Sneak Peek – Marked

MARKED
Stormbound Warriors of Soltharra – Book One

CHAPTER ONE

Dr. Sloane Carter, Pilot & Chief Engineer, Earth Year 2143
Nova Frontier Initiative: Star Designation HD 568342 F
Planet b – HZP (Habitable Zone Probable)
LCS score .79/1.00 (Life Compatibility Score)
Mission Day 1,898

The ship was dying and I was going to die with it.

I knew it the way a scientist always knows — not with panic, but with the cold, awful clarity of data that has stopped being theoretical. The stabilizer coil shrieked. The atmospheric sensors screamed numbers that made no sense. And the planet’s storm field had just reached up through the hull of our ship like a fist closing around something fragile, and squeezed.

“Come on.” I yanked the manual override, both hands white-knuckled on the yoke. “Come on—”

The shuttle answered with a sound like a dying animal. A lurch threw me sideways against my harness, hard enough to knock the air from my lungs and leave a bruise I’d feel for days. My teeth snapped together. My vision went white at the edges.

Outside the viewport, the planet consumed everything.

This world had looked beautiful from orbit — a dark jewel striped with violet cloud systems, lightning threading through the atmosphere in patterns that had made my breath catch every time I’d watched the storm feeds. I’d spent three days cataloguing those patterns. Three days thinking the electrical activity was the most extraordinary thing I’d ever seen.

I wasn’t thinking that anymore. I was thinking we were fucking idiots for coming here in the first place. But NFI—Nova Frontier Initiative—our militarized corporate overlords, wanted every ‘class b’ planet in this sector of space catalogued, sampled and explored for minerals, life, genetic data. Anything they could get their greedy hands on.

The altimeter spun. The jungle rushed up — dark canopy, jagged obsidian cliffs, a valley floor I was about to introduce my face to at a velocity that would reduce both me and the shuttle to something investigators would catalog with small, numbered flags.

I pulled up hard.

Not enough. It was never going to be enough.

The impact didn’t feel like a crash. It felt like the planet had decided, personally, to reach up and claim me.

I came back to myself in the ringing silence.

For a moment I just breathed. Counted the breaths. Let my nervous system run its checks — ribs aching but intact, a warm thread of blood tracking from my temple that I touched and assessed as shallow, not critical, just dramatic the way head wounds always were. I filed it under not fatal and made myself focus before my hands could start shaking.

The cockpit had held. Barely. The viewport was spiderwebbed across the lower left corner, and half the console had gone dark. But what hit me first — what stopped the methodical inventory cold — was the smell.

Hot metal and scorched polymer, yes. The expected chemical signatures of a crash. But underneath all of that, something I hadn’t anticipated. Something clean and electric and wild. Ozone and rain-soaked stone. The charged sweetness of air after a lightning strike. Plant life. Soil that smelled shockingly similar to the forests back home.

The planet was alive.

I could smell life pouring in through the hull breach, and it smelled like electricity given form, like something ancient and alive, and something in my chest responded to it in a way I had absolutely no framework for.

I ran ship diagnostics with hands that were steadier than they had any right to be.

Luckily, I had managed to steer the shuttle away from the village we’d been shocked to find once we entered the atmosphere. We thought we knew what we were getting into when we decided to land and grab some samples from the surface. Uninhabited planet. Strong storms, but navigable. Not dangerous. We’d thought our ship could handle the wind currents and dense atmosphere.

We’d been wrong. So damn wrong.

Every data point we had was inaccurate. Distorted by the electromagnetic fields surrounding the planet. The energy floating in the air. We didn’t actually have a clear reading on anything. Not the planet, the forests, not the ground formations. Especially not the fact that this planet was inhabited by intelligent life. They had built cities. Fucking cities. And we hadn’t been able to see them until it was too late.

The only reliable data, coming to me about the status of my ship, was not good.

The stabilizer coil — responsible for managing the power core’s interaction with external electromagnetic fields — was gone. Not damaged. Destroyed. The power core itself was currently stable, running on internal reserves, humming quietly in the belly of the ship like a heart that didn’t yet know it was bleeding.

In seventy-two hours, when the next ion storm hit this valley, it would know.

Without the stabilizer to manage the electromagnetic overload, the planet’s storm field would overwhelm the ship’s core. The feedback loop would build and build until the system reached a threshold it wasn’t designed to survive.

Then it would stop trying to survive. The explosion would take out everything for miles. If that happened, the village I’d just risked my life to save would be destroyed anyway.

I sat with that for exactly three seconds. Then I picked up my field kit, exhaled through my nose. “Right. Seventy-two hours.” The empty cockpit echoed the words back to me like a threat.

The survey data I’d collected from orbit had flagged crystalline formations in the cliff faces surrounding this valley. Extraordinary conductivity. Electromagnetic properties unlike anything in the xenomineralogy database. I’d noted them as scientifically remarkable three days ago from the comfortable distance of a stable orbit.

Now I was looking at them the way a drowning person looks at a rope.

A storm crystal with conductivity readings that high might — might — substitute for the stabilizer coil, if I could interface it correctly with the core’s regulation system. It was a theory built on incomplete data and desperate need.

It was the only theory I had. The only chance I, or the other members of the crew somewhere out there in escape pods, had to get off this rock. I either stabilized the ship’s power system, or we all died right alongside the alien villagers.

I wondered what the aliens looked like. Tall? Short? Did they look like humans or were they some kind of strange creature? Reptilian? Ape-like? Insectoid?

A shudder ran through me. God, I hoped not. I could deal with a lot, but a ten-foot tall cockroach was something I could live my entire life without seeing and I’d die perfectly happy.

Didn’t matter as long as I wasn’t food.

With a thump that made my teeth rattle, I fell from the cockpit chair and shrugged out of the harness. Time to take a look at the planet that had just tried to kill me.

Breathable air. Bit warmer than I liked, but at least I wasn’t going to freeze to death outside the ship. I’d seen hundreds of digital images, but reality stopped me at the edge of the ramp.

I stood there and I looked, which was not something I normally allowed myself. Science was observation, yes, but disciplined, purposeful observation — not standing with one hand braced against the hatchway because the world in front of you had just short-circuited every professional instinct you possessed.

“Whoa.” If my dad were alive to see this? Wow. Just wow. My first alien world and it was… spectacular.

The trees were wrong in the most beautiful way I’d ever seen. Their trunks were glass-smooth where lightning had repeatedly melted and rehardened the bark. They caught the last of the dying light and threw it back in fractured violet like a hundred disco balls. The undergrowth pulsed with faint, bluish glow that rolled along the forest floor like waves in a babbling brook of light. Small fungi clustered at the base of every root system, breathing soft blue bioluminescence in a slow, rhythmic pattern that was almost — disturbingly, uncomfortably — like a heartbeat.

And the air hummed.

Not mechanically. Not the ambient white noise of atmospheric pressure or wind through branches. This was a frequency. A resonance. Low and constant and alive. I felt it less in my ears than in the cage of my chest, vibrating against my sternum like a tuning fork pressed to bone. My body hummed along in tune, like someone had struck a giant gong the size of a bus and that long, shimmering note vibrated through my entire body. My blood hummed. My bones resonated. Like a tree with deep roots but with every leaf and branch shaking. By eyes buzzed. Even the air moving up and down my throat felt like it was moving. Alive.

Extraordinary.

I forced my feet to move and headed for the obsidian cliffs on the far side of the valley. According to my calculations, I had four hours of usable light, maybe less. The rest of my crew had ejected in escape pods. I would find them later. First, I had to stop the ship from exploding, destroying everything. Even if my friends survived the crash, they couldn’t cover enough ground to escape the radius of the blast. Not even if they were uninjured and knew which way to run.

I should have just enough time to assess the climb—and hopefully the crystal deposits—before darkness made the terrain impassable. I needed to move fast, think clearly, and not waste cognitive resources on—

The air changed.

That was the only way I could describe it. One moment the electric hum was background noise, ambient and ignorable. The next, it shifted. Not louder — sharper. The way a radio signal sharpens when you find the exact right frequency, the static cutting away to leave something clean and direct and undeniable.

Every hair on my body stood up.

I was being watched. I felt him. A presence. Male. Strong. A warrior.

How did I know that?

The back of my neck went hot. My lungs pulled in a slow, involuntary breath. My pulse, which had just started to slow after the crash, lurched into something faster and out of control.

I stopped walking.

He stepped out of the jungle, directly in my line of sight, and watched me. He was ethereal. Beautiful in a way I couldn’t explain. Like something from myth. Something magical.

He can’t be real.

Before our arrival, there had been no registered civilization on this planet. Just wild weather and obsidian trees. Glass. Storms so violent nothing could survive their fury. Scanners never penetrated far enough into the dense atmosphere to send data back to NFI, Nova Frontier Initiative. The corporation that funded our research. That was why they’d sent us. To land on the ground and catalogue what we found. An exploratory mission to determine if there was anything on this planet worth taking, mining, stealing or selling.

I had a feeling this male was not going to take kindly to what my corporate employers had planned for his home world.

Here was my first real alien, the walking, talking, obviously intelligent kind and not just random wild creatures, plant or bacteria. Thank god he didn’t look like a cockroach. He was enormous. Not in the crude, imbalanced way some creatures had evolved on other worlds. Not awkward or specialized like a giraffe or elephant.

He was a man. Though not human in coloration. He was pure violence in flesh — a creature built for a world that had never allowed weakness to survive. Seven feet. Maybe taller. Broad through the shoulders with a density that made the space between the trees seem to tighten around him, the jungle itself contracting as though to acknowledge the predator that moved through it. His skin was dark, blue-green, almost obsidian in the strange violet light of the planet’s dusk, warm-toned and unnatural. His flesh didn’t just catch the fading light — it held it, gave it back richer, like metal heated slowly from within. He radiated power. Control.

He turned slightly, moved silently closer.

I gasped. Beneath his skin?

Light. Moving. Arcing. Shifting as he moved.

The light traced the line of his spine from the base of his skull to the small of his back — not superficial glow but something under the surface, pulsing in branching patterns that mirrored the lightning I’d watched thread through this planet’s atmosphere from orbit. The same patterns. The exact same fractal geometry. It grew brighter the longer I stared. A soft silver radiance deepened steadily, like a breeze had ignited an ember, like something dormant rose inside him and grew more powerful. Gathered energy. Ready to strike.

His body was exquisite. Built like an elite athlete, the outline of muscle clearly defined over every inch of him. Even his cheeks. His jaw. His feet were bare, the muscles in his legs, thighs and ass barely covered by a sliver of black material that covered—well, hell. I assumed that was where his cock would be. He was built like a man, and I found that suddenly I very much wanted to know what was underneath that scrap of black.

I held my breath as he moved, hoped the material would slip so I could see…

He made a sound that sounded suspiciously like laughter. My gaze jerked up from his crotch to his face. Fuck me, I was blushing. Too hot.

His gaze locked with mine. The breath left my body.

Silver. Not the pale, grey-blue that got called silver back home. Silver — the iris the precise color of mercury, of a lightning strike. Bright. Metallic. The moment our gazes locked his eyes flared. A pulse of light, brilliant and instantaneous, like a spark leaping a gap it had been waiting to cross.

The light traveled through the atmosphere and lodged in my chest. No, in my clit. My pussy shuddered, suddenly aware and swollen like I’d just had three orgasms and my core was eager for more. Too sensitive. Full of blood and lust. Needy. Awake.

God help me, I felt him. Stronger now. Not in my eyes. In my chest, behind my sternum, a tone so clean and sudden it was almost painful — a vibration that bypassed every rational layer I possessed and landed somewhere older and louder and impossible to dismiss. My heart slammed once, hard, like it was answering his call. The soles of my feet tingled. The air between us tasted of lightning.

Shit. What was happening to me?

I took a step backward.

He didn’t move. He simply watched me, massive and still and luminous in the alien dark, and his expression — I couldn’t read all of it, but the part I could read wasn’t threat. Wasn’t predation.

It was recognition. Absolute and certain. Like he’d been expecting me.

Like the planet had told him I was coming.

Don’t Miss MARKED, Book 1 in Grace Goodwin’s all new sexy sci-fi series : STORMBOUND OF SOLTHARRA where human females discover just how… electric… desire—and hot alien warriors—can be.