Nalini wasn’t sure if it had been Ian Krane’s goal, but by the end of her first week in the Nimerian base, she was ready to enlist with the other side of the conflict. Had he appeared to her right then and asked her to join him, she would have jumped to stand next to Kai.

These males, and the rare few females who followed them, needed killing. Badly. They didn’t value lives. Not the lives of anything that wasn’t Evris, or the lives of animals or children who didn’t have the right name.

There were slaves in the base. Slaves. People from other sentient races, like Krarkens and Valuas, as well as Evris who’d been sold to them, or had committed a crime of some sort. Slaves kept in chains, barely fed, rarely allowed to wash, expected to work during their every waking hour. Needless to say, they received no payment for their labor.

Nalini had never seen any slave before that day, not with her own eyes. There had been some in Vratis when Enlil had ruled, but none had been deemed good enough to even step foot in the warlord’s palace. She knew slavery was a terrible thing, but she never understood how evil it really was until she saw their eyes, devoid of any hope. Practically devoid of life. Somewhere in her mind, she’d just believed slaves were lower paid workers. A lower class, but not so very different from her. How wrong she’d been.

They worked from dawn to dusk without more than a short break when they were permitted to eat—probably so they didn’t faint. It wouldn’t do to delay the completion of their jobs, after all.

Their clothing was nothing but rags. Females wore very little at all.

“We can’t stay here,” Kronos said one night. “You’ll kill someone. And I’ll help.”

She nodded. They needed to go, but it wouldn’t be as easy as that. Now that they’d been enrolled, their departure would be seen as defecting. There was no doubt that the vile snake always watching her would make a point of catching her, and, who knew, perhaps put her in chains once he had.

He’d finally introduced himself. Veli Par Hora, he was called.

Nalini had laughed in his face, to his confusion, of course. Kai’s brother. Half-brother, in any case. That explained why she vaguely recognized his features. He was slimmer and pastier than Kai, and his face was longer, but there certainly was a similar air. That should have made him attractive, yet the knowledge only made him appear more repulsive to her.

Thankfully for her sanity, she was kept busy. The shitty fighting ships the soldiers piloted had terrible shields, which meant a lot of them came back bruised and burned—or didn’t come back at all. They’d gone for a higher number of ships instead of purchasing fewer, safer ones. Of course they had.

Tending to the wounds of these Evris was a bittersweet occupation; she’d never met anyone she didn’t wish to help. But the cause they’d received these wounds for, that she couldn’t support.

She was exploring the natural tunnels in the belly of the cavernous base one day when she felt a presence behind her.

She started, half expecting Veli, who was never far, sniffing around her like a wolf in heat, but it was one of the soldiers she’d patched up a few days earlier.

“Hey. I see the arm is better,” she said, pointing to his now bandage-free limb.

“You did good.” Heio Su smiled at her. Then he gestured to the tunnel she’d planned to explore. “Don’t go that way. We’ve closed off the entrance, but there’re beasts you don’t want to see on the other side. Sometimes, they claw some passages through. Takes ten men to put them down.”

Nalini lifted a curious brow. “What sort of beasts?”

If he’d meant to scare her, he’d failed. If one didn’t take dragons into account, she’d never met an animal whose mind she couldn’t control. She couldn’t force them to like her, but their simple minds were easily breached. That’s what she’d done with the firebirds so long ago, and when she’d first encountered Nox, before approaching him, she’d breached his mind to ensure he wouldn’t strike her, a precaution she always took with dangerous things.

“Nekos,” he replied. “Felines as tall as you.” He smiled, holding his hand up to his pecs to show their height. So, yes, roughly her size. “They’re deadly, and they like to play with their food, too. When they take someone down that tunnel, we hear screams for hours.”

Nalini winced.

“Some are smaller—the males, we think. No one got close enough to them to check which ones have a pecker.”

She looked down the corridor again. “Why are they in here?” she asked. “Don’t they need access to prey? I can’t imagine there’s much to feed beasts in the mountain. Except the occasional loyalist.”

Heio laughed. “Their den is somewhere in these caves, but it leads out.”

How fascinating. She smiled and purposefully walked away from the tunnel, firmly marking its position in her mind.

This was her way out.

Now she just had to convince Kronos to let her lead him toward a flesh-eating monster’s den. Should be a piece of cake.

* * *

“Are you certain?”

He couldn’t act based on rumors and hearsay; there was a chance he wouldn’t act at all, even if the intel Hart reported was, in fact, true.

Kai had fought relentlessly; he now controlled seven of the nine systems of their sector. All of his enemies had allied themselves and conglomerated on the last two. One, Ederia, was inhabited by the civilians who wished to stay away from the worlds he was building, away from magic and from war. Their prerogative. Still, his eyes were on the peaceful system for one reason: he strongly suspected that it was where Nalini had chosen to hide. It fitted what he knew of her.

The other system, Draks, was the opposite. Its main planet, Nimeria, was the stronghold of the loyalists who wished to restore their previous rule, reinstating slavery and butchering mages. They called it the natural order of things.

Kai stared at the hologram before him, showing both systems.

They were populous, some three billion inhabitants per planet—Evris and other races, too. A fair few Kretians—the blue-skinned, smooth, and short bipeds who rivaled their race in intelligence and surpassed them in cunning. They were merchants by trade and could be found in every system throughout the galaxy.

Kai liked them well enough.

“The Imperials are readying for an attack as we speak, that much is clear. It is my understanding that the emperor has purposefully dispatched his own cousin, and the order wasn’t given in a Council session. As a royal, Vuler has the power to take it upon himself to lead a war if he so wishes. That way, the Imperials can pretend to have nothing to do with this.”

They were planning to attack Draks. If the Imperials occupied it, they’d have a military base in his sector.

But they’d get rid of Kai’s enemies in the process—the loyalists, slavers and barbarians who deserved nothing but death.

Kai wished he could take a knee and think,, but it would have felt awkward in the presence of his cabinet. Instead, he folded his arms behind his back and watched the stars through the large window. Emptying his mind of all concerns, he searched for an answer.

Seconds passed in silence. Kai saw a pair of blue eyes pass through his mind.

Her.

He never felt her these days, although no hour passed without him thinking of her. She’d shut him out, blocking their bond just as he’d become conscious of it.

Yet, he could almost hear her whisper in his ear today.

“There are innocents on Nimeria. Children, Kretians. They’ll be slaughtered along with the rest.”

The words came out of his mouth, but it was almost as if she were saying them.

“Prepare the fleet. Let us send a message. We will be protecting our worlds.”

But they were too late.