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“Get a lock on the Jorvlen ship! It’s imperative that we follow its course.” Tinsley could hear the gruff being called out to his crew, whose faces bore telltale expressions of intimidation.
The voice she’d heard earlier suddenly boomed through the ship again, and she spied the Lorr it was coming from.
He was sitting in her chair. Hell no. That was too much.
Tinsley burst through the door to the bridge, suddenly furious that anyone would dare to sully her ship. This was her vessel, and unless this Lorr’s name was Tinsley Adams, he had no business sitting in the captain’s seat.
“Who the hell are you?” she cried out, and the whole crew turned to stare at her.
Clearly, they were as surprised to see her as she was to see them. Only she was now angry, whereas they were still stuck in shock.
The massive Lorr being, lean and muscled with violet skin and striking black hair, stared at her from her captain’s chair particularly hard. His violet eyes were captivating and disarming all at once, like they could pierce right through her.
He stared as though he’d never seen a human before, or possibly a human captain. Or possibly a female human captain? Sexist jerk.
And it seemed almost certain he’d never seen a female human captain whose ship he was in the process of commandeering.
Bizarrely, Tinsley got the feeling this was some kind of colossal mistake on his part, but she wasn’t taking her chances. There was the possibility it was all a ruse.
The Lorr glared, taken aback by the interruption in delivering his orders. He contorted his features into a slight grimace and ran a giant hand through his crop of straight black hair.
Despite her irritation, something about the gesture was immediately endearing, and Tinsley felt herself soften slightly.
But the Lorr didn’t seem to have any words to follow up with, and Tinsley decided to throw him a bone.
“Are you on the wrong ship?” she asked, her voice softening.
A sudden flush of dark violet-blue came into the Lorr’s cheeks, and she got the feeling she’d hit the nail on the head. Now the only question was how had he accidentally commandeered her ship?
Chapter 2
“I’m disowning you all!”
Dante’s own words from earlier that day rang in his ears as he replayed that pivotal moment when he’d stormed out of the palace on Lorr and away from the royal family—his royal family, as it happened, not that it made much of a difference. With four older brothers, he was so far from the throne, he may as well be just another common Lorr warrior.
Even his younger brother, Levi, seemed to get more royal perks than him. Dante remembered how he shook his head as he climbed back into the pod he’d taken down to Lorr from his craft in orbit. It had been easier than bringing his whole ship. But when he was fleeing the planet, it just annoyed him to be flying something that felt like a child’s toy. Taking off in a full-sized spaceship would have been infinitely more satisfying than buzzing away pathetically in the tiny one-person pod he’d rented.
At six-foot-five, he hardly fit into the tiny craft. He didn’t know why he’d hired it in the first place. To avoid drawing the attention of the Jorvlen uprising that occupied parts of Lorr, he supposed. But now that he was stranded, mistakenly on board a ship that wasn’t his, he felt especially stupid for the decision.
Flying away in the pod was the equivalent of slamming a door in anger and then finding out it wasn’t the kind that slammed. He’d been hoping to make a grand exit to go along with his grand pronouncement, especially since his decision to disown his family was directly related to a spaceship.
Not just any spaceship, either—the PulXar Star Cruiser, which his oldest brother Kozien chose to pass on to Levi, not him. Dante was older and thus more entitled to the ship than Levi, the youngest of the bunch, barring their twenty-one-year-old sister, Maraliza.
Just thinking about it was getting Dante angry all over again. Instead of dwelling on it, he’d fired up the pod and lifted himself off his home planet. The sooner he never had to talk to his family again, the better.
As he’d hurtled through the atmosphere and into open space, though, he couldn’t help but think of them. It wasn’t just the PulXar that had gotten him out of sorts. That was just the last in a long line of slights at the hands of his brothers and father.
With seven siblings and a throne on the line, there had always been a hierarchy, always competition. It was relentless. Even in PAPS, the investigation agency he and his brothers owned, there was a clear chain of command. And it wasn’t based on expertise. It was based, of course, on order of birth.
Dante was sick of it. As he’d made his way back to the space station to collect his A62 Nebula—the ship he was stuck with in lieu of the antique PulXar—he decided to push the matter out of his mind.
In fact, he’d thought he might even plan a holiday instead of hanging around the investigation agency, where no one listened to him anyway. He figured disowning the family also meant disowning the family business, and he was totally fine with that arrangement.
Maybe somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy, he thought idly as the space station came into view.
Before he could plan which resort he was going to visit, though, he heard a ping on his comm. He looked down at his wrist and saw his father’s face, peering into the screen.
After the fight they’d just had, he wasn’t exactly inclined to answer, but something in the king’s face told him this wasn’t about some petty family dispute. Something was seriously wrong.
