“Get me a fucking location now!” Laarn growled over the commlink as he stormed through the lower city streets, a blade in one hand and a pulse pistol in the other. He knew he presented a formidable sight in full battle armor, his hair flying around his shoulders as he kicked doors down and stormed through houses.

Maids scattered as he entered the next house, the high-pitched shriek of terrified oonat getting on his nerves as he ripped through rooms but found them empty of his prey.

“FUCK!” He turned in a circle in the shady interior courtyard, fists white-knuckled around his weapons.

They’d stolen Jess right out from under his nose. From the palace gardens no less. He still couldn’t understand why she’d even been there on her own, and he’d raged at her guards. Demanding to know how the fuck they’d let her out of their sight when they knew what was at stake. When they knew the entire fate of their race rested on the shoulders of one delicate little Terran female and the child she carried.

No.

He stopped dead, a frown creasing his brow. The drapes whispered around him in the breeze that lifted strands of his hair across his face. The rage inside him, the panic… it had nothing to do with losing the last piece of the puzzle to save his species. Even if Jess had been just a normal woman, nothing remarkable about her DNA or the child she carried, he would still be incensed… furious… terrified and desperate to find her.

Because she was his, the baby was his and he loved them both.

He blinked, every cell in his body motionless as the knowledge resounded through him.

He loved her.

He loved Jessica with every fiber of his being.

Closing his eyes, he let his head drop back as he let out a groan of despair.

He loved her and he might have lost her forever.

Fear gripped his heart as he pushed himself into motion again, storming from the house. New purpose filled him. If he had to search every fucking dwelling in the city to find her, he would. Someone, somewhere, knew where she’d been taken and by whom. When he found out, he was going to tear their spines from their bodies with his bare hands.

And when he found her—when, not if—he growled under his breath, “I am so chaining you to that fucking bed.”

“Somehow, I don’t think that was for me.” Karryl grinned as he appeared at Laarn’s side, fully armed and armored the same as the slender figure behind him. Laarn lifted an eyebrow, recognizing Karryl’s mate, the human soldier, Jane.

“Don’t ask.” Karryl growled as he spotted the direction of Laarn’s gaze. “You know human women. They do what they want, when they want. At least if she fights with me, I can keep an eye on her.”

“True.” Laarn’s gaze flicked down to the blood across Karryl’s neck and the eyebrow went up again. “Yours?”

“No.” The warrior shook his head, his braids dancing and the valor beads catching the light. Soon it was likely both he and Laarn would have to cut their hair: Laarn to take up the role of lord healer and, if the rumors he’d heard were true, Karryl to become a war commander with his own group of ships.

“We ran into a mouthy one. Sympathizer. He’s had an attitude readjustment.”

“Readjustment?”

Karryl chuckled. “He made a crude comment about human women where Jane could hear him. She educated him on the error of his ways.” Suddenly the warrior frowned, touching the comm in his ear. “Someone two blocks over saw a couple of warriors dragging a veiled female through the back alleys a while back. Want to bet that’s our girl?”

“My girl,” Laarn growled possessively. Even though he knew Karryl was mated and equally possessive over the woman at his side, he didn’t like any other male laying claim to Jess, even verbally.

“Your girl, got it.” Karryl held his hands up in surrender as he and Jane turned to go. Laarn couldn’t help noticing that already they moved as a unit, Karryl watching the rear as his slender mate took point. The big warrior cast him a glance. “You coming or not?”

By the time they got two blocks over, the emperor and reinforcements had arrived, warriors crowding into a back alley that had been cleared of merchants and furniture from the street cafes. Laundry from the neighboring houses fluttered in the breeze overhead, shielding them from the baking sun.

Daaynal was grim-faced as he flung a bruised and battered warrior into the dirt at Laarn’s feet. Blood streaked one side of his face and his left arm hung limply, the upper arm at a funny angle. The healer in Laarn, though, was well and truly dormant as he looked down at the male. It was one of the guards from Jess’ security detail.

“This fucking draanthic sold us out. He’s one of Dvarr’s. We caught him trying to steal out of the palace on the sly.”

“Shit,” Jane breathed, pulling off her helmet to look down on the fallen male with disgust. She looked up and met Laarn’s gaze, looking between him and Daaynal. “It all makes sense now. I couldn’t figure out how she’d slipped past a group of battle-hardened warriors like that. I mean, me or Kenna?” She shrugged. “Yeah, you boys haven’t a hope in hell of stopping us if we want out…”

A warrior behind Daaynal snorted. “Really? A woman? Our warriors would easily catch you and restrain you.”

A chill descended as Jane looked the young warrior right in the eye. Laarn almost felt sorry for him as her voice, cold as space, sliced through the silence.

“Really? Perhaps you should have been on hand to offer your wisdom to Ishaan F’Naar or maybe the T’Laat then. I’m sure Ishaan in particular would have benefited,” she said, naming the clan leader she’d shot point-blank between the eyes and the clan who thought it would be a good idea to try and kidnap the human women from the K’Vass.

The warrior wisely shut up, backing up a step under Jane’s steely gaze. She returned her attention to Laarn and Daaynal. “Jess was Ops, so the idea that she could slip past your detail didn’t sit right with me.”

“Ops?” Laarn asked with a frown.

“Base operations… traffic I think. Basic military training but not combat personnel,” she explained. “We wouldn’t put her on a battlefield. She’s too valuable doing her primary role.”

Karryl advanced on the bloodied warrior, a snarl of anger on his face. “So this asshole let her go…”

“…And told his buddies where to find her,” Daaynal finished the sentence for him, reaching the male before Karryl and hauling him to his feet with a hard hand on the back of his neck. Trapped between the two bigger warriors, he went pale, and started to talk… words falling from his lips in a panicked stream.

“It was Dvarr… he threatened us all,” he stammered. “Threatened to wipe out our entire clan if we didn’t find some way to get the girl to him. When she wandered off by herself—” He squawked as Daaynal’s hand tightened. “He’s in there. They were going to perform the ceremony at sunset.”

Laarn’s eyes narrowed. “What fucking ceremony?”

Silence fell in the small group as they waited for the answer, all eyes trained on the pale, panicked male.

“A…a sacrifice to appease the gods. If the Terran and her spawn die, the gods will favor us.”

Fear that he might be too late tried to take hold but a glance at the skyline assured him that sunset was still a way off. It was traditional to offer sacrifices as the sun went down and Dvarr was a traditionalist… so surely he wouldn’t do anything before sunset in case that displeased the gods. But… He was also a fucking lunatic. Who knew what he was thinking?

Laarn roared, rage and panic filling him, but before he could land a blow on the sniveling creature, Daaynal wrapped a big arm around his neck and wrenched. The loud crack of bone snapping filled the alleyway before the warrior dropped, lifeless, to the ground, his neck snapped and his eyes wide and unseeing.

“To live without honor is no life at all,” Daaynal snarled. “So he will not live. Apparently Dvarr is holed up in there—” He nodded to the bigger house at the end of the street opposite them. “What say we go and crash this fucking ceremony they have planned?”

Laarn was already moving, intent on marching down the street and kicking the door in to rescue his mate. Rage surged through him, white hot and volatile, ready to explode at any moment. They had his woman, and his child, and they planned to kill them.

Daaynal stopped him with a large hand in the middle of his chest and nodded toward the roofline. In his rage Laarn had missed the squat outline of automated defenses half hidden in the tiles.

“Don’t be a hero, son,” the big emperor murmured. “At least until your female can see and coo appropriately.”

Laarn snarled, about to knock his uncle’s hand away when a new sound registered. The thump-thump-thump of bot feet. Heavy bot feet. As he watched, a troop of drakeen combat bots rounded the corner and took up position in front of them, slowly moving forward toward their target.

“Nice to see the big guns here,” Karryl whistled, falling into place beside Laarn and Daaynal as they followed the bots, using the cover they afforded.

True to form, before they’d gotten halfway up the street, the automated defenses on the roof of Dvarr’s villa activated. The cover plates lifted, twin snub-nosed canons edging into view. Instantly they locked onto the group and the next moment the air was filled with laser blasts.

The bots moved, their mechanical arms a dance of metal and energy fields as they caught the incoming fire, protecting the men, and one woman, behind them. Laarn shot his uncle a sideways look. The destroyer-bots of the Lathar armory, drakeen were rarely deployed in groups of more than two, yet there were five in front of them and at least three bore the personal insignia of the emperor. Which begged the question, where the hell had Daaynal found so many pilots. Drakeen were hellishly difficult to pilot, and not many had the aptitude for it…

Then he spotted the uplink band around the back of Daaynal’s head, half hidden under his hair and snug to the scalp, and blinked in surprise, looking at the three bots with the emperor’s mark again. Sure enough, all three moved easily, but with a strange synchronicity that the other two didn’t.

“All three are yours?” he asked, catching his uncle’s eye as he rechecked his primary assault weapon automatically.

The corner of Daaynal’s lips quirked up as he did the same, sliding the weapon back into the sheath at his thigh. Two more pistols were in bandoliers across his wide chest. None of his movements betrayed the fact he was also piloting three heavy bots when most couldn’t pilot one without lying down in a dark room.

“Your mother rewrote the code for them when we were kids,” he murmured with a wink. “Don’t tell anyone… it’ll be our little secret.”

Shit… Laarn blinked again, rolling his shoulders as they neared the villa. No wonder no one had ever challenged Daaynal for the throne, not when he had tricks like that up his sleeve.

Then there was no more time to think about anything other than getting his female and baby out of Dvarr’s clutches.

“The plan?” he demanded as the bots formed into a line, bringing their guns to bear on the front doors of the villa.

Daaynal grinned, unsheathing both his sword and rifle. “Kick the doors down, kill the bastards inside and rescue your woman. What else?”

Laarn grinned, weapons in his hands as the canons on the bots whined when they powered up.

“My kind of plan.”

* * *

They were going to kill her.

Jess bit back her whimper, not wanting to give the men who held her, her arms twisted painfully behind her back, the satisfaction. Dropping her head, she let her hair cover her face and squeezed her eyes shut tightly.

She’d been dragged into the main hall of the villa a few minutes ago to find it packed with warriors. The furniture had been cleared to the side to make room for them all to stand in lines, like they were in church. Forced to her knees on the hard stone floor in front of them, Dvarr stood a few feet away, chanting.

She winced as she moved, trying to clear the rubble and dirt digging into her knees. Lifting her head, she looked around. The floor hadn’t been swept, and the cobwebs gathering in the corners of the room said the villa had been unlived in for a while. Which meant no owners to come home and find a bunch of fanatics had taken it over.

Dust motes danced in the air as Dvarr spoke, twirling in the shafts of sunlight from the vents above them. For a moment she allowed herself to get lost in their simple dance, stretching out the moment of just being alive as long as she could and pushing back thoughts of the horrors she knew were to come.

His voice rose and fell hypnotically. It was a language she vaguely recognized as Latharian, but couldn’t make out properly. Like it was an older version of something similar. Perhaps there were other languages on their planet—like French, English and others on Earth… It was beautiful, even if it did fill her with dread.

Whatever he was saying, his audience were rapt, their eyes trained on him fanatically. She shivered at the looks on their faces as panic and fear welled up.

Dvarr was going to kill her. Worse, he was going to cut the baby right out of her body. Her gaze focused on the knife in his hands. Curved and serrated on the back, its wickedly sharp inner blade glinted in the dim light.

A whimper broke from her lips and she struggled again, but it was no good. The two men at her side held her easily, their hands biting cruelly into her arms and shoulders. They were so close she could smell their sweat and the sickly-sweet odor of whatever they’d used to draw a red line down one side of their faces. The same red line as all the Lathar in the room had… a sign of their cult or whatever they called their group.

Tears formed at the backs of her eyes, welling up to stream down her cheeks in scalding rivers. There was no way out. It wasn’t fair. Always in books or films there was something clever the heroine could do to extricate herself from a tricky situation, or the hero charged in at the last moment to save the day.

This was real life, though, not a story. No one knew where she was and it was becoming painfully apparent that real life didn’t give a shit about her expectations and what was fair. The universe was a cruel and unforgiving thing… there would be no happily ever after for her and her baby. No crib in the beautiful room next to their bedroom in the palace. No seeing Laarn hold their daughter for the first time. More tears ran down her face as her heart twisted savagely in her chest… she’d never see if she had her father’s eyes.

Dvarr turned to her guards. “Get her up here.”

She was yanked to her feet, kicking and screaming as she was hauled in front of the fanatic leader. One of the guards growled, quelling her fight by pulling an arm back and punching her in the jaw. Her head snapped around, agony and blackness welling up as blood filled her mouth. She managed to spit it out, woozy as Dvarr made her stand in front of him, tsking under his breath as he had to support her with an arm around her ribs just under her bust.

He continued chanting, the sound making her head swim. She watched in horrified fascination as he lifted the blade. It hung in the air above her, the edge caught in one of the shards of sunlight piercing the shadows of the room.

It plunged downward. Tore into her stomach.

She gasped, looking down. Blood welled around the blade, turning her skirts scarlet. Eyes wide, she watched helpless as Dvarr’s hand tightened around the hilt, seesawing the blade through her flesh, and she realized the terrible screaming in her ear was coming from her own throat.

The sound of pain and suffering was only drowned out when the doors exploded inward, killing three warriors instantly, and the gap was filled with warriors.

It was too late.

She smiled as her gaze met Laarn’s horrified one, the angle shifting as Dvarr dropped her to the ground and raced forward to face the intruders, willing him to understand it was okay.

Then her eyes fluttered shut and she couldn’t open them again.