Yarx lingered a moment longer. His expression was unreadable—somewhere between professional detachment andsomething that might have been sympathy, if she squinted hard enough.
“The Alpha King will decide what happens to you,” he said quietly. “If you’re smart, you’ll accept whatever he offers. The alternatives are...” He trailed off. Shook his head. “Rest. That’s an order.”
He left before she could respond.
Elsa sat alone in the medical bay, surrounded by pulsing blue light and the soft hum of alien technology. Her fingers found the implant behind her ear again, tracing its edges compulsively.
Prisoner. Property. Theirs.
The weight of it settled over her like a shroud.
She glanced at the other domes. At the shapes of her fellow captives, still locked in healing stasis. At the table where the medgun sat, useless as a prop now that she knew what it really was.
Then she looked down at her legs. Still dead weight. Still useless.
But the numbness was fading. Slowly. She could feel something now—pins and needles, the ghost of sensation creeping back into muscle and nerve.
Soon,Yarx had said. Soon she’d be able to stand. To walk.
To be dragged before an Alpha King who would decide her fate.
Elsa leaned back against the curved wall and closed her eyes. Outside the medical bay, she could hear the low rumble of voices. The click of claws on stone. The steady hum of whatever power source kept this place running.
The sound of her captivity.
And beneath it all, quieter but no less insistent—the frantic rhythm of her own heartbeat, counting down the minutes until whatever came next.
3
Elsa
The hood ripped from Elsa’s head.
Light stabbed through her eyelids—not the sterile blue of the medical bay but something harsher, colder. She flinched, blinking hard against the sudden exposure. The air tasted different here. Stone and metal and something ancient underneath, like the smell of a cave that had been sealed for centuries.
Her wrists ached where metal bit into skin.
Chains. Heavy ones, linking her to—
Movement to her left. Someone breathing hard, their panic a living thing that filled the space between heartbeats. To her right, another presence, stockier, tense as a coiled spring.
Elsa’s vision cleared slowly, the room swimming into focus through the afterimages of darkness.
Four of them. Chained together at the wrists and ankles, the bindings connecting them in a line that rattled with every shift of weight. The sound echoed off stone walls that rose higher thanany human structure had a right to, carved with patterns that might have been writing or warnings.
She took stock.
To her left stood a woman in a ruby-red dress, the fabric expensive and formal and completely out of place in this nightmare. Raven-black hair fell past her shoulders in tangled waves. Her face was pale, tear-streaked, eyes wide with the kind of terror that came from being broken before the fight even started.
Mia.The name surfaced from somewhere—wedding guest, probably. One of the civilians who’d been on theStardancerfor the maiden voyage celebration.
To Elsa’s right, two men. The first she recognized—Rowan, security detail, broad-shouldered and stoic despite wearing nothing but his boxers. His jaw was set, muscles twitching like he was calculating angles and distances and odds that didn’t exist.
The other man was Milo, one of the ship’s chefs. Wiry frame wound tight, dressed in the remnants of his kitchen whites. His gaze darted around the room, cataloguing exits that weren’t there, weapons that didn’t exist.
Elsa’s white gown clung to her body, torn at the hem and smudged with ash that wouldn’t quite wash out. The fabric felt like an accusation—this elegant thing she’d been forced to wear while her captain destroyed everything she’d charted.
The chains connected them all. One continuous line of metal and captivity.