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He pressed the answer button, but he didn’t have time to say anything before his father’s voice came shouting over the ship’s speakers.
“Dante! Maraliza is missing. You have to help take care of this,” the king announced gravely.
Dante’s heart practically stopped beating, and all thoughts of disowning his family slipped immediately from his mind.
“I’m on it,” he replied without missing a beat. “Send me whatever information you have.”
His father nodded before ending the call, and a second later, he got another ping, this time with the names of a few witnesses and their reports. The common denominator, of course, was the word Jorvlen.
Dante scowled as he docked at the space station and returned the pod hastily. Of course, it was the Jorvlen. He should have known they’d do something like this. Kidnapping a Lorr princess was just the next ploy in their war against his homeworld, and he wouldn’t stand for such a slight.
“Bran!” he barked into his comm, calling up his first mate.
“Yes, captain.” The reply came immediately.
“Meet me in Hangar Six. We have something that needs doing.”
Dante sprinted to the rendezvous point, scanning the row of ships for his transporter as he waited for the crew. They were there within minutes, and Dante led the way to the A62 Nebula—the last ship on the dock.
“My sister, Maraliza’s been taken,” Dante told the crew, and he heard the weight in his voice.
His blood ran cold with the thought, and he knew he had to do everything in his power to get her back. He filled in the crew on what he knew, and they all gave him solemn nods.
“We’ll find her,” Bran told him, and Dante knew he had the right crew for the job.
“Then let’s get to it,” Dante replied. He led his crew toward the transporter ship that he hoped would bring his sister to safety.
They piled aboard and took their stations with Dante manning the captain’s position on the bridge and Bran right beside him.
“Iris!” he called up to the ship’s AI. “Fire up the engines!”
Only silence greeted him. “Iris?”
Nothing.
It looked like there was a problem with the software, but they didn’t have time to look into it now. They’d just have to do things the old-fashioned way instead. That was no problem, though. Dante had an experienced crew that could do anything the AI could do, including preparing meals if it became necessary.
“Bran, engines!” he called. Bran was on it immediately, pushing a series of buttons on the control panel that had the ship humming in no time.
He was about to tell Bran to get them on the launch queue when he heard a door slam from somewhere behind him.
“Who the hell are you?” an unfamiliar voice rang out. Dante turned to see a gorgeous human woman standing before him.
For a second, he thought she must have been a stowaway, but she didn’t look like any stowaway he’d ever seen. They were usually scrappy and disheveled—on the run from someone or something, or else too poor to pay for transport on a passenger ship.
This woman was obviously none of those things, and besides, she’d announced herself to them. No stowaway would be so bold as to step out onto the bridge in front of the entire ship’s crew.
Instead, this woman had a fierce look in her eyes, eyes that immediately grabbed Dante’s attention. They were copper-colored and bright, and they shone from her dark face. She had the warm brown skin of a human woman from the Terran nation of India, her long, flowing hair curly and dark.
He wasn’t used to feeling this pull from a human woman, and the tug of it was different from other forms of attraction. She was strikingly beautiful. She was well-dressed in tight black pants, green shirt, and a brown vest that hugged her stunning, daydream-inducing figure.
And Dante suddenly recognized with a start that she wore the star-shaped badge of a captain. Is she commandeering my ship? he suddenly wondered.
Then a second thought occurred to him, and his heart dropped into his stomach.
Am I commandeering hers?
Fuck.
