Sneak Peek – Starfighter Salvation

Starfighter’s Salvation: Prologue

Elite Starfighter Corvan, Moon Base Arturri, Vega System

I stood alone in a ready room and watched Georgina Reyes from Earth finish her last training mission. I shouldn’t have opened the feed. I knew that before I touched the console, the way I’d known it every night for months and touched it anyway. The program had matched us months earlier. The black bonding mark had appeared at my nape the same day, warm and impossible to ignore, and I had spent every day since trying like hell to do just that. The ready room held the stale chill of a space no one used this late in the cycle, dim except for the flickering lights from her mission feed dancing on the walls. Fourteen months I’d been obsessed with her. I knew the exact instant her expression would sharpen before she made a decision. I knew her the way I knew my own ship’s instruments. That was the problem. I had memorized a woman I had never met, and I tried to convince myself I didn’t care.

I read her file once. Then I read it again. After the second time, I stopped counting. Georgina Reyes. Thirty-four Earth years old. Trauma nurse in a city called Denver. No mate. No children. Emergency contact listed as Priya Anand, then amended to Alisha Calloway when Anand completed the program and came to Arturri three weeks ago.

I knew Gina’s file better than I knew the pilots I’d flown with for years. Gina worked too many hours and she ate standing up. She talked to simulated casualties as if they were real people and called wounded soldiers sweet names that made no sense to my cipher implant. I had replayed those names more times than I would admit to anyone. Honey. Sweetheart. Words for wounded men she had never met, coming from a mouth I had never kissed. I wanted both the words and those damn lips with an obsession that bordered on insanity.

She laughed often, and that was the most dangerous thing about her. The way she cared for everyone within reach undid something I had kept shut since the disaster at Hex Port Callis. She gave pieces of herself away all day and then went home alone. I hated every single human who took advantage of her. Hated and envied them at the same time because they were hers.

I watched her latest mission sim, smiled when she laughed, waited to hear her voice. Want struck first, a low pull behind the sternum that had nothing to do with the bond and everything to do with her. Admiration followed, quieter and far more dangerous. Distance had done nothing except make the ache familiar, a thing I woke to and carried through every cycle like a second pulse.

Gina and her female friends thought the males they flew with were just part of a game, digital fictions on their computer screens. Georgina had no idea I was a living, breathing male who was as obsessed with her as she was with me. Perhaps more so because I knew the truth. I knew she was real… and I yearned for her.

If it were just the training sims, I would have been able to ignore her. But I heard everything. Her voice. Her laugh. The way she interacted with her friends. The way they worried about her. Stories they shared about their lives, their jobs, and us, their Elite Starfighter counterparts. Gina was often lectured by her friends for working too hard, giving too much. For not taking care of herself the way she should.

Renn had been like that. He had sacrificed himself because that was the job. Gina had the same spirit. The problem was not that I might lose another person I cared about. The problem was what caring would do to the decisions I was forced to make. At Callis, I had chosen to save twelve people over Renn. I had done the math and left him behind. Fourteen months of watching Gina had taught me one thing with absolute certainty: if she were the one outside that hatch, I would not be able to make the same choice. I would never be able to leave her.

So I stayed light-years away from her and called it discipline. The lie survived until her sim feed lit up, and then I forgot I had ever known the word. On the screen, Gina ran into a simulated hot zone while the rest of her team provided cover. I leaned in before I caught myself doing it. She reached the first casualty, assessed him in seconds, and moved on because he could wait. I watched her make the call a triage master twice her age would have fumbled, and I stopped pretending I was watching her out of duty.

“Stay with me, honey,” she said as if the simulation could hear her. “You are not dying on my last mission. I have plans.”

Her hands were fast. Her decisions were faster, and she cleared the simulated training grid with nine seconds remaining. The program flashed white. Gina leaned closer to her screen, close enough that if the feed were a window, I could have felt her warm breath on my lips. Her blonde hair was pulled back from a face gone loose with relief. Blue eyes were sharp despite the exhaustion. Beautiful.

Mine. I gripped the edge of the console until the metal bit my palms. She had no idea I had learned every stubborn line of her face.

“Welcome, Starfighter. We’ve been waiting for you.” The training sim played General Aryk’s voice as Gina finished the training module and agreed to join the ranks of the Elite Starfighters.

Then she saw a recreation of me. My voice. My hand reaching for her. Asking her to be with me. Be my partner and my mate.

She. Said. Yes. She was mine.

Fuck.

The mark at my nape burned with a steady insistence I had stopped being able to tell from my own heartbeat. All I had to do was request the Gate slot. Go to Earth. Tell her the truth. Bring my bonded mate home. My desire was a physical thing, my cock hard, my lips dry, the ache in my chest an empty hole nothing but her touch would ever fill.

I watched her smile disappear into sadness right before the screen want dark. She was waiting for me now. Waiting for a male who had no intention of ever going to claim her.

If Georgina Reyes came to Arturri, she’d be dead in a week. The war was raging. The risk was too great. I couldn’t bear to lose her. Couldn’t live with myself if I sacrificed a ship full of survivors to save her life instead. And I would. I would choose her every damn time.

I told myself she deserved someone better. A rescue pilot who still had a code of honor. A soul. I told myself that the training program had made a mistake. The bond was a mistake. She was everything I wanted and that was the crux of the problem.

The screen was black and empty, but her image stayed burned into the backs of my eyelids the way it did every night, uninvited and unwilling to leave. The bond mark at my nape kept its steady heat, patient, certain, impossible to deny. I ignored it for days.

Until the general called my bluff and sent another male to Earth to claim my mate for himself.