Six remaining smugglers. Horos. Two other Divani males. A bloody, brutal brawl that spattered the deck with different colors and textures of blood. Nothing was sacred. No one was gentle.
Khar hauled Lily into cover behind the crate of credits meant for Horos and pushed her down to sit on the floor.
“Stay here. We’ll handle it.”
Lily squeezed his thick arm, feeling the muscles shift beneath her palm.
“Be careful.”
Khar flashed a confident smile, sprang up, and shouted across the chaos.
“Khar, I’m here!”
Lily froze.
What.
The Divani vaulted over the crate and plunged into the fight, calling back over his shoulder.
“Khar is my brother!”
Lily’s face went so hot she thought it might combust. It was physically impossible for that much blood to rush into one human head. The floor should have swallowed her whole. Anything would have been better than facing Khar and his brother after kissing the wrong one like that.
And yet, no matter how mortified she was, she could not look away.
Most of the remaining smugglers swarmed Khar and his brothers while the cockroachlike creature who had pushed the cargo cart earlier chased Horos across the hangar.
Khar’s younger brother threw himself into the fray, tackling two aliens who had pinned down another Divani male. Lily assumed that one had to be the third brother. They looked so alike it was unsettling, but there were differences. Khar kept his horns bare. The brother she hadn’t kissed wore silver guards that hugged the length of his horns like fitted armor.
While the two brothers fought the two trained attackers, Khar held off the smuggler boss alone, along with two enforcers at his side.
Both sides had adapted. If ranged weapons were suicide, close combat was a certainty. The smugglers were armed for it, and some of them could turn their own bodies into weapons.
One particularly repulsive, rounded figure kept growing bone blades out of its limbs, snapping them off and hurling itself at the Divani like a living trap. The attempt ended quickly and badly.
The gold-horned brother seized the bone-spiked creature’s arms, letting the spikes shred his own forearms to ribbons so the silver-horned brother could grab another smuggler, hoist him overhead, and drive him down onto the bone spears. The impact snapped the bone-grower’s neck. They collapsed in a wet, disgraceful heap.
The two Divani moved like a team that shared a mind.
But Lily’s attention belonged only to Khar.
He fought like a wrathful god, batting away three opponents as if their strikes were nothing but insects. The smuggler boss’s gelatinous body absorbed blows that would have shattered bone, but it still could not get a hold on Khar. Instead, it played distraction, drawing Khar’s focus while the two enforcers hunted for an opening.
They might have ranked beneath their boss, but both looked larger and more dangerous than he did. One was squat and dense, wrapped in thick brown-black fur, rows of small eyes lining the sides of its face. The other was shorter but fast, lizard-quick, doing everything it could to slip behind Khar.
It succeeded.
Khar’s arm was buried to the elbow in the boss’s sticky torso when the lizardlike smuggler drew two long, vicious daggers from a belt at its waist and threw them both.
Lily screamed, loud enough to rip her own throat.
“Khar, behind you!”
Khar twisted. One dagger missed him and sank into the smuggler boss’s chest instead. The second he knocked aside with his claws. It clattered across the deck, spinning away with a metallic chime.
Khar yanked his arm free, seized the boss by the legs, lifted him, and slammed him into the wall. The leader splattered into a snot-green smear. From Lily’s distance it looked like neither the dagger nor the impact had finished him.
The furred enforcer chose that moment to strike.
