CHAPTER 1
SEBASTIAN
Not even thisgiant cruise ship was big enough for me and my dad. It felt especially small when we were both at the same party on the main deck to celebrate tomorrow's space launch.
Technically, it was my cruise ship, since he'd given me the cruise line on my twenty-first birthday, my first piece of his expansive entertainment empire, Paskal Enterprises. Today marked my thirtieth trip around the sun, the day he'd promised to give the entire earthly venture to me.
That's right. My dad, billionaire Ivan Paska, had been looking up at the stars since he was a small boy in Ukraine, back when it was part of the USSR. He'd built his companies and his reputation from the ground up, and now it was his turn to take a stab at the space race. He wanted to be the first entrepreneur to colonize Mars.
I liked my feet firmly on earthly ground, thank you very much. Most of the time, he was happy to leave mehere, handling his day-to-day operations. This would be the second time he launched me into space.
I'd never amounted to much in his eyes, anyway. I'd attended all the best aerospace schools, but everything I'd learned taught me we were better off trying to fix our home planet. Meanwhile, Ivan was ready to scrap it and migrate to the next rock over. Saving the earth didn't fit with his space colonization plans at all.
Dad sat at the far end of the open-air deck bar with Dr. Samuel Bunting, their heads together, whispering some conspiracy theory or another. I made my way to the opposite side and ordered two fingers of top shelf bourbon while I watched them. I couldn't see the good doctor's face, and Ivan spoke with so little movement of his lips, I couldn't read them. My paranoia and imagination colluded to put words in his mouth.
"Tonight's the night,"Dr. Bunting would say. "We need to kill Sebastian so he can't inherit the company. He's a loose cannon. Did you see what he did to the lab after his first space flight?"
"Well, we did turn him into a wolf,"Daddy Ivan would say.
I shuddered at the memory of my first shuttle trip. I downed my bourbon and asked for another as soon as the bartender handed it to me.
Dr. Bunting knew. I still wasn't sure how, but he fucking knew I would turn into a wolf the moment the shuttle crossed outside the stable triangular areas influenced by the Lagrange points.
I wished someone would have told me. Instead, when we veered off course, my insides felt funny.
Yes, everyone feels funny around the Lagrangepoints. This wasn't, "Oh, my bladder waves are at different frequencies," or, "My brain is sloshing against one side of my skull more than the other." This was more unsettling, like sea and air sickness at once. My insides felt like they were being ripped to the outside.
"I knew you could do it. All that radiation paid off."
The words had made me shiver. How much radiation, exactly? It had felt good to shake, since I'd ripped through my space suit and now stood in the shuttle's cargo area. The lack of gravity didn't seem to affect me. Either that, or the grip of my claws held me to the floor. I gave another full-body shimmy, really letting it out in my tail. Since when did I have a tail?
All that cracking, rustling, ripping, and pain had left me in the body of a giant gray wolf who could still understand English, even with my father's broken accent.
More disturbing than his words was his approval while he studied me from head to tail. I had always been his favorite science experiment, after all. In my dad's world, people were either the scientist or the experiment. For most of my life, I'd been both.
Now, I didn't know what I was. When he looked at me after that first shift, his eyes gleamed the way they did when someone showed him a new product with his name on it. He viewed me as property. That was unsettling, coming from a man who treated his property as poorly as he treated his home planet.
Ivan's gaze left the good doctor and met mine across the bar. He raised his glass to me, and Dr. Bunting turned and did the same with a fake smile plastered on his face.
The bartender returned with my third bourbon. I paid him for all three, downed the rest of the second glass, and grabbed the third like a lifeline.
I turned away too quickly and splashed my expensive bourbon over a cheap dress shirt.
"God damn it, do you ever look where you're going?" I glanced down and met my new copilot's narrowed gaze. "No," he said, speaking for me with a high falsetto. "The answer is no. Why would you?"
"Good evening, Gunnar."
"Hello, Sebastian. Or should I call you Mr. Paska?"
"I'm Dr. Paska."
He scoffed.
"Mr. Paska is my father." I pointed down the bar. "If you ask him nicely, he might suck the bourbon out of your shirt."
I'd noticed the way the coding upstart fawned over my father. It was disgusting. My dad had never looked at anyone other than my mother, and this brat thought he could fill her shoes, rest her immortal soul.
"That was fucking uncalled for," Gunnar whispered under his breath. "Jealous much?"
