She heard a faint whine coming from where they’d slept. Hoping against odds it might be Dancer, she ran to find Illyse limping and sniffing at the blanket they’d slept on. Their gear was strewn about and the tracker for the device in Dancer’s back was near the blanket. “Easy, girl,” she said, stroking the lorina’s fur to calm her.

The lorina licked her chin, then nuzzled her.

And with every heartbeat, Sumi became more and more furious. “Dancer!” she screamed out again, knowing it was useless.

Someone had taken him.

Fear, worry, and grief tangled inside her. But instead of reducing her to tears, it stoked a rage the likes of which she’d never felt before.

How dare they!

And with that fury came the training she’d mastered over these last three years. She wasn’t a woman right now.

She was a feral assassin.

“You better not have harmed a single molecule on his body.” If Dancer had so much as shed a single skin cell while in their custody, she was going to take it out of their entrails.

CHAPTER 21

Hauk winced as he woke up to a splitting headache. The light burned his eyes. Frowning, he found himself inside a steel cage with Bastien and two other men. He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead while he sat up to get his bearings.

“Do you speak Universal?” the guy on his right asked.

Hauk nodded then scowled as he checked Bastien to make sure he was unconscious and not dead. Thankfully, he was still breathing.

“Good. Just do what they say and don’t argue.”

Hauk turned an are-you-serious sneer at the man that caused him to gasp and scamper to the other side of the cage where the other man stared at him as if he terrified him.

“What the hell are you?” the man who’d been talking to him asked.

“Pissed. Off.” Hauk rose slowly into a feral crouch. While the human men could stand inside the cage, he couldn’t.

This was bullshit!

Ready for war, he got up and went to the door to examine the biolock. He kicked it in anger.

A woman gasped then fired a blaster at him. He ducked the charge and hissed, exposing his fangs.

“Pheara! You gotta come see this. Fast!”

He wouldn’t call the woman’s gait hurried as she came around the side of a wheeled transport to eye him. An inch or two shorter than Sumi, she was well muscled with short, dyed red hair and the swagger of a woman used to fighting for what she wanted.

The instant her dark brown eyes focused on him, she froze. “What the hell are you?”

He ran his tongue over his fangs, emphasizing the fact that he wasn’t human. “Let me out of here.”