Mace snorted. “That explains why someone would want to kill you, not all the others.”
“And the Admiral didn’t ask for you, Alec.” Byron squeezed Alec’s shoulder. “Which means if it comes down to it, I’ll go willingly with this asshole so you and the ship can get to safety.”
He would have laughed at the twin looks of horror on Alec’s and Mace’s faces if Gar hadn’t interjected.
“Not happening, Byron.”
“Ice Man, look—”
“Don’t ‘Ice Man’ me. We are going to figure this out and solve the problem once and for all. I’m not losing anyone else in my life.” Gar swung around and pointed at Faolan. “That includes you, pirate.”
Faolan grinned and mock saluted his husband. “Yes, sir.”
Gar growled. “Now, I have a plan. It’s stupid and dangerous, which means it’s most likely to work.”
Faolan leaned in close to Doc. “I love it when he gets all diabolical.”
“Say that once you’ve heard my idea.” Gar let out a huff. “What’s the one thing we have that the Admiral would want more than Byron?”
The answering silence made Byron feel a little less obtuse. “I’m assuming it’s something other than money?”
Gar didn’t bother to look at him then. His gaze locked on his husband’s.
Faolan’s smirk fell from his face and he sat up a bit straighter. “No.”
“Faolan, you know it’s the only thing that would stop the Admiral from pursuing this. We can buy him off.”
“No.”
“Mace, where’s the necklace?”
“No!” Faolan was on his feet and around the table to stand in front of Gar before Byron could blink. “We are not giving that madman that kind of power. Do you know what he’d be able to accomplish with it? How many lives he’d be able to influence? It was why I didn’t end up trying to sell it to him three years ago.”
“What the hell are the two of you talking about?” Byron crossed his arms. “Gar?”
Gar kept staring his husband down, waiting for Byron’s sigh before finally letting his gaze shift over to Mace. “Where is it, Macie?”
Byron recognized guilt when he saw it, and the look on Mace’s face when she reached into her pocket was pure guilt. She pulled out the necklace he’d seen her wear on a few occasions.
“I don’t go anywhere without it.” Mace fingered the green stone, rubbing her thumb over the surface. “Not since you gave it to me.”
Alec reached out to touch it, but Mace pulled it back. She quickly pressed it into Gar’s hand and bit down on her bottom lip. “Sorry.”
Byron couldn’t tell whom she was apologizing to, or what for. More mystery, more complications he didn’t know how to manage. Annoyance bubbled up, and he had to fight back the urge to yell or hit something. “Someone better start telling me what the hell is going on before I completely lose my patience.”
Gar held up the necklace in front of Byron and Alec. “This little baby is the reason Faolan and I beat Jason Krieg. It gives the wearer the ability to read another person’s thoughts.”
Alec looked from the stone to Mace and back again. “Fuck.”
Byron glared at her. “You wore that back on the ship.”
“I had to make sure you were . . . okay. I trusted Alec, but you were still an unknown. I couldn’t risk Faolan or the Belle Kurve.”
Faolan tapped a finger on the stone, setting the dangling pendant in motion. “The Admiral doesn’t know about it or else he would have chased me down years ago.” He groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose. “The bastard is going to kill me when he learns I’ve been holding out on him.”
Gar snapped the necklace back into his hand and shoved it into his inside suit pocket. “He’ll kill Byron if he doesn’t get it. Which would you prefer?”
“Neither.” Faolan started to say more but swayed dangerously on his feet. “Shit, I need to sit down.” Doc was beside the captain in an instant; Gar took his other side to help him back to his chair.
Byron couldn’t give them the attention he normally would, not with his mind spinning about Mace and her invasion into his thoughts. “How much did you hear?”
She looked away. “It wasn’t like that. I only had it on for a short time.”
“I don’t care if you had it on for five minutes. What did you hear?” He knew his tone was sharper than it should have been, but subtlety was never his strong point.
“Enough.” Her words were almost swallowed up by the noise in the room as Doc fussed over a protesting Faolan. “Enough to know how much you care about him.”
Byron looked over at Alec, who reached out and took Mace’s hand. “In the grand scheme of sins, listening in on our thoughts is pretty minor.”
“Still, I should have said something sooner. I’m sorry about that.”
Privacy was one of the few things Byron had always been adamant about in any relationship he’d ever had. Even Alec knew that Byron had a part of himself he never shared, a line of intimacy he wouldn’t be pushed beyond. Byron had always struggled with the darkness in his thoughts, his urges for retribution, and the ferocity of the protectiveness he felt toward the few people he cared about. He didn’t want anyone catching a glimpse of that man inside him. He didn’t want to scare people away, like his father had done with the loved ones in his life.
Before Byron could formulate a response to Mace, Alec spoke up with a tentativeness Byron hadn’t heard from him in a long time.
“I guess . . . Well, I think there’s something I should probably tell you both as well.” He coughed into one fist. “I don’t think either of you will appreciate it.”
“Shit.” Byron tightened his hands into fists. “Get it over with.”
Alec stiffened and took a half step away. “I know you suspected, Bry, but I’ve done some modifications to my genetic makeup. And not just to test the Syrilian cure virus.”
Byron felt his stomach bottom out. Alec had always wanted to push the limits, test things on himself before putting another person through any pain. Byron had stopped him more times than he could count. But nobody had limited him that way for the past seven years. Byron could hardly begin to imagine what he might have done to himself in all that time.
Mace clearly didn’t see things the way Byron did. Her look of bewilderment would have been cute if the situation had been different.
“What the hell do you mean? You can’t change your genetic makeup. It would make you not human.”
“You can, actually.” Alec looked downright sheepish, also not cute in the current circumstances. “A little tweak here, a minor change there, and suddenly I’m one percent Draconian and have the ability to, um, influence people. After I left the Loyalist facility and didn’t have Byron watching my back anymore, I wanted to be sure I could trust people. It was the only thing that would keep me alive. So I can project a low-level psychic field on others and force them to tell me the truth.”
Mace gasped and stepped farther away from Alec. “The tapping. That’s what you’re doing. You’re mimicking the ticking noise Draconians make when they’re . . . doing their thing.” It wasn’t considered polite to mention that the intelligent, pacifist, dominant species of Draco had first evolved their psychic ability—at some point in their dark prehistory—to mesmerize prey.
Alec nodded. “I don’t use it all the time. I learned a few things about some people and quickly realized ignorance is bliss in most cases. Now I’ll only do it for little things. Or very, very big things.”
“Bastard.” Byron wanted to punch him for his stupidity. “You promised me you’d never do something like this to yourself.”
“You weren’t there, Bry.” Alec stiffened and met his gaze directly. “I did what I had to do. You taught me that.”
“Well, this is another interesting twist.”
Byron jumped, and the three of them turned to face Gar. Faolan and Doc had slipped out as they’d carried on their conversation. Gar’s cool gaze washed ove
r each of them, ending finally on his sister.
“Did you know what Alec was doing when he used this ability on you?”
“Didn’t have a clue. I noticed his hands more than realized he’d done something to me. And that was only because I knew him as well as I did. He isn’t one of those people who taps or drums on things all the time.”
Gar nodded. “Think the Admiral would pick up on it?’
“Stop right there. Absolutely not!” Byron didn’t bother to clamp down on his annoyance or fear. “You’ve just spent the better part of an hour telling me what a cutthroat killer this man is. That all the scary stories about him are true. You expect us to let Alec try to pull a scam on him? Think again, Ice Man.”
Alec scowled. “Bry—”
Byron waved him off. “Find another way.” This time he marched out of the room and didn’t bother to listen to anyone’s protests.
The last place he wanted to go was back to the room he shared with Alec and Mace. He needed to clear his head and calm the fuck down before he did something really stupid, like punch a bulkhead. Or kick a pirate. Or cry. Or tell Alec how much he loved him.
He headed away from the quarters and wound up in the weapons training room on the lowest deck of the Bell Kurve, near the engine room. It was one of the first places Mace had shown him when she gave him the grand tour. Byron suspected that had more to do with Gar telling her about his need for alone time than Mace thinking he’d want to keep his skills sharp while they floated in space. But there was no reason he couldn’t accomplish both.
Picking up one of the dummy blasters on the table, he aimed at the farthest practice sensor and fired.
“Damn, you really are a crack shot.”
He looked over his shoulder at a very pale Faolan standing by the door. “I thought Doc had taken you back to med bay.”
“She tried. I’m hard to keep pinned down.”
“You’re hiding, aren’t you?”
“Fuck yes.”
“Good for you.”
Turning back, he fired off several more shots, each landing dead center of the target.
“You know Alec is going to do this no matter what you say.”
His next shot went wide. “How the hell do you know anything about it?”
“I kept a com channel open so I wouldn’t miss out. Nosey that way.”
Byron’s arm suddenly felt too heavy to hold up, and he let it fall hard against his body. “Alec always did his own thing. Only came to me when he needed help picking up the pieces. It gets tiring after a while.”
“But you have Mace now.”
Somewhere in his confused head, Byron knew this. It didn’t make it any easier to admit his failure though. “I know.”
“So why are you down here instead of upstairs making sure they don’t get my ship blown up?”
“They don’t need me. You said it yourself. Alec will do this no matter what, and Mace is there to help him.”
Faolan snorted. “That sounded dangerously like self-pity.”
“Fuck off.”
“Not until Alec fixes me. The will is strong, but the body is broken.”
Byron turned to face him. “What the hell do you want from me? I’m not like you and your merry band of pirates. I don’t play well with others, and I certainly don’t stick my nose in where it’s clearly not wanted.”
“Funny, I knew another bounty hunter who sounded a lot like you, once upon a time.”
Byron rolled his eyes. “I’m not Gar.”
“No, you’re not. But that doesn’t mean you’re any less capable of changing than he was. You clearly care for Alec and Mace, and no, I don’t need a bloody mindreading necklace to tell me that. You don’t want to walk away from them only to have something happen while you’re gone. Trust me when I say the guilt is more likely to kill you than a blaster.”
Byron’s heart raced and his stomach turned at the idea of Alec or Mace getting hurt or dying. But they would only risk that if they insisted on making this insane attempt to save him from the Admiral. He shook his head, not wanting to even consider the notion of supporting such a plan.
“It’s worth the fear to be there with them. You need to know you did everything you could to keep them safe, Byron.” A look of pain and understanding transformed Faolan’s normally good-humored face.
“You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”
“My wife . . . died, and I wasn’t there to help her. Maybe I would have died alongside her. I don’t know. What I do know is that until I met Gar, I had given up on letting anyone else close to me. I danced on the edge so many times, I’m surprised I survived.”
Fuck, he hated this. “So you think I should go back up there and help them with this crazy idea to save my life?”
“Yes.”
Byron paused and let everything penetrate through the bleakness of his thoughts. Could he do it? Sit back and not get involved now that he had Alec with him again? Could he ignore the new but just as powerful feelings he had for Mace, and let the two of them walk knowingly into danger while he refused to watch their backs? On the other hand, if he could convince them to let him give himself up to the Admiral . . .
He’d be asking for the same sacrifice from them. Leaving them with the same anguish he was facing.
“I’m a fucking idiot.”
Faolan shrugged. “No more than the rest of us. Love does that to a man. We just need to accept it.”
The deck shuddered. Faolan stood straight and looked over his shoulder. “We should get back to the bridge. Gods only know what they’ll do to my ship in an attempt to save your sorry ass.”
It was then Byron caught a glimpse of the man Faolan Wolf must have been before the ryana stole his will to survive. The in-charge, swaggering captain who did what he thought was right, even if it went against what others wanted. The pirate with a heart of gold.
He fell into step beside Faolan. “Alec is going to cure you, Wolf. Don’t think this little distraction of the Admiral’s is going to change that. He’ll be even more determined now.”
“One thing at a time. I’ll be fine for a few hours. You won’t be. We’ll get the Admiral off our backs, figure out who wants you dead, and then worry about saving my sorry ass.”
They walked the rest of the way back to the bridge in silence. Faolan took a deep breath, hesitating before triggering the door.
“Cover me if they start to get violent.” He winked at Byron. “Doc will be less than thrilled that I’ve managed to elude her again.”
“I’ve got your back, Captain.”
Walking onto the bridge, he couldn’t believe the level of chaos that had erupted. Both Mace and Gar were completely focused on the coms and navigation controls. Alec was standing off to the side, frowning as people rushed by.
“Status report,” Faolan shouted, causing at least half the crew to jump.
“We have a problem.” Gar’s calm response was disturbing amid all the noise.
“When don’t we have a problem?” Faolan marched over to stand beside his husband. “What in particular this time?”
Mace turned and looked at Byron. “As I suspected, the Admiral is keeping to his own timetable.”
Cocking an eyebrow, he returned her gaze. “What do you mean?”
“He’s here now.”
When Mace was younger, Faolan would tell her stories of the Admiral. It was more to keep her in line than for entertainment purposes.
“If you’re bad, the Admiral of the Black will steal you away and throw you in his prison ship, where you’ll be doomed to live out your sorry days eating synthmeat gruel and hoping the guards don’t decide to use you for target practice.”
“If you make a mistake at the helm and navigate into the wrong part of the quadrant, the Admiral’s demon crew will blast your ship to smithereens and leave no survivors.”
“Try to double-cross the Admiral and he’ll claim all your loot, break all your bones, and leave you bound to a post on a desert p
lanet for the strats and kralls to feast on.”
Not being a very young child, Mace had always laughed at him, teasing that he really needed to get better at being scary if anyone was going to take him seriously. She never did admit how much it bothered her to hear his descriptions of what the Admiral did to people who betrayed him. But she was too old to lose sleep over the pirates’ version of the monster under the bed.
It wasn’t until a few years later that they’d come across several burned-out wrecks floating in the black of space, and she’d learned that the Admiral wasn’t a myth or a ghost story or some character Faolan had dreamed up for his series of cautionary tales. He was real and very dangerous. Faolan’s stories all came back to haunt her dreams, and she finally took them seriously. She knew if she were ever about to cross paths with the Admiral, she’d be wisest to run the other way as fast as she could.
Which was why she couldn’t believe they were about to willingly open up their docking clamps to let the living embodiment of her nightmares come on board.
Byron and Alec hovered behind her, both ignoring her earlier tirade about going back to their quarters and staying there until she, Gar, and Faolan made sure the matter was under control.
Byron turned out to be snarky when he was nervous. “Well, this is going to be fun.”
“Shut up.” Alec sounded as tense as Mace felt. “Otherwise I might change my mind and convince Mace to hand you over to this guy so I can be done with you for good.”
The Belle Kurve vibrated as the Admiral’s ship, the Wyvern, connected. Mace’s heart was in her throat. Gods, why the hell was she so scared? She knew if things went wrong, Faolan wouldn’t just turn Byron over. They would fight for him, even though he was little more than a stranger to most of the crew. The men and women on the ship knew Byron and Alec were important to Mace, which was all the reason they needed to defend them.
A man’s voice crackled through the coms. “Belle Kurve, this is the Wyvern. We’ve secured docking clamps and are ready to board.”
“Wyvern, this is Captain Wolf. We are ready to welcome the Admiral on board.” Faolan clicked off the system and rolled his eyes. “Like the bastard gave us any choice.”
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