Chapter One

2255 A.D. Nikolai leaned back in the captain’s chair with a sigh. It had been a long journey, and he was glad to be nearing their destination. His brother Kyle was asleep in the chair next to him, looking so peaceful that Nikolai hated to wake him to do the necessary checks on the loading bays below decks before their final approach to the planet below.

He and his brother Kyle were Voyagers, from the planet Lycanus 3. They delivered the bauxite from the mines on their small home planet all over the galaxy and on occasion helped their cousin, Blayde, an independent bounty hunter. In fact, Nikolai had been wounded during the last trip with his cousin, and was still recovering, though his Lycan metabolism had mostly taken care of his healing. He’d only agreed to take this trip because of Kyle’s inability to find a replacement at the last minute for Blayde on this contracted delivery. Blayde had only recently found his mate, a handsome young man named Ryan, and they were off on their first voyage together, a kind of honeymoon for the newlyjoined couple. Blayde was training Ryan to help him fly the ship, so he could act as co-pilot on their journeys around the galaxy.

Nikolai smiled to think of how much in love his older cousin Blayde was these days and how much it had changed him. Blayde used to be such a player, really, much like Nikolai himself. Blayde seemed truly happy, but Nikolai still fervently hoped the gods would be kind and wait a very long time before revealing his own mate. He wasn’t ready to settle down with just one person for the rest of his very long existence, and wouldn’t be for a while. He was at the mercy of the gods, though, and if they decided to be capricious and bring his mate to him, he would have little choice but to be with that mate because of the family curse. Once his mate was found, he would fall wildly, irrevocably in love with the person, and have to be with them no matter what. The mate could be either male or a female, old or young, fat or thin, it didn’t matter. Once the blood lust came over him, he was trapped.

Blayde’s unexpected mate had actually been one of his bounties, a former fugitive wanted on a murder charge, yet Blayde was determined to have him, no matter what. Luckily for Blayde, it turned out that the charges were false, and Blayde and his cousins had worked together to clear Ryan’s name. However, things could have easily turned out the other way, leaving Blayde himself a fugitive for harboring and protecting a prisoner. It seemed to Nikolai that the gods had an ironic, even bizarre sense of humor when it came to picking their mates for his branch of the family.

Nikolai shifted in his chair, trying to ease the slight ache in his chest where the bullet had lodged near his heart. If not for the quick actions of his brother, Kyle, he might have succumbed to the wound he received while trying to rescue Blayde’s mate from kidnappers. Nikolai’s body had mostly healed, except for a few twinges here and there, but he still wasn’t a hundred percent.

Nikolai and his family, the ancient Balanescus, were Lycans, commonly referred to as werewolves, though there were significant differences. Lycans had supernaturally strong metabolisms and lived a long time, but weren’t immortal, by any means. They weren’t ravening beasts when they shifted, but were quite capable of intellectual reasoning, and in fact kept their man’s shape, except for their heads, when they shifted, though their bodies sprouted extra hair and became even more muscular. Able to shift whenever they needed to in order to defend themselves and not just at the full moon, their beasts were large and formidable with wolf-like snouts and teeth. Their nails elongated into claws, and they presented a fearsome appearance. Their society was partially based on pack mentality, and each family group had an alpha male who was in charge. In the Balanescu family, due to an old curse, most of the children born into the family were male—and alpha.

Luckily, his family had worked out a solution, with his oldest cousin, Lucas, becoming the pack alpha, and Lucas’s brother Blayde, along with the other four male alpha cousins in their family group, all working jobs that kept them off-planet most of the time, as Voyagers or bounty hunters. Thus, they’d managed to avoid the in-fighting a group of alphas would always be prone to. Each of the alpha males in the family had sworn allegiance to Lucas, and each was able to maintain their pledge by simply not being around much and avoiding the inevitable challenges close proximity would bring.

“Kyle,” he called softly, “Wake up. Time to go down and do a landing check.” Kyle stirred and sat up, rubbing his eyes. “How long till we land?”

“Only about thirty minutes or so. I’d like to get in and out as fast as we can. I can’t say I greatly

admire the Jayronians’ choice of a landing site.” The planet of Jayron was largely marshy and wet, and there were few places on this underdeveloped planet to land a star cruiser. The site the Jayronians had chosen was outside their small capital city of Lithos, in the country of Artoria. Artoria was the only really civilized country on the planet, and the only one to boast any kind of governing body. They had a king who had brought his country a long way toward modernization, though their technology was still a couple of centuries behind most of the Alliance planets.

The problem Nikolai had with the king of this planet and his council was the blind eye they seemed to turn to the space pirates known as Jolly Rogers, so called for the pirate flags they affected on the sides of their ships. Apparently the Rogers thought the flag insignia gave them some kind of glamour. Nikolai considered them to be cutthroats and thieves, and couldn’t understand why the Jayronians allowed them to hide out on their planet. Some kind of close association must exist between the king and the outlaws, though Nikolai had never heard exactly what the connection was. Many refused to continue to trade with the Jayronians, but recently the king had made extravagant promises to keep the trade routes safe and open. Since they were also willing to pay well for goods delivered to the planet, a few of the bolder traders, like those in his family, had decided to take a chance.

The Rogers made their living preying on the ships up and down the space corridors. Usually piloting small, fast ships, they used docking technology that could latch onto a larger starship, and, once docked, the thieves would enter by force, rob and terrorize the crew before taking off and losing themselves in the vastness of space, at times even taking hostages or prisoners to be sold on the slave markets. Often, out-of-the-way planets like Jayron, with little or no modern technology, were used as their bases of operation, though Jayron had become more and more the sole base of operations for the Rogers in this part of the galaxy. The pirates were mostly from a race called the Nilaniums, an ancient culture, dating back thousands of cycles. Their home planet was destroyed when their sun went supernova a century before, and rather than find a home on another planet, the survivors became nomads, traveling the galaxy in their ships. They were warlike and unfriendly to outsiders, considering themselves superior to most other races. Nikolai thought them to be a handsome people, but untrustworthy and arrogant.

Kyle levered himself up from the seat and grabbed a cup of coffee before going below, as Nikolai made the final landing preparations. Landing at the small, temporary docking station just barely large enough for the ship made maneuvering tricky and required all Nikolai’s attention for the next little while. By the time Kyle finally slipped back into the seat next to him and gave him a thumbs-up, they’d entered Jayron’s atmosphere and descended rapidly until the ship was hovering over the landing area, which consisted of a few docks, a warehouse, and some assorted outbuildings. Nikolai could just make out the Jayronian traders waiting for him below. Nikolai had dealt with these traders before and found them trustworthy enough, though the fact that the Jayron king allowed the Nilaniums to set up their hideouts on his planet was still troubling. Whenever they traded with the planet, they liked to get in and out as quickly as they could, but today something still felt off. A strange sense of foreboding came over him, but as he surveyed the scene below, he could see nothing out of the ordinary.

About ten of their workers, along with the old-style petroleum powered forklifts used on Jayron, waited on the dock, ready to unload the bauxite into a large truck once Nikolai and Kyle received their payment. The truck looked old-style too, and Nikolai was reminded of the poverty of the planet, partially due to the king’s stubborn refusal to join the Alliance. The area was fairly flat and open, with no place nearby for the pirates to hide in ambush. Besides that, the bauxite they were receiving was a necessary element in Jayron’s emerging economy, necessary to make aluminum, a cheaper alternative to some of the other metals currently in use to make their land and spacecraft. Bauxite was rare and in high demand throughout the galaxy. Surely they wouldn’t be so short-sighted as to allow the Rogers to attack a shipment, especially one from the powerful planet of Lycanus 3. The Balanescus, who made up a large part of the entire population of the small planet, were known to be fierce and dangerous to anyone foolish enough to become their enemy.

Nikolai came in for a landing, and he and Kyle went below to meet with the traders. Just as they were about to step out onto the dock, Kyle snapped his fingers. “I left the bills of lading on the comm deck. I’ll go get them while you direct the unloading.”

Nikolai nodded and the hatch opened. He stepped out as the chief Jayronian trader came toward him with a big smile on his face. Beside him, one of the workers wearing the long, hooded cloaks favored by the people of Jayron, started inside the ship. Nikolai got a sudden whiff of some delectable odor that he’d never smelled before. It was both musky and sweet, causing his nose to twitch and his cock to harden. He was so surprised he held out a hand to stop the man. “Wait a minute, friend. I have to get payment first. Don’t be in such a hurry.” He pulled on the arm a little harder than he’d meant to, needing to see who the man was, and the Jayronian glanced up to look directly into Nikolai’s eyes.

When his dark blue gaze met Nikolai’s, the jolt was so unexpected, it almost knocked Nikolai off his feet. His brain screamed Mate! and he felt his wolf leap inside him, wanting desperately to come out and rut with this man beside him. Shocked and acting instinctively, Nikolai reacted as if to a threat, yelling out, reeling backward, and reaching for the stock of the short-barreled phaser-gun he kept at his side.