Chapter 16
KALLUS
Pain wakes me.
Not the clean kind. Not the sharp, honorable pain of a blade bite or a broken bone earned in combat. This is thick and wet and wrong—like my body is full of shattered glass and fire both, like something vital has been cracked and is leaking.
I drag in a breath and taste blood.
My vision swims. The world comes back in fragments: stone ceiling fractured by smoke, alarms howling in jagged bursts, the copper reek of spilled life everywhere. The stronghold groans around me, wounded and furious, its bones shuddering under distant impacts.
I try to move.
Agony answers.
My left side screams when I shift—burned flesh, torn muscle.
One of my bone spurs is snapped clean near the shoulder, the exposed marrow buzzing with pain.
My armor is half-melted, fused to skin in places.
Someone—Brom, I think—has slapped a field seal over the worst of it, but I can feel how close it came. How close I came.
I force myself upright anyway.
“Ayla,” I rasp.
The word scrapes out of my throat like gravel.
The bond answers—not with warmth, not with presence, but with absence. A screaming void where she should be. Cold. Wrong. Empty.
Panic slams into me harder than any weapon.
“No,” I growl, pushing to my feet. My legs shake but hold. “No—where is she?”
Brom is there in an instant, one arm bloodied, one eye swollen shut. Smoke curls off his armor. He looks like he’s been dragged through hell and back and spat out for being too stubborn to die.
“Captain,” he says, voice hoarse. “She’s—”
“Don’t,” I snap. “Don’t soften it.”
He swallows. “Taken.”
The word detonates in my skull.
Taken.
My claws extend without permission, slicing furrows into the stone wall beside me. The stronghold shudders as if it feels my rage and answers in kind.
“IHC,” Brom continues grimly. “Elite unit. In and out. Hit fast, cloaked pods. They had her tagged—knew exactly who they were after.”
I turn on him, eyes burning. “Which way.”
Brom points toward the open sky beyond the shattered balcony. “Orbit. Cruiser-class. Already pulling away.”
Something primal tears loose inside me.
I move.
I don’t remember crossing the distance. One moment I’m in the ruined chamber, the next I’m at the edge of the landing platform, staring up into a sky torn open by smoke and fire.
The jungle below burns in pockets, Reapers still fighting scattered IHC squads on the ground—but my focus locks on the ship above us.
White.
Sleek.
Sanitized.
An IHC cruiser hangs in low orbit, already angling its nose away from Tyrannus, engines flaring blue-white as it accelerates.
She’s on that ship.
My mate.
A sound claws its way out of my chest.
“AYLA!”
I throw my head back and howl.
It isn’t just sound. It’s everything. Rage. Terror. Love. The bond ripped raw and screaming across the void. The Reaper mating call, torn from me with no restraint, no pride, no care for who hears.
The valley answers.
The mountains answer.
Even the air itself seems to vibrate with it.
I drop to one knee as the howl tears my throat bloody, but I don’t stop until my lungs are empty and my vision goes black at the edges.
When I rise again, there is only one thought in my head.
Get her back.
“Brom,” I snarl. “Prep my fighter.”
His good eye widens. “Captain—she’s a cruiser. You’re in no shape—”
“I said prep my fighter.”
The words leave no room for argument.
He hesitates half a heartbeat, then nods. “Aye.”
I stagger into the hangar, blood dripping down my side, every step a knife. The med techs shout after me, waving scanners and sealant packs. I ignore them all.
My starfighter waits at the far end—custom, scarred, patched together from a dozen victories and near-deaths. It’s not pretty. It’s not meant to be.
It’s meant to kill.
I haul myself into the cockpit, slamming the canopy down just as the hangar shields flare under incoming fire. The engines whine as they come online, protesting the rushed startup.
“Override safeties,” I bark.
The system chirps a warning. Hull integrity compromised. Weapons at sixty percent. Shields at forty.
I laugh.
“Good enough.”
The hangar doors peel open and I launch into open sky, punching straight up through smoke and debris, straight toward the IHC cruiser pulling away above me.
My hands shake on the controls—not from fear, but from the effort of keeping myself conscious. Blood slicks the console where it drips from my side. I wipe it away and push harder.
The cruiser looms larger.
I open a broad-band channel, no encryption, no diplomacy.
“This is Kallus of the Bloody Talon,” I roar into the comm. “You have taken what is mine.”
Static crackles. Then a calm, infuriatingly measured voice responds.
“Unidentified hostile, disengage immediately. This vessel is operating under lawful IHC authority.”
I bare my teeth.
“Return my mate,” I snarl, every word vibrating with promise, “or burn.”
Silence.
Then laughter. Faint. Distant.
“You are injured and outgunned,” the voice replies. “Stand down.”
Red floods my vision.
“I will die before I stand down.”
I slam the throttle forward and open fire.
Plasma streaks across the void, splashing uselessly against the cruiser’s shields. Return fire erupts instantly—precision bursts that rake my shields, hammering them down with terrifying efficiency.
Warnings scream in my ears.
Doesn’t matter.
I dodge, roll, fire again. I fly on instinct, on fury, on the bond screaming her name with every heartbeat. I imagine her there—bound, terrified, calling for me—and it fuels me like nothing ever has.
Another hit.
My shields collapse completely.
“Captain,” Brom’s voice crackles over a private channel, thick with static. “You need to pull back!”
“Not without her,” I growl.
The cruiser’s bays open.
For a split second, hope flares—I think they’re launching fighters.
Instead, the torpedoes come.
Grav-class.
My eyes widen.
“No—”
The first one detonates just off my port side. Space bends. My fighter lurches violently, alarms screaming as gravity spikes rip through the hull. I fight the controls, muscles screaming as G-forces slam me back into the seat.
The second torpedo hits dead-on.
The universe turns inside out.
My ship spins, end over end, stars smearing into impossible streaks of color. I taste blood and bile. Something in my shoulder gives with a wet crunch.
I scream her name again as the fighter tumbles helplessly, dragged by invisible forces toward the massive, roiling bulk of a nearby gas giant.
The cruiser doesn’t even slow.
It turns away, clean and precise, and jumps to superluminal in a flash of cold light.
Gone.
“Ayla,” I whisper, voice barely sound anymore.
The gas giant fills my view—churning clouds of ammonia and fire, gravity wells strong enough to crush steel like paper.
My fighter’s systems flicker, then fail one by one.
I wrench the controls, forcing the nose up, fighting the pull with everything I have left.
“I’m coming,” I snarl through clenched teeth, blood running down my chin. “I swear it. I’m coming.”
Nothing works.
Every warning light is screaming. Systems bleed red across the console. A soft, persistent klaxon pulses through the cockpit, more like a heartbeat than an alarm. Fitting. My own pulse is thready and uneven beneath the pain.
The atmosphere regulator sputters. My lungs fight for air that isn't there.
The controls have gone sluggish. Like the ship’s drunk, dying, or both. I can’t tell how fast I’m falling anymore—just that the gas giant is pulling me in, and it doesn’t care about my grief.
Or my blood.
There’s so much of it now.
I can barely feel my left side. Every breath scrapes through me like gravel. Something vital’s punctured. Maybe a lung. Maybe more. Doesn’t matter. I can’t fix it. Not here.
Not now.
I slump forward, forehead hitting the console. The metal’s cold against my skin. I close my eyes, just for a second. Just to remember her.
Ayla.
Her voice, sharp and defiant. That stubborn tilt of her chin. Her body tangled with mine, the sound she makes when she gasps my name. The way her fingers tremble when they touch my face—like I’m fragile and sacred all at once.
I see her mouth, parted on a breathless moan.
I feel her body, warm and wrapped around me like she belongs there.
I hear her scream my name in the bond when they took her.
I can’t breathe.
I can't think.
My claws scrape the armrest weakly. “You’re not gone,” I whisper. “You’re not.”
The sky outside the viewport glows gold and orange and violent. Swirls of gas churn, hungry and endless. I can’t see stars anymore.
Only fire.
Only death.
I try to sit up, but my limbs don’t respond. My body feels too heavy, like the gravity’s quadrupled. Like I’m already being crushed.
I won’t die here.
Not like this.
“Stars,” I rasp, voice broken and thick. “If you hear me—if any of you old bastards still listen—I don’t pray. But I swear. I swear on the bones of my ancestors, on the blood in my veins, on every oath I’ve ever broken and every soul I’ve sent screaming into the void—”
My hand trembles as I press it to my chest. The bond flickers. It’s faint, but it’s still there. Somewhere in the black between stars, she’s breathing.
“I’m coming for her.”
Pain blooms behind my eyes. My vision doubles. Triples.
Systems begin shutting down one by one.
First the weapons array. Then the nav suite. Then the stabilizers.
The cockpit dims as the auxiliary power fails.
My fingers twitch against the console. “Just a little longer,” I murmur. “Give me that, and I’ll give you everything.”
The ship doesn’t answer.
No AI. No comfort.
Just me and the dark.
A chill seeps into the cockpit, biting through my armor. The emergency life support kicks in with a feeble hum. A last gasp of survival.
Then a quiet chime.
Torpor field engaged.
No.
“No—wait—”
But my protest is sluggish, too slow. The system doesn’t care what I want.
It only cares that I’m dying.
Cool mist floods the cockpit, silver vapor curling around my legs, up my chest, into my throat. My limbs go heavy—no, weightless. Thought dulls. Memory fades around the edges.
My last breath catches.
I try to hold onto her face.
Her scent.
Her voice.
“Wait for me,” I whisper. “Please…”
Everything slows.
Then stills.
Then dies.
The last light winks out.