Everyone seemed to have questions for us when we returned to Sarrask’s cottage that evening. I answered the onslaught as best I could, but it quickly got to the point where my nerves couldn’t take it anymore. Ronad still couldn’t wrap his head around it, and I didn’t want to hear him say how strong I was being one more time. The truth was, I didn’t feel very strong at all. Although I was trying my best to put on a brave face, it was getting harder by the hour, especially now that everything was set in motion. There was a date and a venue, and it was starting to feel very real.

A storm was brewing, and the clouds were settling on our shoulders. Navan wasn’t dealing with it particularly well either, but neither of us could bring ourselves to discuss it with each other. It was awful—he was the one person I wanted to talk to, to release all of my fears and doubts, but he was the one person I had to keep it from. He already felt badly enough, and I didn’t want to add to it.

I desperately wanted to speak to my friends, knowing they’d be able to talk me down off my mental ledge, but Ronad had been trying all afternoon, and the long-range comms were still down. All I wanted to do was hear Angie’s voice telling me to woman the hell up, and Lauren coming in with the voice of reason, giving me every single explanation as to why all of this was going to be okay. Without my girls, I felt completely alone.

Giving in, I sought refuge in Kaido’s newly set up lab, which had once been Sarrask’s spare room. The bed had been turned on its side, freeing up more space, and every single surface had a tank on it, with a plant inside. I sat quietly in the corner, sinking into a deep, squishy armchair, while Kaido busied himself making sure his plants were okay. We didn’t speak much, which suited me just fine. More to the point, he didn’t ask about the wedding. It wasn’t something that interested him; he was just happy to be around his plants, and so was I. There was something oddly peaceful about the steady glow of them.

My gaze drifted toward the hypnotic pulse of a bulbous shrub, the light drawing me into a strange trance. It was the last thing I remembered seeing before sleep took me. After all, it had been a really long day.

I awoke, disoriented. The room was dim, but I didn’t know if that meant it was still evening or not. Kaido had put blackout blinds across the windows, to nurture his plants, so there was no way of knowing what time of day it was.

As I sat up, I realized someone had tucked a blanket around me and put a pillow under my head. Kaido was nowhere to be seen, but there was a cot set up on the floor at the far side of the room, and the sheets were neatly made.

Rubbing my eyes, I headed down the staircase to the kitchen. As soon as I saw the sunlight streaming in through the windows, I knew it was morning. I’d slept for hours, but I didn’t feel any better because of it. My dreams had been haunted with visions of a girl in a dress standing beside an altar, with Navan standing in front of her. It felt like it might be me, until the last moment, when the veil was lifted, and another woman stood in my place. Sometimes that woman was Seraphina. Sometimes it was Gianne; sometimes it was Brisha. Once, it had even been Orion, but that nightmare was best left forgotten.

“Kaido, you didn’t experiment on me in my sleep, did you?” I asked, blinking into the fierce light. He was flitting around the kitchen, decanting a five-liter canister of lurid yellow liquid into smaller bottles.

“I would never experiment without consent, Riley,” he replied, surprised.

I smiled. “No, of course you wouldn’t.”

“Is everything okay?” Navan asked, appearing in the doorframe of the living room.

I walked up to him and put my arms around his waist, snuggling into him. “I’m just a bit worn out,” I admitted. “Why didn’t you come and wake me?”

“Kaido said you were in the middle of a deep slumber, and that if I woke you, I risked doing permanent damage to your frontal cortex,” he said with a chuckle. “I figured it was best to let you sleep, after… everything.”

“Don’t let me sleep alone tonight,” I murmured, hugging him tighter. “I don’t want to spend another night without you.”

“I promise. Even if waking you will set your whole brain on fire, and you’re tucked up in that janky old armchair of Sarrask’s, I will snuggle in right next to you.” He lifted my chin and kissed me tenderly, his smile moving against my mouth, coaxing a mirrored smile out of me, too.

Kaido tapped Navan on the shoulder. “You really shouldn’t do that in the kitchen. It isn’t hygienic.”

A laugh bubbled up inside me as I clung to Navan’s waist, breaking the kiss and staring up into his eyes. “Thanks, Kaido, we’ll bear that in mind,” I said, still giggling. It was nice to see a smile on Navan’s face, too, as he turned to his brother.

“If you’re not careful, I’ll come upstairs and smooch every single one of your beloved plants,” he teased.

Kaido stared at him in shock. “You wouldn’t.”

“If you don’t let me kiss my girlfriend in peace, I absolutely will.”

Kaido gathered up his vials of lurid yellow liquid and hurried upstairs, casting a horrified look over his shoulder. As soon as he disappeared, Navan burst out laughing. I knew what he’d said had come from a playful place, unlike Sarrask’s perpetual disdain for his differently wired brother.

“I love you,” I murmured.

He grinned. “I love you more.”

After today, there would be three more days until the wedding, but I was determined not to let it get to me. I wouldn’t allow jealousy to drive a wedge between us, and I wouldn’t let him fall into a pit of guilt and despair. We were doing a good deed, for all the right reasons; that was all we had to remember.

“So, where is this darkstar market you were talking about?” I asked, nuzzling into his chest. “Now that we have the code to get in, do you want to go today and pick up something for the Titans? What did you have in mind?”

He laughed. “The darkstar market isn’t a place. It’s an online location in the darkstar network. It’s all digital,” he explained. “People post items from all over the universe, and anonymous bidders vie for what they want.”

“So kind of like Earth’s dark web?”

“Yeah, something like that,” Navan replied, “but bidders can talk to each other, too, through a chat system. You don’t see the person’s face, but you can hear what they’ve got to say. Usually, you don’t want to hear a word that comes out of their mouths.”

I frowned. “Do you go on there a lot?”

“I’ve only looked at it once, when Bashrik was searching for something a few years back.” His cheeks reddened.

“Not Rosita at The Legless Merman?” I gasped.

“Not quite, but I think it might have been something similar.” He grinned sheepishly.

I grimaced. “I guess teenage boys are the same wherever you are in the universe.”

“Bashrik’s shady endeavors aside, I thought we could browse what’s for sale and see if we can find anything to entice the Titans into alliance negotiations,” he said grimly. “If anywhere has something they’ll like, it’s the darkstar market.”

“Sounds… intriguing,” I said, as we sat down at the kitchen table.

The black box device that Ronad had been using to try and contact the others was sitting in the center, where he’d left it. Navan reached for it and flipped up the screen, before delving into the darkstar network. He clicked through file after file. A dialogue box popped up, and Navan typed in the access code Mort had given us.

I peered over his shoulder as the monitor settled on what looked like an ordinary online auction. I couldn’t read the descriptions, but I could see the pictures, although most of the objects were unsurprisingly alien to me.

Each time Navan hovered over an item, the speakers crackled, and a barrage of abuse echoed back at us. We weren’t even involved in the auction, but we could hear the bidders hurling trash talk at one another, a mixture of unusual voices clamoring for attention as they tried to win the item through sheer intimidation.

As Navan hovered across a golden object, which looked like some sort of elaborate candelabra, voices boomed out of the speakers.

“Yeah, yeah, we all know what you’re going to do with a twelve-foot-long, two-foot-wide ceremonial staff, Zeddar22!” one voice barked, cackling.

“Says you, Tinbo441. I want to smelt it down, so what in the name of Arras are you bidding on it for?”

The first voice scoffed. “Sounds like you can shove it up your Arras, Zeddar22!”

“Hey, let’s not bring religion into this!”

“How about all you junkyard waggleflappers focus on the auction, instead of mouthing off like stupid-ass geggers!” a third voice chimed in. “If you don’t have the dough, get out of the bakery, dudes!”

I looked at Navan as he moved away from the object. “What’s a waggleflapper?” I asked, smirking.

A startled gasp made me whirl around, and I found Kaido standing on the staircase. He’d evidently come down to pick up the last of his vials and the rest of his canister. The look of horror on his face was so comical I almost lost it.

“Riley, never speak that word aloud again!” he cried. “Navan, you should not permit a lady to hear such terrible things. What if she got confused and decided to repeat a word like that to someone like the queen, thinking it was some sort of compliment?”

“Sorry, Kaido. You weren’t supposed to hear that.” Navan chuckled.

“Yes, well, I did, and now I shall have to struggle to forget it!” Tutting loudly, he picked up the last of his things and returned upstairs, leaving us to the perils of the darkstar market and its vulgar language.

“So, what does waggleflapper mean?”

Navan grinned. “You don’t want to know. Just don’t repeat it to anyone you like.”

“Noted!”

“Ooh, this looks promising,” he said, pausing on an object that looked like an enormous Gatling gun.

“What is it?”

He peered closer. “It seems to be a cellular ray. It makes things bigger and smaller.”

I raised a doubtful eyebrow. “Do we really want to make the Titans any bigger than they already are?”

“Good point,” he agreed. “How about this?” He pointed to a panel that contained several pieces of armor, painted in bold colors and made from a leathery material. It didn’t seem too offensive, but I was starting to understand that most things on the darkstar market had slightly unusual origins.

“Is it some kind of special armor?”

“Yup. Looks like it’s made from the patchworked skin of a thousand enemies. Each color is a different species. It was stolen from the exhumed corpse of Arko the Twelfth, otherwise known as the Conqueror of Worlds.”

I made a face. “Not hard to guess what he was famous for. Would they like that kind of thing?”

“I think they’d love this kind of thing. They have a museum of war trophies, and I’m sure they’d be eager to add this to their collection.”

“Is it expensive?”

He nodded. “It’s pretty pricey, but we’ve got all that money on the pay device you and Ronad found. There’s more than enough on there.”

A particular auction panel caught my attention. It contained a chained-up mermaid on a video clip running on a loop, showing her thrashing around in a tiny tank, trying to get out. There was another image next to it of three cuffed creatures—they were small and fluffy looking, with cream-colored fur and cute black eyes peering out.

“They sell people on here?” I gasped.

“You can get anything on the darkstar market.” Navan grimaced. “Slaves, organs, weapons, pets, drugs… There’s a seller for everything, no matter how dark and debauched it might be.”

“What are they?” I asked, pointing to the furry creatures.

“They’re Sonorans—a peaceful race of forest-dwellers with a knack for sending people off to sleep,” he explained. “They’re the most trafficked species in the universe because their blood makes people feel relaxed and goofy. It’s used as a drug all over the place. The Feds have tried to protect them, but the traffickers always find a way around it. They’ve set up lunar farms to breed Sonorans in secret, and all sorts of crazy stuff like that.”

“And that’s really a mermaid?”

He nodded. “She must come from one of the water planets.”

“Do you think this is where Orion is getting his weapons from?” I wondered, looking at a row of nasty-looking guns and swords.

“Most likely. He’ll probably have a pickup location somewhere in your galaxy, where he’s arranged to collect his weapons. He won’t want any of the sellers discovering Earth, so he probably has another planet as his black-market depot.”

A prickle of anger rose in my chest. People bought and sold such awful things and thought nothing of it. If this was what joining the rest of the universe meant, I wasn’t sure I ever wanted Earth to catch up. Humans were bad enough to one another within the confines of a single planet—they didn’t need a universal playground to do even worse things.

As Navan typed something into a dialogue box connected to the patchwork armor, a torrent of abuse flooded the speakers. The other bidders were not happy that someone was moving in on their turf, though it didn’t sound like they had the money to win. Navan kept silent, refusing to join in with the trash talk. A timer counted down on the right-hand side of the auction panel. Five minutes, and a whole load of new expletives later, a star popped up on the screen, announcing him as the winner of the auction.

“You undercutting scumnugget!” one voice bellowed.

“You gonna prance around in it, wearing nothing but the nethers you were born with?” another taunted.

“I bet this dude’s a Rexombra—uppity waggleflapper! I hope it gives you the same virus that ended old Arko!” a third chimed in. “I hope it eats away at your—”

An audio call cut through the noise. Navan pressed the answer button, and a voice echoed out into the kitchen, though there was no video stream to show us what the seller looked like.

“You MorticiaAddams01?” a gruff voice asked. I stifled a giggle at hearing Mort’s choice of username said so seriously.

“I am,” Navan replied, glancing at me and lifting a finger to his lips.

“Where d’you want the item dropped off? Planet and location?”

“I’m in Southern Vysanthe. If you could drop it off by the small boathouse on the far side of Trossach Pond, that would be great.”

The seller grunted. “Yer item’s gonna take some time. I’d say three days, and I can get it to ya.”

That clashed with the day of the wedding. Navan glanced at me, a worried look on his face. Evidently, he didn’t think he could get away from Gianne and the threat of her alchemy lab so soon after the wedding itself. She’d be watching him like a hawk.

“That’s no good. I need the item sooner than that,” Navan insisted.

“Three days, or I’ll sell it to someone with less backchat,” he said. “Next bidder down’ll get your suit o’ armor. I don’t care, so long as there’re credits in me pocket.”

Navan grimaced. “Fine, then change the location to the groundskeeper’s hut beside the Decorum Churchyard, in Vysanthe.”

“Right y’are, mate. Glad you could see sense,” the seller replied, sounding pleased with himself. “Yer goods’ll be with you in three days, or I get nothin’. That’s the darkstar guarantee.” He chuckled, and the audio abruptly ended.

Navan looked solemn again as he logged out of the darkstar market and pushed the black box back into the middle of the table.

“As if that day isn’t going to be stressful enough,” he muttered.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “If worst comes to worst, Ronad and I can go pick it up.”

He shook his head. “You never know what kind of sellers these guys will be. It’s too dangerous. He might try and run off with the pay device and take the armor with him. I don’t want to be worrying about you any more than I already am.”

I smiled, looping my arms around his neck. “Ronad and I will be fine. We’ll take whatever weapons Sarrask has, make the exchange, and be back in time for the throwing of the bouquet.”

“We don’t do that here,” he said, a small smile on his lips.

“Well then, you don’t know what you’re missing out on,” I joked. “Honestly, I can handle myself, and I’ll make sure to protect Ronad from any baddies that might come along.”

He laughed. “Fine… You can make the pickup, but only if I can’t safely get away to come with you,” he conceded. “Just promise me that, if you have to go without me, you’ll be careful? And don’t trust anything this guy does. Be alert and be aware.”

I mock saluted before leaning in for a kiss. “Yes, sir.”

He laughed. “I’m serious!”

“You don’t sound very serious.” I grinned, catching his mouth in mine, my pulse quickening. His hands slid around my waist, running the length of my spine with a delicious shiver. His kiss was hungry as he lifted me out of my chair and placed me in his lap, my legs wrapping around him. The house was empty, and I knew Kaido wouldn’t dare come back down.

Navan seemed to have the same idea. He picked me up, running his hands through my hair. I gripped his waist with my thighs. He was about to move toward the living room when his personal comm device started ringing. He paused and fished it out of his pocket, reading the name that had popped up on the screen. Immediately, his face fell.

“Who is it?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.

“Seraphina.” He sighed, putting me down on the ground and pressing the answer button. Her face popped up in a hologram. She looked happier than she had the previous day, her cheeks carrying a healthy glow. “What’s up?” he said, an edge of bitterness in his voice.

“I’m so sorry to call you up like this, but I’m having a bit of a nightmare,” she explained. “I was wondering if I could borrow Riley for a little bit, to help with the wedding planning? My parents are taking over everything, and if I let my mother have her way, this wedding is going to look like a carnival. I totally understand if you can’t, or you don’t want to, Riley, but I would be forever grateful!”

I didn’t dare look at Navan. “Yeah, sure. Of course I’ll come and help you,” I said quietly, wishing I could grab the words and shove them back into my mouth. I didn’t want anything to do with the wedding, let alone the planning of it, but how could I say no?

“Thank you, Riley! This means so much to me! I’ll send a ship to pick you up in an hour, if that’s good for you?”

I smiled sweetly. “Absolutely!”

“Thank you! See you soon!” She hung up, her image disappearing.

Feeling like I wanted to sit in a corner and cry, I stepped into Navan’s arms and felt them wrap around me. I pressed my ear to his chest and listened to his heart, telling myself that it only beat for me.