Page 22 of Claimed By the War Brute
“One,” I mutter softly, voice rough.
“Two more,” Syd announces, solid.
Her hands dance across the nav console, adjusting trajectory like reading the next chord in a melody I don’t need to hear. She gets me now—anticipation matched to instinct.
I bank starboard, aim at the nearest cruiser, open throttle.
She hits the distortion pulse salvage. Sensors flick. Tracking grazes blind for seconds around our ship.
I slam the jump command. The ship jolts. Stars stretch madly into lines. Then—silence. Hyperspace. We’re gone.
The cockpit hums with reactivated systems and residual adrenaline. I lean back, chest pounding, fingers tapping the control bench. Smells of ozone and hot metal tingles through the air—it’s a perfume of survival.
Syd exhales, voice trembling with triumph. “We did it.”
I just nod, catching her gaze. She’s fierce as ever, dark admiration in her eyes.
“No one saw that coming,” I say.
She reaches over, touches my hand. “We caught him sleeping.”
I flex claws against palm. The echo of that strike ribs me with purpose. “Now he knows.”
She leans forward, still soaking in victory—but I see the shadow flicker in her eyes: gratitude, fear, resolve. “What now?”
I glance at controls, fingers still trailing nav-set coordinates for The Drift’s inner ring. “Now we reroute to safe passage. Then we pick weapons, ammo, allies.”
She nods. “Then we go back out.”
Her whisper trembles: “We take the fight to him.”
I grip her hand, knuckles brushing nerves. “We take it all the way.”
We ease the ship through hyperspace’s ghost tide. Under the soft glow of console lights, she rests her head on my scaled shoulder. The adrenaline recedes into embers in our veins.
Out there, Malmount’s empire just lost its first battle—and it may not survive the war.
But here, in this fragile moment between galaxies and gunfire, we’re not just fugitives. We’re harbingers.
Together, we vanish into the nothing. But with stars on fire behind us.
Tonight, we declared war. Tomorrow, we intend to win.
CHAPTER 19
SYD
The ship is quiet now. Too quiet. Its engines hum softly on autopilot, coasting through unclaimed space as damage-control routines flicker across the console like late-night vigil candles. I press my back against the cool bulkhead just outside the cockpit. Crossed arms, heart still drumming in my ribcage. We escaped. We won. But the victory feels jagged—like triumph stitched with ragged edges instead of lace.
I still hear the thundering boom when the first private cruiser collided with that mining station. Even now, I can taste that cosmic tang of ionized metal and ozone in the back of my throat, like a warning sniff before the skies open. My palms still sweat when I recall the G-force slam of the jump. My shoulders ache under the weight of what I put us through.
But my mind… it hasn’t come down yet. Not really. Not when Garrus is locked in the pilot seat like a statue carved for war. Not when I can feel the ghost of his hands along my spine, his lips brushing my throat, that low rumble of his growl echoing inside my skull like a reverberating quake.
I take a slow breath and step into the cockpit, sliding into the co-pilot’s chair beside him. I watch the soft strobing glow fromthe instruments playing across his armor, glinting scars and red dusk scales like blood frozen into metal.
“You always this quiet after cheating death?” I ask, voice low but light enough to hide fragility.
He doesn’t look at me. His hands hover just above the throttle levers, knuckles clenched like he’s holding secrets. “Thinking,” he says, flat.
