The dining hall was wide, immaculate, and so silent it felt staged.

  Dozens of ornate crystal fixtures hung from the ceiling, each one cased in glass and throwing off a harsh white light that turned the room into permanent daylight. A five-meter slab of white marble dominated the center, and every member of the Quill family sat around it as if they’d been summoned to court.

  At the head of the table sat the patriarch.

  His hair was iron-gray, his wrinkles cut deep, and though he was close to sixty, his back was still ramrod straight. He swept a stern gaze over the faces in front of him and spoke in a slow, controlled voice.

  “Our restaurants are on the brink,” he said. “Yet all I ever see is you lot socializing, drinking, throwing money around like it grows on trees. Now that we actually need solutions, no one has a word?”

  This was Graham Quill, founder of Quill Dining Group on Nina Station—and the man who decided what happened to every branch, every employee, and every last member of the Quill bloodline.

  He’d built his first restaurant at twenty-five. Thirty years later, Quill Dining was the biggest and most respected chain on Nina Station, the place people bragged about getting reservations for.

  To lose it now would be unthinkable.

  Seated to Graham’s left was his eldest son, Evan Quill. His hair was combed into a perfect, unyielding part; his square face and careful posture made him look dependable even when the ceiling might be collapsing.

  Even so, there was defeat in his eyes.

  “They’ve cut us off at the source,” Evan said quietly. “Without ingredients, there’s nothing we can do. Even the best chef can’t cook with empty hands.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” his younger brother Dylan snapped, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “The Sterling House and the Alder Room bribed the people in charge at the agricultural labs. They won’t sell to us. Are we supposed to storm the facility and steal produce?”

  On Nina Station, there were only three high-end restaurant empires that mattered: Quill Dining, Sterling House, and the Alder Room.

  Not because no one else served food—there were plenty of little places scattered through the station’s lower rings—but those shops lived on synthetics. Printed meat. Nutrient gels dressed up as “vegetables.” Edible, technically, but miles away from the taste of real, naturally grown produce.

  Natural food came from one place only: the Agriculture Division, a branch under the Alliance’s bio-science authority. They were the only ones with the technology to grow plants with flavor—actual texture, actual scent—instead of bland lab feed.

  Nina Station fell under Alliance jurisdiction, so the Division maintained a satellite facility here, too.

  And they didn’t serve everyone.

  There was an old line everyone knew, attributed to the Alliance’s top brass: the lower class only deserves garbage.

  The Agriculture Division sold only to the wealthy and well-connected. In other words: the produce was outrageously expensive, and money alone still wasn’t enough. Without status, the doors stayed shut.

  Graham Quill gave a cold, unimpressed snort. “So your plan is to sit here and wait to die? They can buy off the directors, and we’re supposed to be polite about it?”

  Evan and Dylan fell silent at once, heads bowed as if they were thinking—when really, there was nothing to think about.

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  Sterling House and the Alder Room weren’t just competitors. Their backers were two of Nina Station’s founding dynasties—families with centuries of power sunk into the Alliance’s military, government, and trade networks.

  The Quills, by comparison, were new money with shallow roots.

  Once, Graham had been lucky. In his younger years, he’d met the head of the influential Hart family, a man who’d taken a liking to him and quietly opened doors no one else could touch. With that support, Quill Dining became the third chain granted access to the Agriculture Division’s produce.

  It wasn’t just access that made Quill Dining a legend. It was the constant innovation—new menus, meticulous service—that let them overtake Sterling House and the Alder Room and become the station’s most celebrated name in fine dining.

  But when the old Hart patriarch died, everything changed.

  Sterling House and the Alder Room joined forces. And with the Hart family’s silent approval, the Agriculture Division stopped selling to Quill Dining entirely.

  A clean cut. A slow death.

  Graham had gone personally to request an audience with the new head of the Hart family—only to be turned away without even a meeting. That had been the moment he understood it: the thread he’d spent years protecting had snapped the day his benefactor died.

  The hall remained motionless, breath held.

  Graham let out a soundless sigh and looked down the table again—Evan first, then Dylan—then his gaze paused on an empty chair.

  The smallest hesitation softened his severe expression into something briefly human, almost wounded, before he forced himself onward.

  Past the empty seat sat Evan’s wife, Tessa, and Dylan’s wife, Mara. Under the patriarch’s lightning stare, both women dropped their eyes at once.

  Another empty chair sat farther down. Graham didn’t stop there. His attention continued to the youngest generation.

  Evan’s thirteen-year-old twin sons, Cole and Caleb, broad-faced and sturdy as guard dogs. Dylan’s daughter, Skye, twelve and pretty in the careful, well-fed way of children born into comfort.

  And beside Skye, sunk into an oversized wooden chair like it had been built for an adult, sat another girl about the same age—thin, small, almost swallowed by the seat.

  She had her head down on the marble tabletop.

  Her black hair, soft and lightly wavy, had spilled across the white stone in a messy fan. The contrast was strangely gentle—ink on snow.

  And beneath that curtain of hair, she was snoring.

  Not loudly. Not enough to be rude in a normal room.

  But this wasn’t a normal room.

  Under Graham Quill’s glare, everyone around the table had unconsciously started breathing more quietly, as if volume itself might offend him. In that forced hush, the girl’s faint snore became the only sound left in the entire hall.

  Faces shifted. Color drained.

  One by one, the family followed the patriarch’s gaze toward the sleeping child—half terrified, half resigned, as if they were watching a disaster form in slow motion.

  Skye, seated beside her, tried to save her.

  Under the table, Skye nudged the girl’s foot with her shoe.

  The girl stirred, eyes still closed. She frowned and mumbled, thick with sleep, “Stop it…”

  Then she sank right back down.

  If anything, the snoring grew a little more confident.

  Skye’s expression crumpled into helpless embarrassment. She glanced around the table and gave the tiniest shake of her head: I tried.

  Everyone else felt a cold sweat break out at once—and, in the same breath, a reluctant admiration.

  Only one person on Nina Station could sleep like this in front of Graham Quill.

  His favorite granddaughter.

  It took a special kind of courage—or a special kind of death wish—to ignore the patriarch’s authority so completely.

  Graham watched for a long moment. His eyes started to ache. The girl, however, slept even more soundly now that the room had gone fully quiet.

  The stern line of Graham’s mouth finally loosened.

  And when he spoke again, his voice was unexpectedly gentle.

  “Cora.”

  Cora Quill was deep in a dream.

  In it, she wasn’t a child at all.

  She was standing on the bridge of a pirate ship, commanding her fleet as it tore into a fat interstellar merchant convoy. One successful raid—just one—and she’d have enough supplies and fuel to keep the whole crew fed, paid, and flying for two full years.

  A real prize.

  But the convoy was no soft target. It had hired an armed escort, and the escort launched dozens of white combat mechs in perfect formation—straight toward Cora’s ship.

  A decapitation strike. Take the leader, break the fleet.

  Cora bared her teeth and roared at her crew, voice echoing through the ship’s comms.

  “Get in your mechs! I want their units intact—those are military-grade beauties. You scratch them up and I’ll peel your hide myself!”

  The pirates whooped and laughed, whistling as they scrambled into cockpits and threw themselves into the fight.

  Cora turned toward her own personal mech—Wildfire—

  And then a furious bellow shattered the dream, yanking her out of sleep like a hook in the spine.

  “Cora—!”

  The name boomed through the vast hall, the echo hanging in the air long after the shout ended.