“If you’d killed him, you’d be dead.” I lowered my blaster as my comm alerted me to an incoming message. “Cormac.”

The comm device implanted behind my ear buzzed as the transmission came in. “Cormac. This is Styx. You have to get to Transport Station Zenith right fucking now.” My adopted brother, Trace, now known as Styx, the leader of our legion, sounded worried. And Styx never fucking sounded worried.

Ignoring Shade, I turned back the way I’d come, already breaking into a run. “What’s happening?”

“You’ve been matched to an Interstellar Bride.”

I skidded to a stop. “What?” Confusion swamped me. The words he’d spoken did not make sense. Impossible.

“Listen to me. You have an Interstellar Bride. That Prillon fucker, Helion, put you in their system, remember?”

I did. Vaguely. But that had been years ago. I’d long since believed the so-called processing I’d gone through had been another empty promise from another asshole. I’d played along because it had been what was best for the legion back when my brother and I were both Enforcers, running wild and causing problems. Before he’d become Styx. Before he’d met his mate, a human female named Harper from a planet none of us had heard of at the time. I recalled the matching process clearly. On my brother’s insistence, I had allowed Helion himself to shove me into a chair and sedate me, and then I had dreamed about sex, about gifting a female my bite and my venom as my cock was buried deep, as my seed pumped into her body. To be fair, the vision had been more intense than anything I’d ever experienced before or since. I’d woken up covered in my own cum, ready to kill Helion for pulling me away from an imaginary female.

That female was a ghost. She had never been real. And no fucking female was going to want me for more than a hot, dirty ride. I had years of experience and solid evidence to prove that truth. I was the monster they fucked in an alley, not the male they chose for a mate, to be a father to their children.

“That was years ago. And I don’t trust that Prillon.” I’d thought the entire matching process a cruel joke. But still, I’d never been able to stop thinking about it. Not for one fucking day. Helion had given me a private hell to suffer. More than once I’d considered hunting that Prillon down and ending him.

“No one trusts him. But he gets things done.”