorrath froze, his chest heaving and eyes blown wide as he focused, locked onto Daavyn. The black tips of his claws were inches from Raaze’s ribs.
“Back down,” he snarled. “Unless you want to explain this little… misunderstanding to Kraath.”
Sorrath vibrated with tension, rage rolling off him in waves. Raaze didn’t flinch, didn’t look at the claws. He just looked Sorrath in the eye.
Go on. Try it mother-draanther. See what happens.
Sorrath blinked, and the focus broke as he looked down at Raaze. The claws didn’t retract fully, but the lethal intent wavered.
Raaze turned his head slightly to lock eyes with Daavyn. “Pick up the sphere.”
Daavyn bristled, fists still clenched. “He started it.”
“And I’m ending it. Pick up the draanthing sphere.”
Daavyn hesitated for a second, his gaze flickering to the males around him. None of them would meet his eyes so he looked at Raaze. He saw the moment sense finally filtered through Daavyn’s thick skull. The big feral grunted, bent down, and snatched the heavy practice sphere from the dust.
Raaze turned back to Sorrath. “East perimeter. Two laps. Now.”
“I didn’t—”
“Now.”
Sorrath snarled, a wet, ugly sound, but he turned and started jogging toward the perimeter fence.
Raaze stayed where he was for a long moment, watching them separate.
He didn’t relax his stance until there was fifty yards of dust between them.
He checked his hands. Steady as a rock. No red vignette bleeding into his peripheral vision.
No adrenaline spike. And definitely no draanthing Blood Rage.
See? Nothing to see here.
He turned and walked back to the edge of the pitch with a swagger.
“Show’s over,” he called out to the gawking team. “Reset the line. We go again.”
The players shuffled back into position, eyeing him warily. Let them stare.
He ignored them, dragging a hand over the back of his neck, feeling the grit of dust and sweat. He should walk away. Go down to the landing pad and start working on the redhead. That was the smart play. That was the escape route.
Yeah, if you want to go in there half-cocked and draanth it all up, yeah… sure. Knock yourself out.
Ignoring the thought, he turned back to the field.
“Bravnak, if you drop that pass again, you’re running with Sorrath,” he yelled.
Twenty minutes later, every drill he had them run disintegrated into stupid mistakes and bitching about the heat.
“Okay, ladies, we’re done. Pack it up and let’s get out of the sun,” he yelled, shaking his head when they didn’t immediately break for the road back up to the Garrison on the cliff above them.
He shook his head and let them go. He wasn’t their keeper. If they wanted to stand around in the baking sun talking trall, that was their business.
Collecting the practice spheres was grunt work. Rookie shit. The kind of thing he used to pay people to do so he could save his energy for the cameras. But here he was, bending over in the dust and cleaning up after amateurs who wouldn’t know a defensive formation if it bit them on the ass.
Professional athlete to babysitter… hell of a career trajectory.
He lobbed a sphere into the nearby crate and was reaching for the next when something in the chatter behind him snagged his attention.
“You’re full of it, Bravnak,” Daavyn rumbled.
“I’m telling you, I heard them,” Bravnak insisted. “The boss was furious. Veins popping, the whole show. But Prince Isan didn’t back down. He told the Commander that we needed to be in the Summer League.”
Raaze froze.
Summer League. There was only one Summer League. It was the celebrity warball competition broadcast across the entire Empire every midsummer. Every major clan, every celebrity team, every scout looking for the next big contract would be in it.
“Summer League?” Sorrath scoffed. “They’d never let us play. We’re monsters, remember? The Empire would have a stroke if they saw an Izaean on a pitch. They pretty much piss themselves every time they’re forced to rub shoulders with us on the battlefield.”
“That’s what Raalt said,” Bravnak shot back. “Said it was too risky. Said if the Empire sees us, like really sees us, then we’re in a shitload of trouble. They’ll do for us like they did for the Vorrtan.”
Straightening, Raaze walked toward the group. He kept the sphere in one hand, passing it from hand to hand with a casual looseness.
“You’re hearing things, Bravnak,” he said, hurling the sphere at the crate in the middle of the chattering group. It hit dead centre with a sharp ‘crack’. “I reckon the heat’s cooked your brain. What’s left of it, anyway.”
Bravnak bristled. Predictable as a sunrise. “I heard it clearly. I was patching the comms unit. Raalt said we’re a liability. But Prince Isan… he said we shouldn’t be prisoners for a mutation we were born with. He said it’s time we took our place in the Empire and made them respect us.”
Raaze crossed his arms. “The prince said that?”
“Word for word. Said we could field a team. Show them we’re not just animals.”
Well. Trall.
He’d written Isan off as a pampered royal.
Raalt’s silver-haired son who’d probably never had to fight for anything harder than a better table at a restaurant.
A pretty face for the garrison’s PR. But standing up to Raalt…
who no one would argue was the scariest mother-draanther on the planet…
Arguing for respect for a group of exiles the Empire had already flushed down the drain? He hadn’t expected that.
Oh… so pretty boy does have a spine. Well, trall. That’s annoying.
It was so much easier to despise the whole system if everyone in charge was an asshole.
“So when’s the tryout?” Daavyn asked, looking at his claws. “If the Prince is setting it up…”
“He’s not.” Bravnak deflated. “He left. Middle of the night, last night. Took his ship and vanished. Raalt was shouting about that, too.”
“He left?” Raaze kept his voice flat, but his fingers dug into his own bicep until the muscle ached.
“Yeah.” Bravnak nodded. “Gone. Probably halfway to Lathar Prime by now.”
Gone.
Plan A. That had been Plan A. Since his second day here, he’d been tracking the docking schedules. Planning exactly how he was going to charm, barter, or stow away on the Prince’s personal transport. The only ship with diplomatic clearance. The only clean way off this rock.
And he’d slept through it.