by Kris Delake
Justified.
Misha pulled on his clothes, willing them to be his armor against the woman in his suite. He had to think of her as the problem she was, not as the first person who had ever made him crave her.
And the only way he could do that was to forbid those thoughts.
He felt like he had a bit of control as he pulled open the bathroom door. He walked down the stairs to the suite’s main living area with its two couches, three entertainment units, full dining table, and comfortable chairs. Then he saw her, sneaking to the front door.
He reached her as she grabbed the lock. His fingers closed around her wrist, and he wanted to pull her against him again, kiss her until she was senseless.
Instead, he clutched that wrist against his chest in a hold that if he put a slightly different amount of torque on it, might actually break a bone.
It didn’t hurt her, but she knew what he was doing. She looked up at him with those beautifully shaped eyes. The green was too bright. He wanted to tell her to remove it, to look like she used to.
Hell, he wanted to feather her face with kisses, make her moan the way she had made him moan.
Instead, he said, “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to get us breakfast,” she lied.
He nodded, deciding to play along. “No need. I ordered some a while ago.”
Her face shifted. He couldn’t tell if she knew he was playing her or not. He kept a hand on her wrist, but loosened his grip, and led her to the large table.
When he got there, he tapped the top. The food he had ordered before she woke up slid through the system into the release window beneath the table. The smell of coffee and fresh baked bread filled the room.
Using just her wrist, he eased her into an upholstered chair. She looked gorgeous in the clothes he had gotten for her. The pale pink blouse was open, showing just a little cleavage. The tan pants fit snugly, leaving nothing to his imagination—not that he needed to imagine.
His heart started racing. He made himself focus on the food instead.
He grabbed it out of the automatic delivery tray, and set plate after plate on the table. Then he lifted off the covers, revealing steaming eggs and real bacon, and fruit so fresh that it made his mouth water. The entire platter of pastries alone could have fed the two of them for a week.
She was staring at the pastries as if she had never seen anything like them. Maybe she hadn’t. She seemed to be doing everything on the cheap and apparently had for some time.
“You think of everything,” she said. “Clothes, food…”
Her voice trailed off, but they both knew what she had left off.
“The clothes look good.” He had ordered those as well through the ship’s boutiques, and had them sent through the same system that sent the food. At the luxury level, he paid for any kind of service he wanted. He didn’t have to leave the suite for the entire trip if that suited him, which it did not. But he was taking advantage of that this morning.
She ran her hands along the blouse. She stopped at her breasts, again, knowing that aroused him. She was trying to distract him so—what? she could bolt out that door?—and it was working. Indeed, the slight movement made him think that the color of her nipples matched the blouse. He wondered if that was what made him order it.
He made himself look away.
“We made it clear last night that we were going to spend the next twenty-four hours with each other,” he said. “It hasn’t been sixteen yet.”
She shrugged. “People get sick of each other. I’m sure the staff here knows that.”
He moved to the other side of the table. “I’m sure they do. But we have to keep up our little charade just a bit longer, so they don’t notice what you did last night.”
She raised her eyes to him. Her hands fell to the table top. Her expression was flat now. “If they notice, it’ll be because of you. I set the cameras so that they looped. No one would have realized I even opened the airlock if you had given me just a few more minutes.”
He shook his head. This was why she was getting into trouble. She thought short-term, not long-term.
“They would notice,” he said. “Not on the trip, but shortly thereafter. You didn’t think this through—”
“The schematics were different—”
“Not that,” he said. “The consequences.”
“No consequences,” she said. “I would be gone before they realized he was missing.”
“That’s not how it’s done,” he said.
She frowned. “Not how what’s done?”
“The job,” he said. “The key isn’t to let them slowly realize that something had gone wrong. The key is to make the death seem natural.”
She looked at him. “Who are you?”
He had already told her, but he did so again. “My name is Misha.”
He paused for just a moment, wondering why it was so important she know his real name, why he hoped she remembered him. Before she woke up, he had planned to tell her the name he traveled under in this sector, but when her eyes opened, he had blurted his real name. His heart name. The name only people who cared for him used.
She hadn’t understood him, which should have given him a reprieve, but some part of him wanted to hear that husky voice of hers murmur his name as if it meant something to her.
“Misha,” she said, frowning. Was she trying to place the name or had she finally figured out who he was? “You said that when I woke up.”
He felt an odd surge of disappointment. “Yes, I did.”
“And you know who I am,” she said.
“Of course I do,” he said. “Since I’m the one who hired you.”
Chapter 5
“You what?” she asked. Whatever she had expected him to say, it hadn’t been that. Her hands fell to her sides, and she felt cold even though the suite’s environmental controls were set slightly warm.
“I hired you,” he repeated, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
For what? she wanted to ask, but stopped herself just in time. She wasn’t sure she wanted the answer. The room, the clothes, the food, everything made more for a seduction than for a murder.
But he had helped her with Testrial, so he wasn’t talking about the sex. Not that she hired out for sex. She hired out for assassination, but never sex.
“What did you have against Elio Testrial?” she asked.
Misha’s smile was cool, faint, the smile of the man she had met in the corridor, not the man she had touched with such abandon a half an hour before. “He was a bad guy.”
“So you knew him?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
“Then why the hell did you want me to kill him?” she asked.
Misha leaned back slightly. He rested one elbow on the back of the chair. From this angle, she could see his muscular torso, the power in his body. He didn’t look slender now. He looked like a man who built for speed and danger, a man who could move across the table, grabbing a butter knife as he did so, and plunge it into the vulnerable base of her neck without a single thought.
“I hired you to kill him because I wanted to see you work.”
Her breath caught. “You wasted a man’s life for that?”
“I wasted?” he asked. “I’m not the one who killed him.”
She rose out of her chair. “You bastard.”
He hadn’t moved. Apparently, he didn’t perceive her as a threat. “Actually, I’m not a bastard. I’m legitimate in more ways than you are.”
That caught her. “What do you mean?”
He shrugged a single shoulder. “I am licensed. You’re not.”
“I don’t need a license to operate in the NetherRealm.” Which was true. This ship had to fly through the NetherRealm—an area of space between two organized governments, an area that no one claimed. She had waited to kill Testrial until the ship reached the NetherRealm.
“Technically, that’s true,” Misha said, “but this is what I mean by
short-term versus long-term thinking. You hid your crime from security so that no one would stop you—”
“I didn’t commit a crime,” she said. “I was on the job.”
Throughout this part of the galaxy, assassination was a crime only for the person who hired it done, not the person who actually carried out the work. And assassination wasn’t always considered a crime, if the person who ordered the death could prove justification.
Technically, Misha was the one guilty of a crime if he couldn’t prove that Testrial’s death was justified.
Misha, because he hired her.
“You didn’t let me finish,” Misha said softly. That voice brooked no disagreement. It made him seem as dangerous (more dangerous?) than his posture did.
She waved a hand at him, pretending a calm she didn’t feel. “By all means. Finish. After all, you hired me.”
His gaze met hers. He clearly knew what she was implying, that the crime here was his.
“It’s illegal to take a job as an assassin in both Litaera and Sygn Sectors if you don’t have a license,” he said.
“And the NetherRealm is between them,” she said. “So?”
“So,” he said with a bit of heat in his voice. “This ship will dock in Litaera. That’s when the authorities will discover that Testrial is no longer on board.”
“I’ll be long gone.” She knew that because she’d used this very method before. No one had caught her then. No one would catch her now.
“You’ll be long gone and wanted,” he said. “Because there will be no proof when Testrial died. And when there’s no proof, then governments decide that they can charge someone with a crime.”
“Well,” she said. “You gave them proof with your stupid airlock stunt.”
“I gave them a possibility,” he said. “One they’ll ignore. They’ll decide that he went into the disposal system or into one of the engines or into the recycling system, something that would have also left no trace.”
He was starting to make her angry now. He had screwed up her job. She had killed Testrial right on schedule. Then she would have dumped him out of the airlock and left no trace. The only way anyone would know he was gone was when the ship’s purser figured out that the number of passengers who left was one shy of the number that originally boarded. The crew would search to see who hadn’t checked out, find Testrial’s name, and then conduct a ship-wide search for him. The search would take hours. And when they didn’t find him, they would have to review exit footage to see if he just forgot to scan his pass.
When they realized he hadn’t done that, then they would examine his credit slips to see when he ate his last meal. Then they would figure out that he hadn’t done anything for half of the trip—since the NetherRealm. That would be when they would start searching for evidence of foul play.
By then, she would be deep in Litaera Sector, enjoying a few days off before searching for her next job. No one would connect her to him. No one ever connected her jobs to her.
Until Misha.
“I really don’t understand what your problem is,” she said. “I was doing my job just fine. I’m good at it. And you’re the one who screwed it up.”
He shook his head as if she was the one being difficult.
“And,” she said with a bit of emphasis in case he wanted to talk over her, “you seem perfectly capable of doing the job yourself. In fact, if I can believe you, you’re licensed. So you could have finished the job in Sygn Sector or in Litaera Sector or in the NetherRealm, giving you a lot more opportunity than me. You didn’t need to hire me. And if you were worried about Testrial recognizing you or something, then you took a really big risk because you were on board anyway. So seriously, Misha—or whatever the hell your name is—”
He winced. The movement was so slight she almost didn’t see it. However, she did, and it didn’t stop her. She continued, “You’re the one with the problem. Me, I just did a job, and I would have done a better job without your little drunk act.”
His entire body tensed. “My little drunk act? My little drunk act probably saved your career if not your life.”
She snorted. “I don’t need saving.”
He slowly leaned forward, his arm dropping at his side. “Really? Because those security guards were on their way when I found you. If I hadn’t helped, they would have found you fiddling with that airlock door, a dead body beside you, and you would have been arrested.”
She crossed her arms. “I would not. They found us on a different floor.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Misha said. “You don’t think that the moment a passenger touches the airlock controls that someone notices?”
“I would have made the notice look like a glitch,” she said.
“With what?” he asked. “Your magic powers?”
She let out a small breath. She wasn’t going to argue that point with him. Once she had figured out the changes in the airlock controls, she would have made the changes.
“They weren’t going to arrest me,” she finally said, knowing it sounded a bit lame.
“Yes, they would have. The moment they saw Testrial’s body. Then, if you told them you’d been hired, they would have asked for proof, and you don’t have proof because I never gave you any.”
“Except the initial order for the job,” she said.
“Which isn’t enough for Litaera Sector.”
“Fortunately, if they had found me with a dead body in that corridor, then they would have known I killed him in the NetherRealm. Tell me, who would have prosecuted me? In case you’ve forgotten, there’s no government in that realm, and the ship’s passenger instructions clearly state that the ship has no responsibility for crimes committed on board. The ship gives those instructions to cover its ass, in case thieves work the ship, to make sure there’s no liability. But it works the other way. The ship has security guards, sure, but they have no way to prosecute criminals.”
“Right,” Misha said. He was leaning even closer, his blue eyes flat. “They give anyone they catch to the local government when they land.”
“And the local government prosecutes if they have jurisdiction. But they have no jurisdiction in the NetherRealm.” She stood up. “I’ve done this before. A lot. And no matter what you think of me, I know my job.”
“If you knew your job, you wouldn’t be causing so many goddamn problems.”
She raised her eyebrows. He looked a bit stunned, as if he hadn’t expected those words to come out of his mouth. Or maybe that was just an act.
“Problems?” she asked softly.
“I’ve been arrested three times for your kills,” he said. “I’ve had to prove that I had nothing to do with them.”
“Really?” she asked. Then she smiled. “Thanks for the confirmation.”
His eyes narrowed. “Of what?”
She grinned at him. “That my method works.”
Then, wrapping her hand in a cloth napkin, she grabbed the biggest, gooiest pastry. She waved at him with the other.
“Thanks for the great night. It always feels good to not only scratch an itch, but get some free clothes and food in the bargain.” She walked across the room.
This time, he didn’t try to stop her. She got to the door before he even stood up. Then she waved two fingers, said, “See ya,” and let herself out.
But before she closed the door, she leaned back in.
“Oh,” she said as if she had just remembered something. “Since you saw my work, you know that I completed the job. You owe me the balance. Might as well pay now, since the final balance was due on notification of completion.”
Then she pulled the door closed and headed down the hall.
She wished she felt as jaunty as she had sounded. Instead, she was off balance and a bit confused.
He had hired her? Why? Because she annoyed him?
Or because he had planned for her to get caught, so he could prove that she was the one responsible for whatever killings he’d been arrested for?
She stopped when that thought hit. The bastard planned to turn her into the authorities.
Which was why he kept her in his room. The good sex, for him, was just a bonus.
Suddenly she felt dirty. And angry. And used. If she was an impulsive woman—which she usually was not (last night’s proof to the contrary)—she would go back into that room and give him what for.
But it was better to stay away from him.
No matter how much she wanted to go back in there and kick his (really sexy) ass.
Chapter 6
Misha stared at the door. He shouldn’t have let her go. For her own good, he shouldn’t have let her go.
But he couldn’t move. He still sat at the large table, eggs cooling in front of him, bacon looking soggy, a slight frown making his forehead ache. She was willing to let someone else take the blame for her work. And it apparently didn’t matter who.
So someone, some innocent someone, who didn’t have an assassin’s card or a proof of hire or even a partial justification, might actually go to prison because of someone she killed.
And some of the prisons in this sector—hell, in most sectors—were horrible places.
He stood up. He was shaking, and not because he needed to eat. He did, though. He was spent and tired and a bit achy, but in a tingly way—and he wrenched that thought out of his head. He couldn’t think like that. He couldn’t think about her like that, particularly now, now that all of his fears had been confirmed.
She really did have no ethics. She didn’t care about anyone else. Just like he had suspected when he started tracking her down.
Last night, he had thought she would be different. Last night, he had known she was different.
Naive, he told himself.
Confused.
Incompetent.
He’d even thought she was funny, the way she staggered under Elio Testrial’s weight, the curses she uttered as she tried to open that airlock.