Waiting was always the hardest. Waiting was always the thing I hated most—waiting for the soldiers to return from their mission. I always wondered if anyone was dead or injured or how badly a person was hurt. It was always so much harder when one of those people you were waiting for was someone you cared about.

I stood beside Merty, my best friend, my eyes trained on the access port, my gaze firmly locked on the tall opening in the side of the ship, and I waited. I kept reminding myself to breathe. What good would I be to anyone if I passed out? What good would I be to Wex if he came through the portal and I was out cold on the floor?

A hand wrapped around my arm, just above the elbow, and I turned to look at Merty.

“He’ll be fine, Prixy. Wex is a good fighter. He’ll come through the portal and he’ll be fine. You’ll see.”

All I could do was nod at her. My throat was dry and my heart hammered a steady beat in my ears. I squeezed my eyes closed for a few seconds and took a deep breath, trying to find some calm.

Technically, he wasn’t even mine. Yes, he was my mate, but we’d never mated. We’d never bonded, and we’d never sealed our mating. Wex wouldn’t even talk to me.

Every time I got close to him, he just looked at me with his cold blue eyes, turned, and walked away. He never spoke, he never told me to leave him alone, and he never responded in any way. I would have given up long before now except sometimes I caught him looking at me.

His eyes were always cold, so cold they sent shivers racing down my spine and a shudder wracking its way down my body. Still, he looked. In the dining room, passing each other in the corridors, when he came to drop off or pick up his clothes from the laundry room. He looked at me, his gaze travelling over my body like he was trying to memorise what I looked like, and he didn’t shy from looking me in the eye.

Goddess, it was enough to drive a person insane!

He let me see exactly what he was, and it sent a trill of fear snaking its way down my spine every time those cold blue eyes the colour of glacial ice locked with my gaze. There was something dangerous about Wex. I’d seen men with eyes like his before—cold and calculating. They were always looking for the advantage of a situation, always observing and weighing their chances in a fight.

Men who killed with no remorse had eyes like that. No emotion, no regret for the lives they took. It was just a job, a means to an end. Something they did, and not because they liked it, and not because they enjoyed it—I’d seen the eyes of men who enjoyed killing and they were filled with emotion, filled with the fierce joy they felt from taking someone’s life—but because it was a necessity.

It made Wex a formidable fighter, an asset on the mission he was on with Kesh, Shirai, and some of the crew of the Fallen Star. It was a rescue mission as unlike the missions I’d gone on, and I waited for my team mates to return.

Those missions were always about destruction and death. There were never any survivors on those missions. My gaze slid to the side to take in Merty.

Secrets and lies. That was what my life became filled with the day I was signed up to fight in a civil war I didn’t believe in. So many secrets. So many lies. Goddess knew how much I hated the lies.

I pushed the thought away as I looked around the corridor outside the access portal where the ship was connected to the cyborg’s warship. The steady hum of the engine and the breathing of half a dozen people were the only noises in the corridor. Everyone was waiting with bated breath for the access door to slide open and our crew to return. Everyone was waiting to see if Devral survived having his implants replaced.

Manik stood beside Merty with a small bag of tools and equipment at his feet, a portable scanner in his hand, ready and waiting for the first injured person to come through the hatch—and there would be injured. Of that, there was no doubt.

You couldn’t infiltrate a cyborg warship and hope to come out unscathed. It was just a matter of how badly they were hurt.

A slight noise, more like a scraping, sent the tension level in the corridor rising to almost breaking point, then the access door started to slide back with a soft hiss.

A dark shape started to become visible until finally the great hulking form of Brylax with his white, white skin and long black hair was struggling through the too narrow doorway. Too narrow because he was carrying Devral over his shoulders, and Devral wasn’t a small man, either.

I stayed back against the wall of the corridor, away from the small staging area in front of the access portal. There was no room for extra bodies in the small area between the corridor and the access door, and from my position, I could see each person who walked through the door.

Following close behind Brylax and Devral was a man I didn’t recognise. He was dressed all in white, a long sleeved top with a small collar that circled his strong neck and white pants over sturdy black boots. Broad shoulders filled out his top, and hands with long graceful fingers hung at his sides. His skin was a warm shade of gold that caught the light and seemed to glow with an inner light of its own.