“We have a problem.”

Rayner looked up from the netscreen on his desk. So consumed in his work, he hadn’t even heard his office door open. But looking up, he found Gerrit, the Alpha’s son, breathing heavily as if he’d run all the way from the royal donjon to Rayner’s quarters.

Rayner frowned, thinking instantly of their Alpha and his poor health. “What’s wrong? Is it your father?”

“No.” Gerrit sucked in a deep breath. “Savas missed his trade appointment with the Hylas.”

The words chilled Rayner’s blood. No wonder Gerrit had been running. Rayner pushed back his chair and rose, catching a half-empty mug of bitter kava before it could topple from a stack of papers on his desk. “Who did he take as his second?”

A beat of silence from Gerrit, then, “Drausus.”

Rayner clenched his jaw to hold in the slew of curses that threatened to roll off his tongue. If Savas had taken Drausus, he’d definitely made a side trip to the human’s space station. The Deep Market had a craving for human slaves, especially women.

“If Drausus is with him, he’s up to no good. We need to hurry.” Rayner strode toward the back of his cramped office that also served as his living quarters and pulled aside the rough-spun Arakid silk to reveal a narrow servant corridor.

“Won’t the central atrium be faster?”

“I don’t want the people to see us hurry and worry it’s another Draqon attack. We’ll take the back way.”

The hardened clay corridors were meant for servants to travel through unseen. The walls were rough rock, the ceilings low, but Rayner knew them by heart. He’d raced through these passageways as a kid, chasing his friends and running after his mother. They were more of a home to him than his Beta-appointed quarters that overlooked the central atrium of the hollowed mountain the Vilkan shape-shifters called home.

The halls wound upward toward the various guard spires above landing pads shorn from the mountain’s peaks. A few late-night servants, eyes averted, ducked out of Rayner and Gerrit’s way as they strode passed. The air smelled more like the sharp blasts of electricity emitted from space storms and less like the deep, wet scent of the mountain’s bottom as they spiraled upward.

Gerrit kept close, his silence speaking louder than words. He knew what his half-uncle was capable of. There were some in the clan who favored Savas’s radical politics and his call for trades with—and of—humans. Alpha Kaveh’s soft approach to handling his illegitimate brother’s insolence had not helped matters.

Thinking of Kaveh, Rayner asked, “Where’s your father?”

Gerrit’s face remained stoic, though Rayner caught the tinge of pain in his young friend’s voice. “He couldn’t remember my name this morning.”

Rayner forced away the sick roil of his stomach at the thought of Kaveh’s mind slipping up to the moons. “It’ll be okay. We can handle this ourselves.”

“Is it possible Savas could garner enough support to insert himself as Alpha?” Gerrit spoke only loud enough for Rayner to hear.

“Savas may be your father’s half-brother, but he’s not true royal blood. The clan will never recognize him.”

At least, Rayner hoped so.

When they’d climbed to the eastern guard spire, Gerrit spoke again. “What makes you think he’s going to land his ship over here?”

Rayner chewed on the inside of his cheek. He didn’t know; it was just a guess. But he’d dealt with Savas since the very beginning of his term as Kaveh’s Beta, and he knew how sneaky the Vilka could be. “The eastern spires are known to be slack on inspection standards for incoming vessels. If he doesn’t already have a contact there, he’ll bully the on-duty guard into letting him land and unload without any hassle or paperwork.”

“What do you think he’s unloading?”

Gerrit was young and well shielded from the murmurs rising from the Deep Market about the ludicrous benefits of intergalactic human trafficking. Rumors had it that Savas was amassing a fortune in the illegal trade. A fortune he planned to use to overthrow their waning Alpha, especially since Gerrit could be considered too young by some when he took over as Alpha after his father closed his eyes for his final sleep. Not to mention Gerrit hadn’t taken a mate yet, and Vilkan law dictated an Alpha must be mated to command the Vilkan army. To sweeten the pot, Savas had spread rumors that human women made superior breeding stock. That the hybrid offspring they produced made stronger soldiers and would make the clan the leading force among Kladuu’s shifting clans. Never mind that Savas would sell his stock to the highest bidder, be it among the clan or to other clans.

“I can’t be sure what he’s unloading,” Rayner finally said, “but no matter what you see step off that ship, hold your calm. If Savas sees you waver, he’ll pounce. With your father lost to his moon madness for the night, we need to stand strong together. Otherwise, Savas might try to splinter the clan around us.”

“But you’re the Beta. He can’t take a stand against you.”

Gerrit’s black and white regard for the clan’s rules made Rayner smile. His lawfulness would serve him well as Alpha, but Gerrit had no idea of how eagerly people tossed aside the rules when it served them best. There wasn’t a day that went by where Rayner’s orders weren’t second-guessed, even by those who supposedly supported Kaveh’s rule. Maintaining discipline was a balancing act. He did not envy his royal friend’s destiny.

They reached the eastern spire. Up here, the mountain walls were thicker and the air thinner from the altitude. Half the peak was shaved off to form a landing pad for incoming ships. The other half was secured behind a heavy seal made of Hylan glass, a nearly unbreakable substance found along the deepest oceans’ floors. A collection of glow worms lived in the holes along the roof and gave off a powerful amount of light to see by.

A young guard stood sentry beside the seal, his gun draped across his chest, his finger resting along the trigger guard. He watched them approach but did not speak first.

“Any incoming crafts?” Rayner asked.

“No, sir!”

“Open the seal.”

“Yes, sir. Right away.”

The seal gave a popping hiss and opened a few inches, letting in the outside air—crisp and cool with the coming bite of fall.

“Take a break,” Rayner told the guard. “Come back in fifteen.”

“Sir?”

“You heard him,” Gerrit said, his lips lifting in a fearsome snarl.

At the spoken word of a royal, the guard scampered off.

The night’s stiff breeze swept moonlit ribbons of grit across the landing pad’s surface. Rayner and Gerrit pulled up their neck scarves, drawing them tight around their noses and mouths to ward against the biting grains. They squinted up at the stars and waited.

Beyond their hollowed and hallowed mountain stretched Kladuu. The planet was a small one, but what it lacked in size it compensated for in diversity. The alliances between all the different shifter clans were short-lived and fraught with tension, and the wars were often long and bloody. But right now, if Rayner closed his eyes, the breeze sounded like whistling music. Like home.

“Should we have brought guards with us?” Gerrit asked, interrupting Rayner’s ruminations. Gerrit’s boots crunched loose rocks beneath his heels as he shifted back and forth. Nervous, and for good reason. “Or perhaps Nestan. He is worth a dozen guards.”

“You would ask him to arrest his father?” Rayner asked. He liked Nestan, but the young Vilka was mercurial and dangerous like his father, Savas, even if he was Gerrit’s best friend.

“No, but …”

“We need Savas to be overconfident. If he fights us, we’ll have justification to lock him and his loyalists up. Plus, it will look good for the royal heir to have a bloody nose when we haul them in.”

Gerrit’s brows spiked. “What makes you think I’ll let anyone land a hit?”

“I know how much you’ve been training lately, but remember that ruling is half about wisdom and half about your ability to put on a good show. Let them land a hit. The blood will serve you well.”

Nostrils flared, Gerrit shot him a glance. “And if he kills us?”

“He won’t,” Rayner said, holding up the remote trigger to the city-wide alarm system also equipped with a tracking device. “This will save our asses.”

Lights blinked on the horizon, near the two moons orbiting Kladuu. Through the shifting auroras, the glint of a large cargo ship lumbered closer.

They remained silent as the ship lowered through the sky above them, sending waves of dirt and small stones through the air. They pinged off Rayner’s skin like a thousand tiny knife slashes, but he held still, his dark uniform hopefully lost to the shadows.

The larger cargo ship had a wider girth than the lighter, more aerodynamic fighter ships, but it landed expertly. The massive engines shut off with a whoosh of compressed air. The exterior hatch opened and spilled light onto the landing pad.

Drausus stepped out first, but he froze when his eyes landed on the shadow-clad forms of Rayner and Gerrit. Behind Drausus, Savas shouldered past onto the landing deck, already barking his orders. “Get them into the deepest cells. I don’t want anyone—”

The long-haired Vilka saw them then. In greeting, Gerrit’s sharp canines flashed white in the dim light. From their sparring, Rayner knew those teeth could snap faster than a Draqon skintrap on its prey.

Savas and Drausus exchanged glances. Assessing the fight ahead of them and if it was worth it, Rayner thought. He cut them off before they could make the wrong choice. “Best unload your wares now while there’s still moons enough to see just how many crimes you’ve committed.”

Savas’s eyes slunk toward Rayner like an inkeel on the hunt. “You won’t like it, especially considering the mommy’s boy you were.”

Rayner didn’t rise to the taunt. His mother’s slave status had been the butt of jokes far too often, and Rayner’s wounds from it had scarred over long ago. “Bring them out. Now.”

Savas nodded at Drausus, a quick jerk of his jutting, square chin. Under the moonlight, Rayner was startled to see just how much Savas looked like his half-brother, with his chiseled face and sharp, dark eyes. If it hadn’t been for his bastard status, the clan might have scrambled after him, following his howling call like pups to a teat. Their animal natures were easily lured by lusts of body and soul. Savas would have offered them pillaging and plundering and all the wealth accompanying it. Kaveh offered the hope of peace among the clans of Kladuu and protection from the humans of Earth, with the promise that they were more than animals; they were men.

Yet many from his clan found little value in unity and peace when war made them so much richer.

Drausus disappeared inside the ship, and a moment later young human women stumbled down the ramp and onto the unforgiving Kladian mountaintop. They blinked into the thin night air, their hair shifting in the breeze. Some could barely walk, and others emitted quiet, choked sobs.

Gerrit hissed out a vile curse word, but Rayner remained silent. The women were all young and beautiful, handpicked to sell as mating flesh to the highest bidder on the Deep Market. Their skin tones ranged from fine porcelain to dark as the shadows around them, their bodies from slender to luscious. These women would fetch astronomical prices, probably more than the mountain’s bi-annual taxes brought in. If Savas managed to steal the throne, he’d make the flesh trade legal once again.

Rayner would rather be dead than see slaves return to the city.

His first memory as a pup had been of a whip ringing in his ears and his mother’s quiet sobs as she clutched him close, shielding him with her back against the lashes. Times had changed since then thanks to Kaveh, and damned if Rayner was going to allow anything to happen to these women like what his mother had lived and died under.

“Line them up,” he ordered Savas’s men.

The women were in chains, linked together at their ankles and wrists. Rayner’s scan snagged on one woman, a striking red-haired beauty with a smudge of dark grease along her cheek and a thick coating of blood on her shoulder. She looked ready to collapse, yet somehow, she held up another smaller, younger girl with raven-black hair. The younger girl’s dark skin had an ashy undertone, and her eyes were hollow pools of shock. Despite her injury, the woman bore the weight of the girl with a grim, flat-mouthed expression.

She didn’t look away from him or flinch in the slightest; instead, she stared right at him as if demanding an apology or an explanation, neither of which he could give. But something about her made him wish he could.

He forced his eyes from her and leveled them on Savas. The older clan member looked ready to fight.

“I won’t be put in a cell for doing what needs to be done to bring this clan back to its dominant status,” Savas said.

Rayner widened his stance. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come without guards. Savas’s loyalists—numerous in number—lined up in a formidable row behind the women. “You went against direct orders from the Alpha—”

“No.” Savas’s fists clenched. “I went against your orders. You’re not the Alpha, no matter how much you play at it.”

“Escort the women inside,” Gerrit interrupted. “They shouldn’t be allowed to hear this.”

Next to Savas, Drausus backed into the ship’s shadows as if he could sneak away. Rayner growled, freezing the big Vilka in place. “How much have they already seen?” he asked Savas.

“Why don’t you just ask us what happened since we’re standing right here?” The injured woman’s voice rang clear and unafraid through the night air.

There was a moment of tense silence amongst the male shifters.

The wind shifted and blew straight toward the mountain, bringing a battery of scents to Rayner’s nose. But threaded delicately through the ship’s exhaust, sweaty shifters, and frightened women, he caught something sharper, like a fresh spice just ground on a stone. It caught in his nose and flared outward, sparking, igniting him, boiling his blood. His bones sang with the Avilku’s blessed smell. His eyes landed on the grease-covered woman with fiery hair.

She was the source of the divine smell.

Rayner asked, “What’s your name?”

“Vera.” She lifted her chin.

“Vera,” Rayner said, her name tingling on his tongue like a bite of sweet fruta, “what happened on the ship?”

Savas scoffed. “You don’t really expect to—”

Rayner snapped his teeth. Only once everyone was silent did he say, “Vera?”

“To start with,” she said loudly, lifting her chains to point at Drausus, “he’s a wolf. Or something like a wolf. Definitely not human, although he looks human right now. And judging by the lack of surprise on your faces, I’m guessing you’re all that way. What I don’t get is where you came from, since as far as I know, we’ve never met alien shifters before. Not that it matters, because you’re about to meet a lot of us. People—Commander Gideon—are probably already looking for us. They’ll find your wormhole nexus. And when they get here, they’re going to …”

The woman trailed off as she seemed to realize she’d said the wrong things. Her gaze flicked between Rayner and Savas, her arm tightening around the young girl’s back.

Rayner felt sick to his stomach. She knew about them. All the women did. They’d seen Drausus shift, for fuck’s sake. This wasn’t going to be as easy to fix as he’d hoped. Beside him, Gerrit’s shoulders slumped ever so slightly. The young heir understood what had to happen.

“We could threaten them,” Gerrit whispered, turning so only Rayner heard. “Send them back but scare them so they won’t talk about us.”

“Their military will come looking for us. You heard her mention Gideon. Our secret can’t be trusted with humans. What if they find the relics?”

“What would you have us do, Beta?” Savas taunted.

For now, Savas had won. At least, he wouldn’t be arrested tonight. He might have intended to bring slaves to Kladuu, but the women were now prisoners. Rayner needed to consult with his Alpha, which meant Savas’s crime would have to be dealt with later.

Rayner lifted his eyes back to the line of women, to Vera. The breeze shifted again and stole her spicy scent away from him.

Was a prisoner much better than a slave? What would his mother have thought if she’d been alive to see her son now? But Rayner had to protect Kladuu.

“Take them to the cells,” he commanded. “No one is to touch them until Kaveh gives his decree on the matter. That’s an order.”