Chapter 5
The closet had become a special kind of torture after the first hour.
After what felt like a full day, Mercy's body screamed in protest with every breath. Her legs had gone from numb to burning to a deep ache that radiated up into her hips.
The shelving units dug grooves into her back that would probably leave permanent marks.
Her wrists throbbed where the cargo straps had cut into them earlier, and her face felt swollen and hot.
She couldn't touch it to assess the damage, but based on the way her left eye was starting to swell shut, she looked like hell.
But worse than any of that was the hunger. Her stomach had given up growling hours ago, settling into a hollow ache that made her lightheaded.
When was the last time she'd eaten? Before the pirates. Before everything went to hell. The bread. Zane's bread, still warm from the oven, with butter melting into the crust. That felt like a lifetime ago.
She leaned against Zane because there was nowhere else to go.
His arms had come around her at some point, holding her steady when her legs threatened to give out.
The position should have been awkward, intimate in a way that crossed every professional boundary she had.
But exhaustion had stripped away her ability to care about propriety.
His heartbeat was steady under her ear. Calm. How could he be calm?
"My fucking useless dad is going to get us killed." The words came out raw, scraped from a throat dry with thirst.
His voice rumbled through his chest, and she felt it as much as heard it. "We're not going to die."
Mercy lifted her head enough to look at him. His face was all sharp angles and shadows, nothing like the soft lord who'd complained about wine quality. Even in the dimness, she could see the certainty in his expression. Like death was simply not an option he was willing to consider.
"We're doing a great job of surviving right now." The sarcasm cost her. Her split lip cracked open again, and she tasted fresh blood.
"We've seen four pirates and the captain. There's almost certainly at least one more on their ship." He shifted slightly, adjusting his grip on her when she swayed. "We can take them."
Was he serious? She searched his face for signs of delusion brought on by oxygen deprivation, but his eyes were clear. Focused. Nothing like the bumbling lord who'd whined about bathroom breaks.
"I have a blaster hidden on the bridge." She'd stashed it behind a false panel near the pilot's seat three years ago after a close call with raiders.
"But they'll kill me before I make it three steps.
" The image flashed through her mind. Her hand reaching for the weapon.
The pirates faster, always faster. Blaster fire tearing through her before she could touch the grip.
"Fuck!" The word exploded out of her. "I should have fought them when they showed up. I'm sorry, this is so bad."
This was her fault. Her ship. Her responsibility. She'd let them board, thinking she could talk her way out of it. Thinking they'd see she had nothing and leave. Stupid. So stupid.
"We don't need your blaster." His hand came up to cup the back of her head, gentle despite their situation. His palm was warm, almost hot, against her skull. "I can handle them, but I need you to be safe."
The touch should have been comforting. Instead, it sent a spike of anger through her exhaustion. Safe? She'd been taking care of herself since she was sixteen. She didn't need protecting.
"I can handle myself." She tried to pull back, but there was nowhere to go. "And you're my passenger. I'm responsible for your safety."
Not the other way around. She was the captain. He was cargo, valuable cargo who'd paid half up front, but cargo nonetheless. It was her job to get him to his destination intact.
"I can handle myself, too."
Something in his tone made her look at him again. Really look. Past the expensive clothes and once-perfect, now mussed and a little greasy hair. Past the act he'd been selling since the pirates grabbed them. There was something there, lurking beneath the surface.
Something dangerous.
They lapsed into silence. Her mind turned over his words, trying to make sense of them. What kind of lord could "handle" armed pirates? What was she missing?
Time crawled by. Minutes or hours, she couldn't tell anymore. The emergency lighting never changed, the walls never moved, and their bodies remained pressed together in forced intimacy. Her thoughts grew sluggish, focusing down to basic needs. Water. Food. Freedom.
The way Zane's thumb was tracing small circles on her shoulder, probably unconsciously. The heat of him seeping into her bones.
Then she heard it.
Running feet in the corridor outside. Shouts, muffled by the door but urgent. Angry.
The proximity alarm shrieked to life, cutting through the ship like a blade. The sound was different from inside the closet, muted but still sharp enough to make her flinch.
"What the hell?" She pressed her ear against the door, trying to make out words through the metal.
The pirates who'd attacked her sounded like they were about to be attacked themselves. The irony wasn't lost on her. Part of her, the petty part that was tired and hurt and angry, found it hilarious. Served them right.
Chaos erupted outside. More running. Something heavy crashed into a bulkhead. It cut off abruptly.
Zane moved. In the confined space, it took effort, but he managed to turn himself around so he faced the door. His body formed a barrier between her and whatever was happening outside. The gesture was so unconsciously protective that something twisted in her chest.
"What are you doing?" she whispered.
He didn't answer. His shoulders had gone rigid, every muscle tense. Ready. And the closet was getting hot. Or maybe she was imagining it.
Then she smelled it. Burning. Acrid smoke that made her nose wrinkle. But how? They were in space. Fire needed oxygen, and shipboard fire suppression systems were brutal in their efficiency. Any flame should have been smothered in seconds.
Had they been boarded? Was someone using incendiaries? Her mind raced through possibilities, each worse than the last.
The door yanked open, and she squinted against the sudden brightness. The corridor beyond was empty. No pirates. No boarders. Just wisps of smoke curling along the ceiling and a dark scorch mark on the wall that definitely hadn't been there before.
She and Zane stumbled out, her legs barely holding her weight. Pins and needles shot up from her feet with each step. She had to grab the wall to keep from falling, her hand landing in something wet and warm that she really didn't want to examine too closely.
"I think we have our moment." Zane steadied her with a hand on her elbow, already moving toward the bridge.
"What did you do?" The question came out sharper than she intended. The smoke, the screaming, his calm certainty. It all added up to something that made no sense.
"I got us out." He didn't look at her, his attention focused on the corridor ahead. "We need to run."
No argument there. Whatever was happening, they needed to get control of her ship. She forced her protesting muscles to move faster, following him through corridors she knew by heart.
The bridge was empty, and there weren't any bodies.
Just her violated space with its torn panels and shattered displays.
And that broken mug, still in three pieces, mocking her from the floor.
She dove for the pilot's seat, hands flying over the controls.
Most of the systems responded, sluggish but functional.
The dock release wouldn't budge.
She tried again. Override codes. Manual disconnect. Every trick she knew.
"They've locked us down." Her fingers cramped as she input another sequence. "We'd need to be on their ship to disengage."
"I will pay for any repairs." He leaned over her shoulder, close enough that she felt his breath on her neck. "Just pull us away."
"You can't pay for repairs if we're dead." She pulled up the structural display, showing him what he was asking. "We'll lose life support and the engines."
The docking mechanism had integrated itself into her hull like a parasite. Ripping free would tear away half her ship's belly, including the primary systems that kept them alive. They'd have minutes at most before the cold of space claimed them.
"Damn it!"
"Exactly." She pushed out of the seat, mind already moving to plan B. "We can try a manual release. If we can access the coupling directly, maybe—"
They ran for the maintenance access, her body protesting every step. The hatch was already open, tool marks scoring the metal where someone had forced it. She dropped to her knees beside it, peering into the mechanical guts of the connection.
"Definitely black market." She traced the modifications with growing disgust. The coupling had barbed teeth, designed to sink into hull plating and hold on. "This is nasty work. Professional parasite tech."
The mechanism had burrowed into her ship like a tick, barbed connectors making removal impossible without massive damage. Whoever had designed this wanted their prey helpless.
Fighting sounds echoed through the halls, getting closer. Whatever was happening on the pirate ship was spilling over into hers. The hull breach alarm joined the cacophony, its rhythmic shriek making her stomach drop.
"No. No, no, no." She pulled up her wrist display, confirming what the alarm already told her. Pressure dropping in section C. Structural integrity compromised.
This was her ship. Her home. Her freedom.
Five years of her life poured into keeping it running, and it was being torn apart by other people's greed.
Five years of choosing which meals to skip so she could afford a new regulator.
Five years of sleeping in the pilot's seat because the bunk heater was broken and she couldn't afford to fix it.
Five years of her life, bleeding out into the void.
Movement caught her eye. A figure in a dark green space suit rounded the corner, military-grade gear that looked wrong on a pirate. The plasma cannon in their hands was definitely military. Stolen or black market, designed to punch through hull plating like tissue paper.
The barrel swung toward them. Mercy's brain went very quiet, the way it sometimes did when things got truly bad. No time for fear. No time for regrets. Just the simple observation that this was how she died.
She knew this was the end. No dodging plasma. No clever tricks or last-minute escapes. Just superheated death in a narrow corridor.
The ship rocked violently, something massive impacting the hull. The force flung her sideways, away from Zane. Her shoulder cracked against the bulkhead hard enough to make her vision white out for a second.
The pirate fired. She saw the plasma bloom from the barrel, beautiful and terrible. Her hands came up instinctively, a useless gesture against that kind of death.
Something inside her pulled. Not a physical sensation, not exactly, but something deeper. Like reaching for a door handle in the dark, knowing exactly where it should be. Heat bloomed in front of her, but not the searing agony of plasma.
A wall of fire erupted between her and death.
Orange and gold flames that danced and writhed but didn't burn her.
They moved like they were alive, like they were listening to something she wasn't saying out loud.
The plasma blast hit the barrier and dissipated, its energy absorbed into something greater.
What the fuck?
Then Zane moved. Fire, real fire, erupted from his hands in a torrent that made her little shield look like a candle flame.
It roared down the corridor, white-hot at the center, with edges that flickered between orange and blue.
The inferno engulfed the pirate, and the scream that followed was mercifully brief.
The smell of charred meat and melted plastic filled the corridor.
Silence fell, broken only by the wail of alarms.
Zane stared at her, chest heaving, eyes wide with something that might have been shock. Or fear.
"You control fire?" Her voice came out strangled. Her hands were still raised, and she could see small flames dancing along her fingertips, gold and harmless. But she blinked and then they were gone. How was he doing that? "Since when?"
He took a moment to compose himself, still staring at her like she'd grown a second head. When he spoke, his voice was careful. Controlled. "I'm a dragon."
The words hung between them, simple and impossible. Her brain tried to process this information and came up error. Dragons were myths. Stories. Not real people who complained about wine and made bread in her galley.
"That might have been useful when the fucking pirates started destroying my ship!"
The hull breach alarm shifted from warning to critical. The synthetic voice that followed was calm in the way of machines delivering death sentences. "Structural failure imminent. Abandon ship."
Her anger evaporated, replaced by the cold clarity of survival. Sixty seconds. Not enough time to reach the escape pods. Not enough time to seal the breach. Not enough time for anything but one desperate option.
She and Zane looked at the dock connecting her dying ship to Horris's vessel. The parasite that had killed her ship might be their only salvation.
"Run." The word came out together, from both of them.
They ran. Through the hatch, across the docking tube that groaned under the pressure differential. Her ship's death screams followed them, metal shrieking as it twisted and tore.
Behind them, the Alto gave one final, shuddering groan, and Mercy felt it in her bones. Five years. Gone.
They burst onto the pirate vessel and straight into Horris's waiting arms.