Kessa Rooke takes a suspiciously rich salvage contract because she is almost out of options.
The dead colony ship Norvane should be empty, cold, and legally simple. Instead, she finds Asset N-9 locked inside Vardell Systems containment: a wounded engineered man treated as cargo, weapon, and property.
Freeing him turns the job into a chase through a collapsing ship full of corporate traps, command phrases, medical restraints, and archived proof of what Vardell has buried. Nine knows the ship through pain. Kessa knows how to survive systems built to own people. Neither expects the dangerous want growing between them to become the one thing Vardell cannot fully control.
As retrieval teams close in and the Norvane begins to die around them, Kessa must decide whether survival means running with the evidence or risking everything to let Nine become more than the asset name carved into his body.
Not Cargo is a dark sci-fi survival romance featuring forced-proximity danger, corporate captivity, engineered-human body horror, explicit MF heat, consent-focused intimacy under pressure, and a hard-won romantic ending.
