Collateral

Name: Collateral
Author: Kaya V. Darke

by Kaya V. Darke

Genre: Romance New Adult Paranormal

87 pages

My father’s debt made me cargo. His mark made me his.

TALIA
I was dragged from my home in restraints, loaded into a cargo hold with twenty-two other souls, and shipped to the most dangerous station in the galaxy.
Veridian Seven. The Sapphire Cage.
I was supposed to disappear into the labor line, just another debtor ground down to nothing. But the syndicate lord who owns this station pulled me from the processing queue before I could draw my second breath of recycled air.
Zane Torrence is seven feet of alien predator with bioluminescent skin, eyes like frozen methane, and an empathic ability that lets him feel every single thing I feel. My fear. My fury. My hatred.
The things I feel when he’s close that I refuse to name.
He burned his mark into my throat. A brand of light that pulses with his heartbeat. Now everyone on this station knows what I am.
His.
But I am my father’s daughter. I was raised to fix what’s broken and survive what can’t be fixed. And I will not break for a monster—no matter how badly the monster makes me want to.

ZANE
She was supposed to be leverage. A debtor with a dead father’s secrets, nothing more.
Then I felt her.
Not her fear. Every human on this station reeks of fear. What stopped me cold was the defiance underneath. Structural. Load-bearing. The kind of defiance that forms the bones of a woman who has decided she will not break.
I pulled her from the line before I made the conscious choice to move.
I marked her before I understood why.
Now she’s in my quarters, learning my world, studying my weaknesses with those calculating grey eyes…and every night, through the bond I burned into her skin, I feel her wanting me and hating herself for it.
My father built this empire on cruelty. He disappeared chasing something in the void and left me a station full of wolves. Enemies are circling. A traitor walks my corridors. And the woman I claimed as collateral is becoming the one thing I can’t afford to lose.
The difference between me and my father is the space between wanting and taking.
Some days, that space is paper-thin.

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