CHAPTER ONE

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MAEVE

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The transport drops through the canyon, and I count my breaths the way I used to count them in combat zones. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. The orange light of Vahiri's twin suns bleeds through the scratched window beside me, painting everything in shades of rust and old blood. Fitting, considering I'm descending into the territory of House Draven to bargain for my brother's life with the only currency I have left.

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Myself.

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The thin air of this planet has scraped at my lungs since I landed three days ago. My oxygen supplements sit in my cargo pocket, but I won't take them in front of the two Draveki guards flanking me in the transport. Showing weakness here is a language I refuse to speak.

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Below us, The Hollows clings to the rugged canyon walls. Vertical architecture carved into red rock, buildings stacked and jutting from the cliff face in defiance of gravity. Neon signs flicker in a hundred alien languages, advertisements for pleasures and poisons I don't want to understand. A holographic display mounted on a building ledge cycles through faces and numbers. Debt notices. Names I don't recognize, sums that would take lifetimes to repay, the word ‘collected’ stamped across faces gone blank. I look away before I see what collected means. The deeper we descend, the darker it gets, the twin suns' perpetual amber twilight barely reaching the canyon floor.

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Tomás is down there somewhere. My idiot brother, who dreamed his way into one hundred thousand credits of debt to the most dangerous crime family on Vahiri Prime. Who ran when running only made it worse. Who is now property, held in a compound I'm entering with no real guarantee I'll ever leave.

I touch the strap of my med kit where it crosses my chest. The weight of it grounds me, every pouch and pocket accounted for, every supply earned through years of blood and barter across three star systems. This kit has kept soldiers alive in the mud of colony battlefields. It has sewn organs back into screaming bodies while plasma fire scorched the air overhead. It is the most valuable thing I own, and the reason I might walk out of this compound with my brother instead of becoming another cautionary tale whispered in the human slums.

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A medic with combat experience. Xenobiology training. Field surgery skills that most Vahiri doctors can't match because they've never had to operate on six different species in a single firefight. That's what I'm offering House Draven. The math is simple: I'm worth more than Tomás. A trained medic is an asset. A gambling addict who can't cover his debts is a liability they'll work to death in the mines or sell to whoever wants him.

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I'm betting my life that they'll see the logic.

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The transport shudders as it settles onto a landing platform, and the guards stand without a word. I follow them out into air that tastes of mineral dust and ozone, sharp against my throat. The Draven compound rises before me, carved into the canyon wall itself, all harsh angles and reinforced doors. No ornamentation. No softness. Everything here exists to serve a function, and the function is violence contained, waiting to be directed.

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The platform overlooks a sheer drop into the canyon's depths. If I stepped off the edge, I would fall for thirty seconds before hitting anything solid. I file the information away with everything else: another exit that isn't an exit, another door that opens one way.

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Armed Draveki stand at every checkpoint we pass. Charcoal skin, silver eyes that catch the dim light and throw it back at me. They’re taller than humans, broader, built for speed and power both. Apex predators with horns, fangs and natural armor plating who wear the thin disguise of civilization. I keep my spine straight and my gaze forward, because that’s what you do when you’re surrounded by things that could kill you without effort. Don’t run, don’t flinch, walk as though you belong and pray they buy the performance.

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The first checkpoint strips me of my weapons. A small plasma pistol. Two knives. I hand them over without protest because I'm not stupid enough to think they would save me in here, and I'm not stupid enough to come unarmed either.

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Then they reach for my med kit. I grip the strap tighter before I can stop the reflex. One guard notices, his mouth curving into a smile that shows the tips of his fangs. The expression holds the lazy satisfaction of a predator watching prey. The small human female clutching her bag of supplies, surrounded by monsters who could tear her apart.

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"It's a med kit," I say, keeping my tone flat. "I'm a combat medic. Former Terran Coalition."

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The guard who smiled takes the kit with a grip no human could break. He opens it on a nearby table, examines each pouch, each vial, each sterile-wrapped instrument. His clawed fingers move through supplies I've bled to acquire, and anger flares hot in my chest before I smother it. Anger is a luxury I cannot afford.

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When he finishes, he hands it back. The tension in my shoulders eases as the familiar weight settles against my hip again. They recognize value when they see it. That's a good sign. That's a sign the math might work.

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They escort me deeper into the compound, through corridors carved from the living rock, past doors that lead to places I don't want to imagine. The air is cooler here, the sparse Vahiri atmosphere more tolerable in the depths. I note guard rotations, sight lines, the way sound echoes off the stone. Force of habit. The survival instincts that kept me alive through two years of the colony wars don't care that there's no real escape from this place.

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We stop at a receiving room. Sparse. Clean. Furniture designed for bodies larger than mine. The guards leave me there with a single instruction: wait.

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So I wait.

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I don’t sit. Sitting would be surrender, and I’ve surrendered enough to get here. Transit debt to reach Vahiri. Favors called in to find out where Tomás was being held. Three days negotiating with lower-level Draven functionaries, trying to get this meeting, trying to reach someone with the authority to make a deal. A window looks out over the canyon depths. Neon lights glitter in the darkness below, a mockery of stars, and the sight pulls at old memories. My mother, pointing at the real ones, telling Tomás and me that somewhere out there things were better.

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She was wrong, of course. The colony wars taught me that. There is no out there where things are better. There's only here, wherever here is, and the choice is between fighting and dying.

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I was sixteen when I learned that lesson. Sixteen and holding my mother's hand in a charity clinic on Thessaly Station, watching her drown in her own lungs because the medication that could have saved her cost more than we would earn in ten years. A respiratory infection. Treatable. Curable. And she died anyway, not because medicine didn't exist, but because we couldn't afford it.

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I swore then that I would never let money be the reason someone I loved stopped breathing. The military trained medics for free, so I joined. The colony wars gave me skills no one else had, so I served. And now I’m here, on Vahiri Prime, because my brother made choices that turned him into property, and no one else is left who can trade herself for him.

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Tomás never learned that lesson. He kept chasing the next hand, the next scheme, the next dream that would make good on all the ones that came before. And I kept cleaning up after him, because that's what I do, because I couldn't save our mother but if I try hard enough, I can save him.

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The martyr's arithmetic. I learned it from her, I think. She gave up treatment money so Tomás could have school fees. She worked double shifts until her lungs gave out, convinced that if she sacrificed enough, we would be safe. It changed nothing. She still died choking on her own fluids.

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I touch the scar on my left forearm, the ridged line where shrapnel tore through muscle and tendon during the Kepler IV offensive. The medic who stitched me up was dead an hour later. I carried her body to the evac shuttle because there was no one else to do it.

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Somewhere in this compound, Tomás is waiting. Terrified, no doubt. Regretting every choice that led him here. He'll look at me with those big brown eyes that have been getting him out of trouble since we were children, and he'll say he's sorry, and he'll mean it. He always means it. The problem is that sorry doesn't pay debts on Vahiri Prime, and sorry doesn't undo the collar of ownership that the Syndicate laws have wrapped around his throat.

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The door opens. A different guard enters, taller than the others, with a gaze that holds no expression at all. He gestures for me to follow, and I do, because there is no other option, because this current has pulled me toward whatever comes next since the moment Tomás's message reached me across three systems.

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We move through corridors that grow quieter, more isolated. The sounds of the compound fade behind us. I see training rooms where Draveki spar with a brutality that makes my combat training look gentle, their bodies blurring with speed. I see a hallway lined with doors without windows, and I do not let myself imagine what waits behind them.

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The guard stops at a door that looks identical to every other door we've passed. No marking. No sign of the power contained behind it. That's how it works with the truly dangerous. They don't need to advertise.

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"The Enforcer will see you now," the guard says.

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I’ve heard the stories. Everyone who comes to Vahiri hears them. House Draven’s heir, chief enforcer of the Syndicate’s debt collections. The one they send when an example needs to be made. If House Draven is coming for you, you’re already dead. Not a threat, not a warning. Fact, spoken by humans who learn to navigate the currents of this world, who understand that some waters you don’t survive.

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I'm about to walk into those waters and ask them to spare my brother.

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A tremor runs through me, pulse spiking, chest tight. Every instinct screams to turn and run, because I understand what it is to be hunted, and behind this door waits a danger worse than any battlefield.

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I've operated on soldiers while taking fire, held men together with my hands while their lives leaked between my fingers, walked into places where death was a certainty, and come out the other side because giving up wasn't an option.

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I can handle one meeting. One monster. One negotiation for my brother's worthless life. I touch my med kit one more time. Straighten my spine. I have survived worse than this.

The lie almost sounds convincing.

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Another guard opens the door, and I step through into the dim beyond, into the office of the creature who holds my brother's life and, now, my own.

 

Cutting through the darkness is the orange light from a single window. And in that light, silver eyes find mine. The word that surfaces in my mind isn’t monster.

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It’s predator.

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And I’ve walked into his den with open eyes.

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COMING SOON