The pain was gone by dusk. In the minutes after that life destroying kiss, Raze had almost said something. No, he didn’t collapse this time. But every nerve was on fire and pulsed with the unbearable agony of wakefulness. It was like he’d woken up after a centuries-long sleep, only to find all his muscles atrophied and every movement full of pain as he tried to use a body unaccustomed to any movement.

Everything was brighter as the suns set; the weak rays of light streamed into the cave and illuminated the green moss. He’d known it was green, had seen plenty of it since they landed. He could have described the color exactly in his report. But he’d forgotten what that green really looked like since he’d lost his soul. But not today. Today the green glowed with a depth that reminded him of dense forests and fresh spring. He could imagine what soft grass felt like under his fingers and remembered an agility exercise that had taken him high into green leafed trees until sitting on the limbs had felt like flying.

By every god, he felt. And it hurt. Not physically. His body had rested and adjusted to whatever those touches and that kiss had done to it, but his soul ached, even as he knew it was impossible. But he remembered. Once upon a time he’d held this ache close and promised himself that he would hold the memory close through the dark years to come. As soon as he made that promise, it had dissolved along with love and fear and hope and regret until he was nothing left but an automaton doing tasks assigned by his superiors to support a cause he knew that he’d once loved.

And Sierra shone in a way that he’d never before realized. She’d taken her hair down to readjust her braids. Sun glinted off the red strands, radiant as a gem. Despite her days outdoors, her skin was a pale cream and he remembered soft, full lips that had tasted like hope and impossible dreams. She held herself with a refined strength, both physically and mentally, though he wasn’t certain if it was strength or fear that had made her pull back the night before. He recognized a retreat and respected her decision.

They worked in silence to cover the few signs that they’d stayed the night.

“So what’s the plan?” Sierra finally asked, breaking through the quiet.

He’d had hours to come up with a way to get Toran and Kayde out, but simplicity in this scenario seemed best. “I need you to make a distraction away from where they’re being held. That should draw away some of the men. I’ll retrieve my men and the business will be done. You have my thanks.”

Sierra bit her lip and glanced outside before looking back at him. “Can you do the retrieval without drawing attention to the women? If the slavers think the location is compromised…”

Then her mission would be for naught, and it would entirely be his fault. Raze nodded. “I will make every effort.”

She nodded. “Good then.” She hitched her pack over her shoulders and checked her weapons. “It’s been… interesting. Good hunting.”

No mention of the kiss, or the charged intimacy of the night before. Raze wanted to step close, circle his arms around her, and taste her once more before they walked into danger. He wanted to keep her by his side and shelter her from harm, not send her into it in the name of his mission. A mission that had nothing to do with her. He could grow tired of wanting, especially if he were parted from Sierra, the impossible woman who might have been his in another life.

“You could…” He almost made an offer he couldn’t promise.

Sierra looked at him like she knew what he wasn’t saying. She gave the slightest shake of her head and that was it, the moment gone. They named a time for her to make the distraction and went off their separate ways, and an ache in his chest bloomed as it became more and more clear that he would never see her again.

***

This was a terrible idea. Unless Raze was holding onto some serious tech that he’d kept hidden from her, she was about to charge head first into the heart of pirate territory with little more than a blaster. Weren’t people without emotions supposed to rely on logic? Because logic was telling her that he was about to embark on a suicide mission of epic proportions. And that was not only going to get him dead, which she was trying hard not to imagine, but it was also going to fuck up her mission and get those women transported somewhere else, somewhere they’d never find.

“Mindy, are you there?” she asked, finally engaging her comms. She was moving towards the settlement with the most stealth that she could manage, but if she kept her voice low, no one should be able to hear her.

“I was beginning to think that you ran away with some alien hunk.” Mindy sounded chipper, like she’d slept in a soft bed and was relaxing with coffee and a warm pastry. She had the bad habit of waking happily, no matter the time of day or what planet she was on. “Care to fill us in on what the hell that was about?”

“Jo’s on the line?” Normally those two kept communications as brief as possible.

“We got curious about your little adventure,” came Jo’s droll reply.

At least her stupidity seemed to bring her teammates closer together. That had to count as a win… or something. “There was a bit of a mix up,” she explained. “Raze thought I was a pirate who kidnapped his guys. I thought he was a pirate who was trying to kill me. It’s all cool, we’re friends now. And we found out where the women are being kept.”

“Wait, back up. There’s another team on planet? What’s the mission?” Now Mindy was all business. “I managed to get the basic info on Detyens, I’ve relayed it to both of your tablets. If this guy’s not a pirate, he must be a merc. Detyens don’t exactly have a military… or a planet.”

“He’s not a merc.” Not that Sierra had anything against mercenaries, but she’d listened long enough to determine that whatever organization Raze worked for, it was Detyen in origin. Who else would have come up with some way of prolonging their lives, no matter how horrifying? She kept that info to herself, it wasn’t relevant. “He came here with two men, also Detyen. I saw them myself. They were nabbed by the pirates yesterday morning.” Was it really only yesterday? “They, along with our women, are being kept in a central building. I agreed to provide a distraction at a specific time so he can extract the men. Whether he’s successful or not, we’re back on track after that.”

“You mean except for the part where he’s announcing that there are hostiles on the planet, right?” asked Jo, voice dripping sarcasm. “What the fuck, Sierra? Since when do you fuck up like this?”

Sierra decided to take that as a compliment. She usually didn’t fuck up and Jo knew it. “It will be fine. They’ll know that Raze and his team are here, they know nothing about us.”

“Unless Raze barters information about you,” Mindy pointed out.

He wouldn’t do that. She choked back the words before they had a chance to slip out. Any agent with the barest competence would trade information like that for safety. One mostly chaste kiss and some hand holding weren’t enough to cement loyalty. “He doesn’t know about the two of you,” she said after a moment.

The silence on the line said volumes of what her team was thinking of her right now. But Mindy gathered her wits and got back to business. “So where does that leave us?”

“I was able to set the crawlers yesterday.” They were small pieces of tech that could map out a location and gather data about the number of people and calculate where they were likely to cluster. She’d left them in the settlement while she helped Raze search. “I’ll gather them today. Once we ensure that Raze’s mission hasn’t compromised ours, we can call it and return home for phase two.”

“And if the mission is compromised?” Jo asked, because of course she would.

“Then we deal with it.” Sierra infused steel into her words. If they sounded hard, maybe her team would stop asking all these inconvenient questions. “We won’t know until it’s done. I’ll get back to you in a few hours. Out.” She cut off the comms and let out a frustrated sigh. They were going to give her so much shit when she got back to the ship, and Sierra would deserve it. But she couldn’t beat herself up about it right now, not until the job was done.

Covering the ground back to the settlement was easy, but more nerve wracking in the fading daylight. Her instinct was to hide whenever she caught sight of pirates and slavers in the distance, but that would only draw more attention to herself. From afar, she looked just like any one of them, no one that needed any special attention paid.

When she got to the village it was a different story. There were only a few hundred people living there at any given time, and most of them would know each other, at least in passing. Around them, she couldn’t afford to be seen. No cover story could explain her presence, unless she wanted to pretend that she was one of the captured women who’d somehow stolen a slaver’s outfit and was now pretending to be one of her captors, just taking a walk around town like nothing was wrong. Yeah, no one was going to buy that for long.

The key to staying hidden was to play it cool. She stuck to the shadows and alleys created by the dilapidated structures and grounded craft, but she didn’t hunch over or try to look like she was staying out of sight. If someone caught a glimpse of her, she couldn’t panic. Running would call way more attention to herself than ducking around a corner or keeping her head down.

She engaged the sensor on the crawlers and called them back to her. Three little black balls, each fitting comfortably in the palm of her hand, rolled towards her. She scooped them up and turned off the data collection module, sticking them in her pack without going over the data. They had the capability to transmit information back to Mindy, but the encryption wasn’t as strong as she’d like it to be and she didn’t want to risk the signal getting picked up, not when it was just as simple to walk the data back to the ship.

Sierra checked the time; she still had more than an hour before Raze was ready to make his move. A slither of apprehension snaked through her. This must be what operatives in the old days felt like, before they could stay in contact with teammates and ensure absolute synchronization. The only way she’d know if he was successful was if there were no Detyens aboard the prisoner ship when she set a crawler to do the final check. And even then, she couldn’t be certain. All she’d know is that they were no longer on the ship, not if they’d survived or been slaughtered or been left to die.

She’d pine later, right now she had a job to do.

“Get that merchandise back to the pens,” she heard a gruff voice from around the corner. Sierra’s first instinct was to peek and get a look at what they were talking about, but her training kept her in place, hunched behind a short wall that acted as a gate between structures. “Krend’s moved up the schedule.”

“He said I could have one until midday,” came the plaintive, nasal voice of the second pirate. She guessed he was young and human, but couldn’t be certain. He sounded like all of the boys she’d gone to school with who complained when the cafeteria ran out of their favorite food.

“Plan’s changed. He said something about a buyer. We need to move.” The first pirate was a man used to being obeyed, and she wouldn’t be surprised if he was the second on one of the fleet ships. Definitely someone with responsibility, and a person had to have a lot of blood on their hands to hold one of those positions for long in a group like this.

Damn it. A buyer changed the stakes. Even if a recovery team came for the women as soon as Sierra got back to Earth, there’d be no way to get back in time to save them. The protocol was to place a tracker so they could chase down the ship, rather than engage here, but Sierra’s entire soul rebelled. Even with a tracker, they wouldn’t be able to retrieve them all. No way would a buyer keep the women together. In a matter of days they’d be scattered across half the galaxy, sold into slavery with little hope of rescue.

She noted the information and pushed it aside. That was something she’d need to look into later, after she’d provided the distraction for Raze. He was counting on her, and she didn’t want him to end up dead because of her negligence. She left the pirates be to find what she was looking for.

The key to a good distraction was to walk the line between danger and fascination. She needed to pull the men away from the central area of the settlement, but she didn’t want them too afraid to approach. And given the layout and building materials that were scattered everywhere, what she had to do was obvious. Her first stop was to find the three nearest maintenance bots and take them out. Then she scouted the area, looking for the perfect place to do what she promised.

Three little huts, practically leaning against each other, were the perfect candidates. She smiled and rubbed her hands together. It was time to heat things up.

***

Raze got into position and watched the clock. At some point in his journey back to the settlement, his mind had settled down from the chaos of his earlier thoughts. The more time spent away from Sierra, the more he felt his equilibrium returning. He could not rejoice at the reassertion of normality, but he knew he should find it satisfactory.

But he wanted Sierra back. He was finding that he hated to want, hated the roiling churn in his guts every time he remembered that he would never see her again. They’d spent perhaps twelve hours together, and he was already certain that those were the most important twelve hours of his life. He’d sacrifice most of his tomorrows for another twelve hours with her, though he’d hope that they were both awake for all of them this time.

He wanted to explore these newfound feelings and figure out why he could feel them. Were they the same as he’d felt before he underwent the procedure to remove his soul? Or was this like the phantom pain some felt after the amputation of a limb? A soul could not simply grow back, and if it did, wouldn’t that mean that he should be dead? After all, he was thirty-two and without a mate.

Unless Sierra was his denya. Now that he could want, he found he wanted that more than anything else. To taste her again, to claim her as his own, to keep her by his side. If she were his, the stars would open up for the two of them, anything would be possible. It would be an unknown, impossible hope for his people. Even the soulless could find their mates, regain what they sacrificed.

Their people might no longer be on the brink of extinction.

He hadn’t been ready to believe Toran when he spoke of human denyai, but now the possibilities seemed endless. The main thing holding him back was certainty. Every account he’d heard of a Detyen meeting his denya spoke of certainty. From the moment they first met, they recognized one another as mates, unwavering in that single fact. And Raze wasn’t sure. He felt, and that alone might be a sign, but more importantly, he wondered if Sierra was his denya. Was that because he had lost his soul? Or was it a symptom of her humanity? Maybe if she were a Detyen, he would have known for sure. No woman of any species had ever provoked feelings like this in him. Something about Sierra was special.

If he had met her while he was alone, he would have taken every risk to see where the thing between them led. But his responsibility to his people was still the bedrock for his very being’s existence and he could not turn away from that. If he did, he would be worthy of no one, least of all Sierra.

He would do his duty here, retrieve his men, and continue the mission. And then… then he had things to consider. If he let her go, all hope for him, and possibly for his race, was lost. But if he could find a way to stand at her side, strong and whole, then it could be a new day for the legion and every Detyen survivor scattered across the galaxy. And he could find out if he and Sierra’s bond was true.

His alert vibrated against his wrist as the hour for action ticked by. As soon as he began to question whether or not Sierra had been able to make the distraction, a shout rang out and the acrid smell of smoke tickled his nostrils. He let his gaze follow where the pirates were running and saw dark clouds blotting out the bright sky.

A fire. Perfect.

Though his muscles were primed to spring into action, he held himself back, waiting to see if anyone ran out from inside the building to see what the commotion was about. When a group of three black clad figures came sprinting out, he knew he’d made the right choice. Another two quickly followed, prompting Raze to make his move. He didn’t want to wait too long and have the entrance to the holding cells closed off while the guards went off to fight the fire.

He pulled the hood on his jacket up, casting his face in shadow. On his hands he wore black gloves which would tear easily if he needed to unsheathe his claws. Most of the pirates and slavers on Fenryr 1 were human, and with his skin covered, he would pass on first glance. Detyen height and musculature were similar to that of muscular humans.

It soon became apparent that the pirates didn’t give a shit. This wasn’t a prison planet with strict protocols and highly trained guards. No, these were slavers and pirates, people who thought cruelty and deprivation were more than enough to keep people cowed. Perhaps that worked for the humans who’d never experienced any hardship. For his men, he knew that they’d be ready, if they hadn’t already formed an escape plan.

The craft the prisoners were being held on was largely concentric, and as he walked inside, he saw that it was made of several loops, each connected by hallways that ran to the center of the ship. He passed two elevators and several ladders, but stayed on the main floor until he found an information hub. There was no helpful listing for “Prisoners” or “Enemies” but just below the mess hall he saw a listing for “Live Storage.” The ship was relatively small, for a long-distance star craft, and he doubted that prisoners would be kept in separate places on the ship. That would require too many guards and double the work. And from his experience, pirates avoided extra work like the plague.

Footsteps echoed down the hall, heading his direction. Raze closed out of the map and ducked behind a pile of unsecured crates, out of sight of anyone walking down the path. As they got closer, he realized two people were walking towards him, rather than one. If he were a lucky man, it would have been Toran and Kayde, successfully escaped. But as they got close enough for him to make out what they were saying, it became clear that it was two pirates speaking to one another.

“Did Krend tell you about the buyer?” One asked. He had a raspy voice, like he’d taken damage to the throat at some point. He spoke IC with a strange accent that Raze couldn’t place, and his translator was no help.

“Like the boss ever tells me anything,” was his surly companion’s reply. Raze’s translator had to translate this man’s words and identified his language of origin as an Oscavian dialect. “We shipping out? Or do we have visitors?”

“You see any grunts getting this place into flying condition?” Raspy asked. “Rumor has it some big shot from out your way is coming by to see the merchandise.”

The Oscavian sputtered out a laugh. “The meat is much better back home. Why would anyone waste their time with those scrawny nothings?”

Slavery was illegal throughout most of the Oscavian Empire, Raze remembered. But the empire was huge with plenty of petty princes lording it over their own planets, and the emperor couldn’t police everything. The pirates wandered further down the hall and their conversation faded. He went in the other direction, further into the heart of the ship to his destination.

The first thing that hit him was the smell. The slavers clearly didn’t care about the general state of their prisoner holding cells. Unwashed bodies and other, fouler scents assaulted his nose and Raze breathed through his mouth to avoid most of it. He tried to ignore the sounds coming from the center of the room where it was clear that several people were being kept. But his eyes were drawn that way with laser focus and they connected with the gem green eyes of one of the abducted women. Her blonde hair was a nest on her head and a bruise marred one of her pale cheeks.

Every single slaver on this planet deserved to die painfully.

Her mouth dropped open when she took in his shadowed form and she drew back from the bars of her cage, as if that would have saved her if he were a pirate. There weren’t any guards standing near the cages. Either they believed this area to be secure enough, or they’d all been called away to deal with the fire. No matter what, he didn’t have much time, and it would take too long to get the women freed.

He turned away from the central pen and circled the room until he found what he was looking for.

Kayde was slumped against the far wall, hands manacled above his head. He looked up and a shock went through Raze as their gazes locked. Kayde’s eyes were dead, no pain, no hope, nothing lurked in them. Was that what people saw when they looked at him? Toran was next to Kayde, his hands bound and chained to the wall, but with enough give that he could lower them by his side and walk a meter or so from where he sat to the corner where a little hole in the floor might have acted as a latrine. His eyes flashed red as he caught sight of Raze and he stiffened before looking around and realizing that no one was with him.

Wasting no time, Toran jerked his head to the left. “That panel controls the cell. The code is 0041752.”

“How—”

“I heard one guy tell another when they brought us food.”

At least they’d been fed. Good, they’d have the strength to run. He entered the code and a menu came up afterward. He selected to disengage the bars, chains, and manacles, freeing his teammates with the swipe of his hand. The computer processed his request and Raze found himself holding his breath as the request went through. When the door slid open and metal clanked to the floor, he looked up and saw Toran and Kayde standing, both stretching cramped muscles for a moment before moving out.

Toran glanced at the pen in the center of the room while Kayde stood beside them, eyes on the exit. Toran turned back and studied Raze for a long moment, but whatever he was thinking, he let drop in favor of getting off the ship. “Weapons?”

“Just my blaster. Most of the slavers are dealing with a fire on the other side of the settlement. We need to hurry.” He didn’t look at the pen in the center of the room, taking his cue from Kayde. Before he’d met Sierra, he wouldn’t have known he should look, should care. And until his men were out of harm’s way, he couldn’t afford to slip.

“Please don’t go!” one of the women in the pen cried as they began to move. “Let us out.”

Toran took a step closer to the pen, but Kayde put a hand on his arm. He shook his head slightly and Toran turned away from the central pen.

Footsteps echoed in the metal interior of the ship, making it sound like they were surrounded by slavers ready to force them back into a cage and kill them or sell them, whichever was easiest. Raze grabbed his blaster and looked back at his team. It was time to get out of here and back on track.