Lilli sleeps beside me. She’s splayed out on her stomach, her back rising and falling with every breath, her long brown hair spread across both her left shoulder and the mattress. I’m exhausted, but I can’t sleep, because I can’t stand to miss out on this moment.

For the first time since I met her, both Lilli and the beast are at peace.

She made no conscious decision to stay the night with me. But the fact that she let herself fall asleep next to me, with my scent all over her, has satisfied the beast’s need to mark her as mine, at least for the moment, and that seems to have lulled him into silence for the first time in hours.

My satisfaction with this moment differs from his. When the beast isn’t growling into my ear, I don’t care about scents and markings. I don’t need to kill every man Lilli’s ever slept with—though I wouldn’t mind coming face-to-face with everyone who’s ever hurt her.

I just want to be near her. I want to see her smile and hear her laugh. I want to feel her thighs clamp around me. I want to watch her sleep. When my team and I were arrested, I thought I’d lost the chance to have this. To find a woman who would want this with me.

I want children—or at least one child—just as badly as the beast does. But I want Lilli even more.

Yawning, I curl up beside her and stroke her hair down her back. She mumbles something unintelligible, then she snuggles up next to me in her sleep.

My heart beats so hard that my ribs ache.

Protect her, the beast growls. And for a second, I think he’s mumbling in his sleep as well. Then I hear it.

Footsteps. Again.

Invaders, the beast whispers, wide awake now. I roll off the bed as quietly as I can, flinching when the mattress squeals. But Lilli still sleeps.

The beast grunts with pride, insisting that she spent all her energy on orgasms, and that he had something to do with that.

He’s not entirely wrong.

I pull my clothes on as quietly as I can, but Lilli doesn’t even open her eyes. She’s out cold. So I pad down the hall in bare feet, and I’m inches from the front door when I hear the first voice.

It’s a woman.

I relax. I know that voice. Sylvie, the female gladiator. The people heading toward us, stomping through the woods in the middle of the night, are friends.

Enemies, the beast insists, and along with that thought comes a wave of possessiveness so strong that my hands curl into fists, and my knuckle spikes emerge.

But Lilli isn’t involved with any of the men in her community. They aren’t competition and they don’t want to hurt her. They just want—

They want to take her home. They want to protect her. From me. And they’re probably still pissed about what I did to Warren.

They don’t understand what we have. I don’t understand what Lilli and I have either, but I can feel it. Yet all they know is that I lied to them, I attacked Warren, then I snuck in and took one of their women.

She’ll go with them. She was trying to get back to her friends when those men attacked her, and she’s only here now because she fell asleep, but she will go with them. And they won’t let me near her again.

Kill them.

The beast can’t abide the thought of someone separating me from my woman. And for once, he and I are in the same book, if not exactly on the same page. No man on Tethys would let strangers come in and take off with his wife.

She’s not my wife.

She’s your mate. She accepted you. She took your seed.

Spires erupt from my elbows and my face aches as my skull begins to thicken.

I can’t let them take her. I can’t. If they try, I will fight them. But if I hurt her friends, Lilli will hate me.

Better that she hate you while she’s with you than love you from afar, the beast insists. But that’s where he and I disagree.

I take a deep breath, then I mentally tug on the weapons that have erupted from my arms. The beast growls as the spikes and the spires recede into my arms.

This is a puzzle to be solved. Lieutenant Dreyer is right about so many things.

The only way to keep Lilli’s friends from finding us is to get both of us out of here before they arrive. Based on the movement they’ve made since I first heard them, they’re not actually headed here. They seem to be searching the woods, calling for her. But eventually, they’ll realize how close they are to this building, where I met them earlier. If it weren’t the middle of the night, they probably already would have come to that conclusion.

Even though I can hear them, I don’t think they’re close enough to detect us, with their substandard human ears. So I just have to get Lilli out of here before they get close enough to hear us leave.

What the hell am I going to tell her about why we’re leaving? She knows I could dispatch any enemies that stumbled upon us.

Thoughts racing, I dash past the room full of corpses to find Lilli still asleep in “our” room. “Lilli,” I call softly as I sit on the edge of the narrow bed to shake her awake. “Lilli. Wake up. We have to get you dressed.”

She mumbles something I can’t understand, then rolls toward me and sluggishly throws her arm around my waist. The fact that she’s reaching for me in her sleep fills me with pride. But that feeling is short-lived, because she’s not opening her eyes.

“Lilli. Petal, wake up.” I shake her harder this time, and when that doesn’t work, I slide one arm behind her shoulders and sit her up.

Her head lolls to the side, but her eyes still don’t open.

Alarm creeps up my spine with skeletal fingers. Something is wrong.

“Lilli.” I pat her cheeks softly. When that doesn’t work, I pat harder. Her arms lay limp in her lap, her hands open and relaxed. She’s breathing. Her pulse and heartbeat sound normal. But she won’t wake up.

I fight back the fear encroaching on my thoughts so I can concentrate on identifying the problem. I run my hands all over her, focusing on her skull and neck, looking for some undiscovered injury that might have rendered her unconscious. Was she hurt before I got to her, outside? Did one of those men hit her?

My vision is better in the dark than it used to be, thanks to Dr. Brennan, but with Lilli in danger, it feels more inadequate than ever. I can’t find any obvious source for whatever’s wrong with her, and beyond first aid, there’s nothing I can do for her.

If her friends find her here, unconscious, I’ll have to kill them to keep them from taking her. I may have to kill them in self-defense, if they believe I hurt her.

I need to find help for Lilli, and keep her friends from finding us. But there’s nothing that would keep Lilli’s friends from coming for her, and there are no doctors in zone three.

But the zone X lab is equipped with everything Brennan could possibly need in order to help her.

Fuck.

I only have one move to make, and just minutes in which to make it.

My heart racing, I squat on the floor next to my bag and dig through it until I find the com device I took from the guard on the shuttle, six weeks ago. Even sick and half out of my mind, I held onto that and to a pistol I can’t use.

Without the guard’s fingerprints, I can’t unlock it, but just turning it on should send out a signal, as the device tries to connect to the planet-wide system. If Brennan is still looking for me—and she is—she’ll get an alert the moment that device powers up.

Except the com device’s battery is as dead as the bodies in the next room.

Dead battery. Think. How can I charge a dead solar cell in the middle of the night? I’d need a source of ultraviolet light, or a contact charging pad. Neither of which I have.

But I do have an extra battery.

I’m not a tech guru, but Coleman showed me how to do this once, in the field, when our com died. Maybe I can still remember…

I dig through the bag again until I find the stolen laser pistol. My hands must remember more than my head does, because I manage to get the solar cell out with no trouble. But I’ve never worked with this model of com device. Must be proprietary. In the end, when I can’t figure out how to get the solar cell out of it, I just smash the damn thing with the pistol grip, then I dig out the guts of the busted solar cell and use the wires sticking out to connect to the cell from the gun.

“Come on, come on!” I mutter as I wait for signs of life from the com device, praying that I’ve connected the wires properly. That the longer-lasting cell from the gun has at least a little charge left. And finally…the screen flashes. A prompt appears, asking for my fingerprint.

I lean back against the cold metal wall and exhale in relief.

Brennan’s watching for that signal. She has to be. Considering how much money I’m worth to UA, she probably has her own device set to wake her up and deploy the troops the instant this device powers on.

The shuttle will be here in minutes.

Based on the sound of the footsteps in the woods, so will Lilli’s friends. We have to be ready to go.

I have to be ready to convince Brennan to bring Lilli with me.

As the seconds tick by in my head, I round up Lilli’s clothes, but I only have time to get her panties back on and to slide her torn shirt on backward, to cover her torso, before footsteps break into the clearing.

“There’s a light,” a familiar voice whispers from outside. It’s Warren, the man whose identity I borrowed in order to lure Lilli from her home.

“It has to be them,” a deeper voice growls. “Warren you get Lilli out of harm’s way. Sylvie, Graham, and I will take care of this—”

“Um…guys?” Sylvie whispers as their steps crunch closer. “Looks like there was a fight.”

They’ve discovered the bodies, and now I can see beams from their flashlights, through the bedroom window.

My pulse begins to pound, and anticipation of the coming fight triggers an ache in my face, as the bones begin to thicken. I was really hoping to avoid this confrontation.

“This wasn’t a fight; this was a fucking slaughter,” Warren whispers. “If Sotelo did this, he has a weapon.”

“So do we,” Sylvie says, and as I take up a position in front of the bedroom door, my elbow spires and bone blades slide from the seams in my skin. No knife or length of rebar will give them an edge against the weapon Brennan created. “So did this guy,” Sylvie continues. “But he never even got a chance to draw it.”

But as the beams from their flashlights angle downward, to help them inspect the corpses, a new sound intrudes on the otherwise quiet night. The growl of an engine.

“Shit there’s a shuttle,” that first voice growls. “Let’s go.”

Flashlight beams track through the window again. “We can’t leave Lilli!” Sylvie insists.

“We don’t even know for sure that she’s in there,” another male voice says. “And anyway, the shuttle’s here for their expensive toy soldier. They have no reason to grab Lilli. We’ll take her home when they’re gone.”

“What if they just shoot her, because she knows about their classified project?”

“Why would they bother?” Warren asks. “Who’s she going to tell?”

But Sylvie has a point. One laser round through Lilli’s chest won’t cost UA a dime, and there are guards who’d kill her just to get back at me for killing the guard on the shuttle.

What if I’ve miscalculated? What if, in signaling Brennan, I’ve signed Lilli’s death warrant?

My grip on the doorframe tightens as the flashlight beams retreat and Lilli’s friends flee into the woods. Seconds later, the shuttle rumbles closer, then begins to descend, and a bright light shines through the window as it lands in front of the building.

“…and remember, do not let him touch you,” Brennan’s voice whispers above the telltale grinding sound as the shuttle ramp is lowered. The low-pitched whine accompanying her words tells me she’s speaking through the com system built into her helmet. “Don’t let anyone you see in that building touch you. He could look like anyone.”

I back away from the bedroom doorway as heavy footsteps clomp down the ramp. “Doc,” one of the guards says over his com—a pointless precaution when you’re tracking someone with genetically enhanced hearing. “We got bodies.”

More footsteps crunch on chunks of the crumbling front sidewalk as they move forward to inspect the corpses. “That’s definitely Sotelo’s work,” Brennan confirms, as beams of light flash in the window again.

“That doesn’t mean he’s still here,” one of the guards says.

“He’s here.” Brennan’s confidence in that irks me, even though she’s right. “He turned on that com for a reason. Either he’s drawing us here for an ambush, or he needs something.” I hate how easy it is for her to interpret my actions. But then, she’s been studying me for two years. “Be prepared for either.”

As I retreat toward the bed where Lilli is still passed out, someone kicks the warped front door open. Two red laser sights appear in the hallway, swinging back and forth as the first guards to come into the building, scanning for threats. Their pistols are almost certainly set to stun, even though I’ve already killed one of their coworkers, because now that they know about my new ability, I’m worth even more to UA. Brennan won’t let them kill me.

I won’t let them kill Lilli.

Fool, the beast growls at me. He wanted me to throw her over my shoulder and carry her off into the woods, to keep her safe from Brennan. But that would have been a short-term solution at best, if I can’t wake her up.

Lilli needs help. Brennan can help her. Even if I have to make a deal with the devil to get her on board with my plan.

The targeting beams swing to the left as the guards enter the first room, and my pulse races while I listen to their progress, still backing silently toward the bed.

“We got more bodies!” one of the guards calls into his com system, and amid a wave of heavy footsteps, I see a flurry of red targeting beams. “This wasn’t Sotelo,” that same guard says less than a minute later, no doubt for Brennan’s benefit. She won’t enter the building until they’ve declared it safe. “Blunt force trauma, mostly. Couple of stab wounds, but no slicing or punctures. This was just a prison yard brawl.”

“Moving on…” another voice says, and I mentally roll my eyes. Do they not know they’re giving their positions away with every word they speak? Though they’re doing that anyway, with every footstep and red beam of light.

“Another door on the right,” the guard in the lead says, as the targeting beams flash into the room, inches from my boots. The door swings open slowly, and my heart pounds as three red beams center on my chest. “Got him,” the lead guard says, while I fight an urge to back closer to the bed. To Lilli. Sudden movements could trigger an overreaction. “He’s in full monster-mode, Doc. How do you want us to proceed? Stun him?”

“I want to talk to him first,” Brennan says. “Is the room secure? I’m coming in.”

“One second.” The guard looks right at me. He shifts his pistol into a one-handed grip so he can press a button on his com, and his next words echo into the room, for my benefit. “Captain Sotelo, lie face down on the ground, or I will stun you unconscious.” He obviously has no idea that I heard every word he said to Brennan.

“Help her,” I growl at him, as I slowly back toward the bed, my hands raised at shoulder height. The backs of my thighs bump the mattress.

“Don’t move!” the lead guard shouts.

“I’ll come peacefully.” My voice is so low-pitched I’m not even sure they can hear it. “But she’s coming with me. She needs help.”

“She…?” The guard frowns at me, while several others fan out into the room behind him.

“Sir, there’s a woman on the bed,” the one on the far right says. “Appears to be unconscious.”

“Help her,” I repeat.

“What the fuck, Nelson?” Brennan demands. “Sweep the rest of the building. I’m coming in.”

“The rest of the building is clear, ma’am,” another of the guards says from the hallway. “There are only two other intact rooms, both empty.”

A lighter set of steps heads toward us, crunching on dirt and debris in the hallway. Then Dr. Brennan squeezes her way into the small room. “Captain Sotelo.” Her gaze slides past me, to where Lilli still lies on the bed, unmoving. “What have you done?”

“Help her,” I demand, and the beast’s grip on my voice keeps it low and gravely.

“This is why you turned on the com?” But Brennan makes no move to approach the bed. She isn’t even looking at Lilli.

“Help her,” I repeat.

“Fascinating.” She studies me for another few seconds, then her gaze finally focuses on the bed. “What did you do to her?”

“Nothing.”

“Well now, that can’t be true. She’s not wearing any pants, Captain.”

“I didn’t hurt her,” I growl at Brennan. “The men outside tried to take her, and I killed them. I thought they might have hurt her, but I can’t find any injuries, and she won’t wake up.”

“Well, she’s not our concern—”

“Help her, and I’ll come back to the lab with you.”

“You’ll come back anyway.”

“Not without her, I won’t. You help her—bring her with us—or my cooperation is over. You’ll have to knock me out to run all your tests, and that means there will be no more field studies.”

Brennan looks more fascinated than threatened. “I’ll take a look at her on one condition: you voluntarily demonstrate your new skill and fully cooperate in the new branch of study.”

“Fine,” I say, and the doctor’s brows rise over my lack of hesitation. “Just help her. Now.”

“Back out of the way then, and dispense with the weaponry.” She waves me toward the fall wall, and when I comply, she directs three of the guards to follow. “If he so much as moves, knock him out.”

All three of them train red beams on my chest, while I harness the willpower needed to talk my biological accessories into receding into my arm.

Brennan approaches the bed cautiously, while two more guards aim pistols at Lilli’s softly rising and falling chest. “What was she doing when she passed out?”

“Nothing.” I stare at her over one of the guards’ shoulders. “She fell asleep after— She just fell asleep, and now I can’t wake her up.”

“After. You had intercourse with this woman?” Brennan stares across the bed at me. “Voluntarily?” I don’t answer, but she doesn’t seem to need the confirmation. “Fascinating.” She pulls a palm-length cylinder from her pocket and shows me the clear central cavity. “Before you overreact, I’m just drawing blood for a preliminary test.” She presses the cylinder to the inside of Lilli’s left elbow, and it begins to fill with blood.

While she waits for the results, she pulls back Lilli’s eyelids and shines a pen light into her eyes, then presses two fingers to her jugular to take her pulse the old-fashioned way. “Her pulse is fine. No sign of a concussion.” The cylinder beeps, and Brennan pulls it from her pocket. “Slight anemia, which is no surprise out here. Nothing else raises any flags, except…” Brennan presses a button on the end of the cylinder and reads whatever appears on the tiny screen.

“What? What’s wrong?” I demand.

“Nothing. Just a surprising level on a couple of hormones. There isn’t much else I can do without the rest of my equipment.”

“So you’ll bring her?”

“Yes.” Brennan taps something on her wrist com, then she lifts Lilli’s right hand and shines the light from her com on the prisoner number tattooed there. “Justin, we’re headed back to the lab with Sotelo and an unidentified female inmate suffering an unexplained loss of consciousness. Send me everything you can find on prisoner number 4084786 so I can read her file on the way back.”

“I’m on it,” a man’s voice replies.

Brennan motions to the guards at her back. “Get Sotelo loaded and bring a stretcher for…” She turns to me. “Who is this lovely little thing?”

“Lilliana Marie Morgan.” No sense withholding her name. Brennan will know that and much more, as soon as she opens Lilli’s file. “But I’m staying with her.”

Brennan gives me an amused shake of her head. “Knock him out.”

One of the guards discharges his weapon, and fire races through every nerve ending in my body. Lighting me up with pain. As I collapse to the floor, Brennan turns back to Lilli. “Wear gloves when you lift him. Even unconscious, he—”

Then the world goes dark.

“Lilliana!” I wake up with her name on my lips, her face carved into my memory.

“Relax. She’s fine,” Justin says, and I turn my head to find him typing on a tablet at the metal desk by the wall.

Lab B. I haven’t been here in months. There hasn’t been any reason for them to put me in here since Brennan concluded the first phase of medical testing and moved on to field observations.

This isn’t the main lab space. Which means…

I try to sit up and a strap cuts into my chest. Moving my arms reveals that my wrists are similarly restrained. I haven’t been strapped to a lab table in nearly a year.

“Where’s Lilli?”

“Lab A.” Justin points across the room, and I turn to my right to see that the wall between the two labs is currently transparent. I have a full view of Lilli, lying on the table in the next room. She’s strapped down, even though she still appears to be unconscious, while a couple of lab techs work at desks against the wall.

There has to be a reason for the transparent wall. If Brennan’s letting me see Lilli, it’s because she wants to study my reaction. There’s a reason for everything she does, and that reason rarely has anything to do with what I need or want.

Lilli is covered by a sheet. There’s a reason for that, too.

“Let me up,” I demand as the beast prowls around in my head, stomping and cursing in anger. “I need to see her.”

Justin snorts. “You can see her from there.”

“Brennan!” I shout. “Get the fuck in here!”

“That’s not going to—” The door to lab B slides open, and Justin’s mouth snaps shut.

“I don’t take orders from you, Captain Sotelo,” Dr. Brennan declares as she marches into sight, just out of arm’s reach from the table I’m strapped to. As if she doesn’t trust the straps.

“Yet here you are.” In fact, based on the eagerness swimming in her eyes, I’m betting she asked to be called the second either Lilli or I woke up. “What’s wrong with her?”

Instead of answering, Brennan pulls a rolling stool over and sits next to my table, still just out of reach. “What all do you know about Ms. Malone, Captain?” she asks, tapping on the tablet on her lap. The device is transparent, but the print is backward from where I’m lying, and it’s very small.

“Less than you do.” Yet more than enough.

Mine, the beast growls, and I silently assure him that I agree.

“What’s wrong with her?” I repeat.

“Nothing is wrong with her. Absolutely nothing, other than slight anemia, which we’re already treating, and an equally slight level of dehydration. Which we’ve already fixed with intravenous fluids.”

“What about those hormone levels?” I try to glare at her, but there’s just no way to look threatening while you’re strapped to a table, staring up at someone. “What’s wrong with her hormones?”

“Nothing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with her. The levels of a couple her hormones are surprising, but not abnormal. And certainly not indicative of anything wrong. Captain did you have intercourse with that young woman?” I start to tell her that’s none of her business, but she cuts me off. “The more you tell me, the better equipped I am to evaluate her condition.”

“You already know I did,” I growl at her.

“I’d assumed as much, based on the half-dressed state we found her in, and the fact that we found several of your rather distinctive silver hairs on her body. Yet we found no trace of ejaculate, either on her or inside her.”

“Don’t…touch her.” The words are so gravely they seem to scrape my throat on the way out, but Brennan waves off my objection.

“We have to examine her in order to treat her, Captain. I’m sure you understand that. But so far, we have no diagnosis. She’s simply…unconscious. Though there isn’t a scratch or a bruise on her entire body, and there isn’t a thing wrong with her. Did you have unprotected intercourse with that woman, Captain Sotelo?”

Finally, what she’s asking sinks in, and I push past the beast’s outrage in order to answer. “Yes.”

“And you climaxed inside her?”

“I’ve already answered that, Doc.”

“Actually, you haven’t, but I’m going to assume that testy response is in the affirmative. Which only adds another layer to this enigma. The only conclusion I can come up with is that her body seems to have absorbed your biological material. And as inexplicable as it seems, that is the only source I can come up with for the surprising hormone levels in her blood.”

“You’re saying that my semen changed her?”

Brennan taps on her tablet, and the transparent screen goes blank while she aims a frank look down at me. “Captain Sotelo, it doesn’t sound any more likely when you say it than it did when I drew the conclusion in the first place. Especially considering that Lieutenant Dreyer has ingested untold amounts of the same substance and has never had any sort of similar reaction.”

“So…why won’t Lilli wake up?”

“That is the real question, isn’t it? I don’t have an answer for you. But it does seem to me that if she was fine before you slept with her, whatever’s happened to her since then—to include her loss of consciousness—is, for whatever reason, entirely your fault.”

“Sotelo!” Everett Lawrence calls through his transparent cell door as six guards escort me at gunpoint down the hall. I give him a nod, but that’s all I have in me at the moment. I’m so tired I can hardly move. “Guys! Sotelo’s back!”

I nod to each of them as I pass their cells, relieved to see that they all look healthy.

“Man, we weren’t sure you were coming back,” Vaughn Coleman says as the guards lead me into my cell, across the hall from his.

“I wasn’t either, at times,” I tell him as my cell door slides shut. It’s transparent, just like theirs, and that’s the only mercy Brennan’s granted us, even though I’ve given her everything she asked for.

“Eat,” one of the guards demands as he opens the flap in my door. He nods over my shoulder while I slide my hands through the slot, and once my wrists are free of the restraints, I turn to see at least a dozen MRE envelopes stacked up on the floor in one corner of my cell.

“Tell Brennan I want regular updates on Lilli!” I shout as the guards retreat down the hall. They don’t answer. On the other side of the lab, a door closes, and silence descends again.

“Who’s Lilli?” Zamora asks, from the cell to Coleman’s right.

“Where the hell have you been?” Dreyer demands from the breeding room. She’s alone in there now, and through the long transparent front wall of her cell, she can see me, Jamison, and Lawrence, when he stands directly in front of the transparent door of his cell, two down from mine.

“Long story.” I grab the top MRE from the stack as I sink onto my cot, and I rip into it as I talk. “There was a crash, and our shuttle got diverted within minutes of leaving here. I tried to hijack the shuttle, and shit went south, which left me stranded in zone three for weeks.”

I eat as I tell them how I discovered a new ability during my attempted takeover of the shuttle. How I wound up stuck in a sick body and half out of my mind for six weeks. As soon as I finish the first meal packet, I rip open another one.

“Then I saw Lilli, and everything got weird.”

Dreyer snorts. “You don’t think the rest of that shit was weird?”

“Don’t get me wrong. This new ability is on a whole new level of bizarre, even above the rest of the shit they’ve done to us. But what happened with Lilli…” I shrug as I chew a tasteless hunk of soy protein, leaning against the metal wall at the head of my cot. “I’ve never felt anything like it. I knew she was mine the moment I saw her, and Brennan’s going to use that against us.” Maybe against all of us.

“What do you mean, she was yours?” Thiago scoots closer to his cell door. “Who is she?”

“She’s…mine.” I shove my empty MRE packets onto the floor, then I curl up on my side. “I don’t really know how to explain that, but I’ll try after I get some sleep. Sorry guys. I’m beat. That new ability fucking drains me.”

I can hear them still calling out questions as sleep claims me, but I don’t have the strength to answer.