Page 116 of Shielded in the Shadows

“I am only recently retired from the Silent Guard,” Vos continued. “And you carry weapons capable of harming my mate.”

I didn’t need to see the males in the cargo bay to know hearing Vos was a Silent Guard assassin had just made them reconsider everything about their plan of attack. No doubt that was precisely Vos’s intention when he revealed that information. Of course he wanted their attention on him and not on his mate or me, or the unconscious male next to him.

He’d just ensured he was their primary target, and it made my stomach churn.

“You have my word I will let you and your mate live, Fortusian.” Sjer somehow managed to sound both deferential and authoritative—not an easy trick. “As I said, I am only interested in Tal and his female. I give you my word on this. I am well-known as an honorable male.”

Calla let out a soft snort and drew me back from the medbay door. She pressed her lips to my ear. “What do we have for weapons in here?”

I went directly to a storage cabinet and pulled out two tranquilizer rifles I kept on hand for the rare occasions I had to land planetside and worried about local predators.

With a flick of my thumb, I switched them both to manual mode—which used compressed air to fire—and handed one to Calla.

She looked hers over in a single glance, noting the capacity and sighting line, and raised her eyebrows. “Are we taking prisoners?” she mouthed.

“No,” I murmured.

“Good.” She thumbed the dosage dial up to maximum. “I’ll take left. You take right. The captain in the middle goes to whoever gets to him first.”

I touched her arm. “Calla⁠—”

“If you apologize, I will shoot you,” she whispered. “These males are your enemy. That makes them our enemies.” Her gaze turned flinty. “And nobody threatens my sister or her mate and lives.”

Letting her step out of this medbay and into the line of fire was one of the hardest things I’d ever had to do. But I had no right to fight her on this. My little sister was as much of a warrior as me.

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you.” She gave my hand one last squeeze and edged toward the doors. “On two. One⁠—”

A male screamed. Shouts and plasma blasts erupted in the cargo bay.

“Two,” she said immediately.

We ran toward the sound of fighting.

The moment we cleared the doorway, Calla and I fired our rifles almost simultaneously.

My shot hit the male to Sjer’s right in the neck above his collar. He stumbled and started to reach for the dart just before his legs went out from under him. He sprawled on the deck, convulsed a few times, and went still.

I was already in motion before he stopped moving, crossing the bay toward his dropped rifle. In my peripheral vision, I noticed a fourth male, one who hadn’t been in the bay earlier, on his back on the cargo ramp with Zwee’s teeth in his throat. I couldn’t tell if he was struggling feebly or it was just her bites making his body twitch.

Meanwhile, Vos erupted—that was the only word for how he exploded out from behind the crates and into my line of sight—the moment Calla appeared in the bay.

She shot the male who’d been on Sjer’s left. Her target had barely hit the deck when Vos was on him, his tentacles making short work of sending the male’s appendages flying in different directions.

I tossed my tranquilizer gun aside, grabbed my target’s dropped plasma rifle, and took aim at Sjer. The pirate captain was charging toward the crates where Jarrix was groaning and struggling to rise.

Sjer had cast aside his sword and drawn his sidearm, a high-powered plasma handgun with auto-targeting, capable of punching a hole through not only my mate but the deck of my ship and the outer hull too.

My rifle shot caught Sjer in the shoulder and spun him around. Our gazes locked.

His face twisted in pain and fury, he roared something unintelligible and fired three times at the same time I pulled my trigger again. The first bolt of plasma from his gun seared my upper left arm just as my shot hit him in the stomach.

Someone hit me from the side in a flying tackle. Calla and I went down in a tangle of limbs. Sjer’s second and third bolts sizzled over our heads and burned holes in the ship’s hull.

I twisted around in Calla’s arms to look back at Sjer just in time to see a flash of black wings behind him.

A wide blade emerged through the center of his chest, just above the wound left by my second rifle shot. Sjer let out a garbled sound.