Page 84 of Claimed By the Wraiths

For years, what the crew wanted and what I wanted had been the same thing.

I’d thought that meant I’d lost myself in them.

Turns out it meant I’d found where I belonged.

SERAK

Aweek after the Consortium message, the mess hall smelled like Maris’s cooking.

She’d always cooked when the mood took her. Three days after Nexus, she’d stopped waiting for the mood.

Nobody had asked her to. She’d walked in, assessed the supplies, and put feeding this crew on a schedule.

Zevik said her curry was better than anything he’d eaten on six different stations. Solren said the nutritional profile was acceptable, which was Solren for delicious. Thoryn ate everything she put in front of him and didn’t say a word, which was how Thoryn said he loved her.

The Raptor was in open space.

No mission. No coordinates. No target.

Years of heading toward something or running from something or preparing for something. Now we were just flying.

The ship hummed and the stars moved and nobody was trying to kill us.

It was the strangest feeling I’d had in a decade.

The mess hall was nearly full. Eight people around the table, the same table where I’d spent the late watch for years, running assessments that never told me anything I didn’t already know.

One ship. Nine crew.

Not enough firepower. Not enough evidence. Not enough allies.

Turned out I’d been running the wrong assessment. It was never about enough. It was about the right people.

Ressh sat with Alix tucked against his side, his arm around her, her feet pulled up on the bench. His traceries shifted in lazy patterns, bronze and gold, the settled glow of a bond that had nothing left to prove. She was reading something on her datapad and occasionally showing him a line that made his mouth twitch.

They were building an intelligence network out of her old contacts and his charm. The galaxy’s most unlikely consulting firm.

Thoryn and Maris occupied the far end of the table. Maris talked supply routes, legitimate ones, and the trading network she was building from her old smuggling contacts.

She talked with her hands, gesturing at a datapad covered in route calculations and margin projections. Thoryn listened, nodded, occasionally pointed at a number that seemed wrong.

The gray still threaded through the emerald, permanent marks on permanent scales. He wore them without apology and without forgetting.

Zevik had his boots on the table. Solren pushed them off.

Zevik put them back. Solren pushed them off.

This had been happening every meal for as long as I could remember and neither of them showed any sign of resolution. It was, in its own way, the most stable relationship on the ship.

Deyric was in his corner with his console, running diagnostics on something. The engines, probably.

Or the sensor array. Or the entire ship’s operating system. He’d added three new monitoring protocols since Nexus and the Raptor had never run smoother.

His version of love was maintenance. The ship was the best-cared-for vessel in the sector because Deyric cared about it the way other people cared about partners.

I sat at the head of the table and watched them. My crew. My family.

The people who’d followed me through the obsession because they believed in what we were doing, or because they believed in me, or because they had nowhere else to go and that was the same thing, in the end, as choosing to stay.