“You remember where to find me when you have those parts?” I asked.
He nodded. “See you soon…”
His sentence seemed unfinished. He might have been about to add Tess or another antagonizing sugar, but he chose not to say anything else when the soldier came up beside me and plunked a shaving kit down on the counter.
Ducking my head, I turned and left Ganavan’s Products and Parts, not looking up or slowing down again until I’d reached the base of the Squirrel Tree.
The Dark Watch was on Albion 5, just like they were everywhere. And where there was one, there were many.
Chapter 7
Shade flipped the sign to Closed and locked the door. He didn’t care who might need a spare part today, tomorrow, or any fucking day. He cared about Tess Bailey and her little stream of lies.
Unexpected asteroid belt. He shook his head.
Under her pale skin, her firework of a blush, and her rabbiting pulse, there was a woman running scared. She looked like she’d been that way for a while, like she never stopped. Never came down. No one got that white unless they spent all their time in the Dark.
Shade’s blood still pumped harder than usual from certain parts of their exchange, and something a little crazy had happened in his chest when she’d looked so terrified of the Dark Watch. Her poker face had sucked, but then she’d managed to pull it together and be as cool as a cloud after the initial shock and assessment had passed.
He’d seen that there had been just one soldier, a man like any other poking around the shelves. A lot of the men and women who joined the galactic military wore their uniforms all the time because it gave them a power trip—always knowing people would get out of their way, say they were right, and look at them like they were a sight. The guy probably hadn’t even been on duty, not if he was shopping for razors in the seedy district around the docks.
Shade had been testing her when he’d said the Dark Watch had followed her into his shop. And her reaction had told him exactly what he’d wanted to know—she was definitely in the hot seat right now.
But he’d gotten more than he bargained for. Her chest had stopped—no breath—and her blue eyes had gone so wide they’d practically swallowed him whole. And then she’d asked the same question he would have. Uniform? Not how many, but what echelon. She’d wanted to know if there was someone important at her back.
Some of the blood had come back into her face when he’d said the uniform was black, which meant that whoever was looking for Tess Bailey wasn’t just some grunt soldier; he or she was a higher-up.
But the savvy space rat hadn’t taken his word for it, had she? She’d held up that cartridge box to use as a mirror and checked for herself. She’d made sure it wasn’t someone who knew her, and then she’d paid for her bullets like nothing had happened, even getting all high and mighty again when he’d teased her about walking off with the ammo.
He had no idea why he’d done that.
Shade ran a hand through his short hair, still not used to feeling it so close to his scalp. The movement wasn’t very satisfying without anything to shove back.
He strode into his office, still seeing the freckles across Tess’s nose. They weren’t very dark; she’d have needed more sunlight for that. She also had a few on her chest. They’d looked like a constellation, a pattern to follow between her straight collarbones and the upper swells of her breasts.
Tension like he hadn’t felt in a while whipped through his body. Rosy lips and a cute ass were just the start of it. He hadn’t been crass enough to add NT to the acronym, but he’d noticed her nice tits as well.
Shade frowned as he tugged out his chair. She was attractive all over, but blue eyes, freckles, and an atomic blush were what had left him feeling like he’d been punched in the chest.
Sitting at his desk, he pushed aside the remnants of the late lunch he’d been eating when Tess had come in and then powered up the tablet that might give him some answers about his latest guest. While it got going, he rummaged through some paperwork, not really seeing it. He was still too focused on the way Tess had frozen, going from a little flirty and confused to petrified all at once.
Who had she pissed off? Some galactic officer? Was she a deserter? A rebel? Despite not having much of a game face, she’d seemed ready to put up a good fight.
And then there was the fact that she’d bought ammunition, when not that many people had guns. LW-9 bullets were for Grayhawks, and there was nothing illegal about buying them, but it sure as hell raised questions in his mind.
Shade wanted to call her scrappy, but it didn’t quite fit. For the spirit maybe, but not for the physical part. She’d been tall and strong and fit. Her eyes had looked older than the rest of her, though, like she’d already been to hell and back and made choices most people never had to face.
Determined. That was it.
She’d looked like she could take care of herself. So why did he have this itch under his skin, like he wanted to make sure she wasn’t in trouble too deep?
When the tablet was ready, he typed in the pass code to the secure database only he and about a hundred other people in the galaxy had access to. This was where shit went down. This was where he made his money.
He scrolled through the latest entries first to get them out of the way, but his mind wasn’t really in the right place to check them out. Rebel. Rebel. Rebel. Escaped convict. Kidnapped scientist. Rebel. Priest.
Priest? His eyes stopped for a moment. That was unusual. Not many people fucked with the Powers, just in case they were real.
“Not interested,” Shade muttered.
Going to the search bar, he typed in Tess Bailey.
No matches came up for a current job. No bounty. No info.
Adjusting the search criteria, he typed in just Bailey.
Again, nothing.
He tried Baylee, Bayleigh, Bailee, and Baileigh, all without a hit.
Good. She wasn’t anywhere on the up-to-date Wanted or Retrieve lists. That brought a little relief to the tension in his gut.
Shade switched databases and widened the hunt to birth records, telling the search engine to ignore any hit from more than forty years ago and to eliminate all males from the results. There was no way she was forty—more like twenty-five—but he was working large out of caution.
After an interminable wait, about five kabillion Baileys popped up.
He sat back in his chair and scrubbed his hands down his face. He’d need a year to sort through all that.
He narrowed the search to birth records for women under thirty. Still too many. He used the same criteria for just Sector 12 and got Baileys under a number of different spellings, but no Tess to go with them. Same thing for Sector 8.
He groaned. She’d probably given him a false name anyway, and this was a wild-goose chase.
“Well, shit. Who the hell are you, starshine?”
Shade hadn’t expected his tablet to answer, but all of a sudden, there she was, filling his screen as a new message came through from the first window he’d opened to the restricted-access database. His eyes widened, and adrenaline ripped through his blood.
He stared at the enormous WANTED above her head and felt his stomach twist.
The sum below her picture of two hundred million in universal currency made his jaw drop.
Shade stood up, thunking both hands down on his desk and glaring at the tablet. He leaned over for a better look—and to make sure he was reading this right.
He’d never seen that much money offered for anyone. Ever. If he was seeing this new post, other people were, too. There wasn’t a bounty hunter with access to this list that wasn’t pissing his or her pants right now with excitement, but Shade felt like he was about to throw up.
His shoulders tensed as he pushed away from his desk to pace. Those others, though, they didn’t know where she was.
The exact platform where her severely disabled ship was currently docked. They had no idea where to start looking for Captain T. Bailey in the whole fucking galaxy, but he could walk right up to her, and she wouldn’t even wonder why he was there.
Shade swallowed the bad taste in his mouth. Two hundred million. He could buy back his birthright and live like a king forever on that. Never compete for another job in his life.
Stopping, he studied the picture again, impatient for the rest of the job info to pop up. There had to be more than this, something to go on.
The image filling his tablet wasn’t an exact likeness. He’d seen ones like it before often enough. Someone had taken a picture of a kid—less than ten years old, if he had to guess—and then used algorithms to transform it into an adult woman. The computer program had gotten the blue eyes, straight brown hair, and almost heart-shaped face right, but it had erased her freckles, like they’d never even been.
He scowled at the screen. The pinkish, uniform skin looked all wrong on her.
More text finally appeared.
Names may be false.
He snorted. Always a good place to start.
Shade glanced at the bottom of the screen to see who’d sent out the post. Captain Nathaniel Bridgebane, Galactic General, Dark Watch 12.
For fuck’s sake, this just kept getting worse. They’d brought out the big guns. Bridgebane was the Overseer’s right hand. His brother-in-law. And he either had no idea who Tess was, or he knew, and he didn’t want to tell anyone.
Captain T. Bailey.
Cargo Cruiser model 419—Endeavor.
Subject presumed dead.
Shade frowned. “Then why are you sending this out?”
Last seen in Sector 14 in possession of highly sensitive government materials.
His eyebrows nearly flew off his head. He’d seen hints of fragility in Tess, but she must have had balls of steel if she’d been zooming around Sector 14 with the Dark Watch on her heels.
The bounty will be doubled for recovery of the stolen goods. Live capture preferred—substantial bonus.
Shade’s heart stuttered to a stop. He reread. Holy Sky Mother, the galactic government wanted Tess and whatever she’d taken more than it had ever wanted anything since its inception, as far as he knew.
And they preferred her alive.
Some of the sick feeling inside him eased.
Unless they just wanted to torture her for answers?
The sick feeling grew again.
What had she taken? Bridgebane didn’t want to say outright; that much was clear. He was dangling bait, and the hunters had to figure it out for themselves. If they found her, they probably found it.
Tess’s coolly spoken “I’m not a petty thief” came back to him, and he almost choked. He’d teased her about stealing a box of bullets? When she stole, she obviously stole big.
The photo and information disappeared, and Shade lunged for the tablet, picking it up again. Bridgebane couldn’t have been taking down the job already. No one could have found her that fast.
A sort of rage-filled panic started drumming beneath his ribs, but then another window opened with a new image to take the first one’s place. Same text underneath. The photo was a mug shot from Hourglass Mile, one of the most severe and secure places in the galaxy. They’d traced her to where she’d been—he looked at the date on the prison photo—seven years ago.
Tess Bailey. It might not have been her real name, but she’d been using it for a while now.
He looked at her birth date, too. A quick calculation told him she was twenty-six.
He cursed and started pacing again.
Fucking nineteen years old and sent to Hourglass Mile. What had she done to get herself locked up in that place? He knew what they did to the inmates there. The mines. The whips. The pairings.
The lunch he’d eaten earlier turned to lead in his stomach. Who had they forced on her? What had he been like?
How the hell had she gotten out?
The sentence stamped in red across her mug shot said Life.
Then he remembered the explosion about five years back. A bunch of prisoners had died. In the confusion, some had managed to run away, making it to the docks and stealing supply ships. No bounty had ever been offered for any of them, no names given—not on the regular channels and not on his. The galactic government had probably been too embarrassed by the massive amounts of chaos at one of their maximum-security prisons to post.
Beautiful. Ballsy. And brave.
A wanted criminal.
Fuck!
He worked on the fringes of the law, dipping his toes into the murky side of the system, but he was still part of the galactic machine of all-encompassing order. He knew who signed the checks. One big job like this, and he could leave it all behind.
Indecision clawed at Shade’s chest. He’d never agreed to help someone before only to screw them over. He didn’t get to know his targets. They were just prize money, a means to an end.
But Tess Bailey with her little freckles and her mile-long legs was everything he needed and more to finally buy his life back from that scumbag Scarabin White.
His mind worked. He knew where she was.
The easiest nab and grab of his life was waiting for him on the three-hundred-and-fourteenth level of the Squirrel Tree. He could land two hundred million in his account.
Double that if she still had the goods.
Chapter 8
I was surprised to see Shade Ganavan show up the next morning practically with the sun. I hadn’t even had my coffee yet, but there he was on the platform, looking ready to work.
Actually, he was checking out the lab attachment. From the outside, it looked like any other piece of space equipment, most likely an additional cargo hold, and luckily, there were no holes in that part of the ship to give him a view straight inside.
I kept to the shadows of the Endeavor’s open doorway, watching him. He moved on to examining the rest of the ship, and unless he had X-ray vision, I wasn’t going to worry about the lab attachment too much.
I’d destroyed the test tubes of my blood, flushing the contents and boiling the labels into oblivion before trashing the empty containers via the compactor. That evidence was gone, and I hadn’t found any other hidden compartments with more samples. Just like Big Guy had said, that was it. With any luck, that was it in the entire galaxy, apart from what was pulsing through my veins.
Once I’d eliminated the samples, I’d sealed up the air lock leading to the attachment. Only I knew the pass code. No one was getting into that lab but me, and even I didn’t want to go back.
Shade eventually reached the gash in the hull at the level of my bedroom, which was pretty barren and torn up. There, he could see straight in, and he ducked down for a better look.
Even with Albion City starting to buzz and hum far below, I heard him mutter something about major repairs as he ran his fingers along the blackened edges of the hole.
A sinking feeling dropped through me. Whatever Shade did was going to cost me an arm and two legs. On top of that, we needed to resupply, and I had some unexpected shopping to do. Space had eaten nearly all my underwear. And plenty of clothes as well. I was too tall to share with Miko, Shiori, or Fiona, and I swam in Jax’s things. I had no choice but to buy new outfits if I wanted to blend into civilian settings, like here on Albion 5, or anywhere we might go for whatever jobs came next.
Shade’s entire upper body disappeared into my bedroom. He looked like he was about to crawl in.
“Morning!” I called out, not really comfortable with him inspecting my unmade bed.
He ducked back out of the damaged ship, straightening as he looked over. Sunglasses masked his expression and reflected my own image back at me.
Squatting low, I braced one hand against the Endeavor’s floor and vaulted do
wn onto the landing dock about four feet below. It was always a bit of a scramble getting back up again, but letting down the ship’s stairs was an unnecessary use of power as far as I was concerned, especially while we were recharging.
“I thought you needed a few days to get the reinforced metal,” I said, moving toward the man who had occupied far too many of my thoughts since the previous afternoon.
“I had two tiles in stock.” Shade turned away from me, resuming his careful perusal of the Endeavor. After a long silence, he added, “Figured I’d get to work while I waited for more to come in from my supplier.”
I nodded, although he wasn’t looking. He seemed to have an expert eye and was wholly concentrated on the ship.
I thanked him anyway, and he grunted something in response, poking his head into another hole.
I watched him, and Shade ignored me. He was distant to the point of making me wonder if I’d imagined the flirting yesterday. Had the warmth and interest all been in my imagination? It wouldn’t have been the first time I’d dreamed up something false. Today, his flat expression behind dark glasses wasn’t telling me much. Or maybe he just wasn’t a morning person, which made me wonder why the hell he’d shown up so close to the crack of dawn.
“We never talked about payment,” I pointed out when he emerged from the damaged hull once more. After he’d added up materials and labor, I hated to think of the total cost.
“The metal is twelve hundred per tile, and you’ll need nine, not eight.”
“Twelve hundred!” My jaw practically hit my chest. “It’s only eight fifty on Rhylight!”
He turned to me, finally taking off those reflective shades and slipping them into his back pocket. His honey-brown eyes looked dark. “You’re not on Rhylight, starshine.”
I took a step toward him. “Don’t ‘starshine’ me, you crook. I won’t pay a single unit over one thousand in universal currency.”
Watching me, he seemed to think about it, his big hands resting on his hips. He apparently liked that pose. I could see why. It made him look even wider and showed off his menacing knuckles.
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