Breakaway

by Michelle Diener

  Breakaway

  Michelle Diener

  Copyright © 2018 by Michelle Diener

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction and all names, people, places and incidents are either used fictitiously or are a product of the author’s imagination.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Coming Next . . .

  Excerpt: Interference & Insurgency

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Also by Michelle Diener

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Leo Gaudier walked a dangerous path.

  Sofie didn't pretend that wasn't part of what attracted her to him in the first place. She was all for sticking it to the Core Corporations. All for it with bells on.

  And it didn't hurt that she really liked the look of him.

  There'd been a little catch in her heart, a little hitch in her breath. A trembling, like fear or excitement. She'd never been affected like that before.

  And it didn't hurt that he'd been interested right back.

  Well, generally they all seemed interested, all did a little chasing, but she wasn't into hooking up with some guy in an Upper Reaches bar.

  That wasn't in her plan. She was just there to eavesdrop on loose-lipped Cores employees.

  Until Leo.

  Leo Gaudier was the first one she hadn't actively run from too fast for him to catch her.

  She'd run a little, but it was more out of habit.

  He'd been just tenacious enough, but not obnoxious with it.

  If she'd said no, it would have been no.

  No matter how fast he made her heart beat, she'd never have taken the next step with him if it had been any other way.

  Now she sat watching him on their third dinner out together with almost embarrassing stars in her eyes, even though the dangerous stuff he was into had just reared its head and interrupted their evening.

  Because it was part of the package, and she'd already acknowledged she liked everything she saw when it came to Leo, she didn't show so much as a flicker of displeasure when his comm sounded and he'd stood and excused himself from the table.

  It wasn't as if she was all that unencumbered herself. He just didn't know it yet.

  They were halfway through an excellent dinner at the best restaurant in Felicitos, the ground-tethered way station on the planet Garmen, otherwise known as Breakaway 1.

  The views were spectacular.

  From where she sat, up against the window, Sofie could see the curve of Garmen below, the blue of the ocean glimmering far in the distance as the last of the evening light touched it.

  Higher up, in the levels of Felicitos that edged out beyond Garmen's atmosphere, it was harder to see the details of the green, blue and rose planet.

  Prices and rents went up the lower you got, and you couldn't get any lower than The High Flyer.

  She seldom saw this view. She couldn't afford it. But sometimes, like now, when she did see the aching beauty of the curve of the planet, the breath-stealing vistas, she grudgingly conceded her father's work did mean something.

  Not everything--she'd never give him that. But it wasn't for nothing, either.

  Sofie turned away from the sights and looked over at Leo again.

  He stood at ease, hands in pockets, his back to her, talking into his comm a little distance from the other diners, in a small alcove designed specifically for privacy.

  He had removed his jacket--it was hanging over the back of the chair opposite her--and he stood in a perfectly fitted shirt and trousers, quite delectable from his dark, slightly wavy hair, broad shoulders and down over long, lean legs.

  Sofie lifted her glass of truly excellent wine, turning the glass this way and that to admire the almost luminous lavender hue of it, put it to her lips and took a sip. She shifted in her chair and caught the very last of the setting sun on the planet below her.

  A movement caught her eye, a reflection in the glass of the window, and she tilted her head to better see what it was.

  A man stepped out of the service entrance, which wasn't strange--waiters had been coming and going since they'd arrived--but there was something in the way he moved.

  Years of survival, of assuming danger was all around her, snapped her spine straight.

  It took an effort of will to force herself out of the fear, out of the frozen helplessness that descended for the split second it took for the man to walk from the service door to halfway across the restaurant floor.

  She was getting complacent. She had things cushier now than she ever had, and it was dulling her edge, she realized. A lapse like that, a victim's paralysis, would have seen her with her throat slit and her body lying in an alleyway faster than she could snap her fingers in the old days.

  But she was back to her old self now, the shock of an attack in this cocooned pocket of luxury over with.

  She almost smiled at herself. Nowhere was truly safe, and she'd been lying to herself if she thought otherwise.

  She moved her head a fraction, looked at the man under the sweep of her eyelashes.

  He was making for Leo.

  There was no rush about him, nothing to indicate he meant harm, but she never ignored her intuition.

  Never.

  Leo's bodyguard, who was sitting three tables away, had his eyes on his boss, not on the waiter, and Sofie knew calling out to warn Leo wouldn't work.

  The assassin would just shoot that much faster.

  Instead, she knocked the nearly empty bottle of lavender wine into Leo's almost full glass, then exclaimed loudly and jumped to her feet, brushing at her clothes, although she'd made sure not a drop of it landed on her pale gold evening dress.

  Damned if she would ruin it.

  She bent, one hand on the table for balance, as she slipped off her high-heeled gold sandal, and saw Leo had started to turn.

  The assassin had, too; eyeing her for a second before dismissing her outright, and focusing back on Leo.

  Leo's bodyguard, Zan, flicked his gaze in her direction, and something in the way his eyes jumped over the assassin had her radar screaming high alert.

  Inside job.

  No doubt about it.

  She lifted her shoe and threw, aiming for the assassin's hand as it came out of his pocket with a tiny laz.

  The sharp heel tip caught his fingers, and he dropped the slim weapon with a cry more of surprise than pain.

  Leo was looking at her by now, eyes wide, and they widened even more whe
n she picked up the fallen bottle of wine and threw it at his bodyguard.

  By the time it had smacked Zan in the chest, Sofie saw Leo had pulled a laz of his own.

  The assassin dived for his weapon and Leo shot him.

  It happened fast, but Zan was still in play--she saw his arm rising up, laz in hand, aimed not at the downed assassin but at Leo.

  She'd already tugged off her other shoe and she ran at the bulky guard, screaming to distract him.

  He started, flinching as she came at him, shoe raised over her head, and although he got a shot off at Leo, it wasn't the head shot he'd clearly been aiming for.

  Leo went down, but his hand went to his chest.

  Sofie threw the shoe, then scooped up the fallen bottle of wine while Zan stood, arms raised for another shot at Leo, and swung it at his head.

  Hard.

  He crumpled.

  For the first time, she became aware of the other diners.

  Couples were looking at her with eyes wide, mouths open.

  She turned away from them, picked up her shoes, which had conveniently landed near each other, and hopped into them one at a time as she headed for Leo.

  “Can you stand?” She kept her voice low.

  “Just about.” His words were strained and his breath labored.

  “You're wearing an anti-laz layer?”

  He shook his head.

  “Ouch.” She put an arm around him and hauled him up with his cooperation.

  When he got to his feet and could stand without her, she looked quickly around, picked up his comm unit which lay on the floor near the window, and then scooped up his jacket from the back of the chair and her own little bag.

  A faint whine and the whiff of ozone had her turning in fright, but it was Leo, laz in hand, pointed in Zan's direction.

  She didn't know if he'd killed the bodyguard or just made sure he stayed unconscious.

  She didn't want to know.

  The restaurant staff had disappeared the moment trouble started, something she was sure wasn't lost on a number of the patrons, but now a wild-eyed manager stumbled out of the same door as the assassin.

  Sofie didn't know if he were trying to extract payment or let them know the meal had been on the house--she didn't give him a chance to say anything.

  With all their belongings under one arm, she slid her other under Leo's shoulder and half-dragged, half-supported him to the door.

  The manager made a sound at the back of his throat, and she sent him a hard glare, shutting him down, and then staggered out with her burdens through the lavender frosted doors.

  Chapter 2

  Sofie Erdo was not who he thought she was.

  Leo leaned against the wall of the lift, breathing through the pain, and watched her as she bent over her screen, face fierce with concentration.

  He belatedly remembered this was the Lower Reaches, and she would need a code to operate the private lifts, but she obviously had one. He didn't have the energy to ask her how.

  “Do you have ports?” she suddenly asked, looking up at him.

  He nodded, slid a shaking hand into his pocket and handed the portable money credits over to her. She took them without a word and went back to her screen.

  He tried to work out exactly what had happened back in The High Flyer.

  His thoughts kept catching on her elegantly leaning over the table, one foot in the air behind her, as she reached back and took off a delicate golden shoe.

  Then she'd thrown it, and all notions of delicacy had disappeared. Lethal seemed the best description to replace it.

  She'd looked lethal.

  The thug the Cores had sent after him hadn't expected to be hit by the sharp heel of a shoe, and Leo had almost lost the advantage she'd given him because he hadn't expected it, either.

  And then there was Zan.

  The bastard had been with him nearly a year.

  He wondered what they'd done to get to him, but depressingly, they'd probably just offered him money.

  That was the way of things on the Breakaways.

  The sole reason for the two planets' existence.

  Zan had been part of his security team when they foiled the last attempt to get him two weeks ago. It was why Leo trusted him to work solo tonight, but the Cores were obviously getting desperate enough to part with large amounts of money to end this stalemate.

  They'd already killed two of his people this month.

  Leo wondered what they'd managed to get out of them before they died.

  The bodies had been dumped outside his warehouse, just to make sure he understood how much they'd suffered before they'd been murdered.

  And as a warning to his other staff.

  Resist talking, and you won't go easy.

  He felt a sudden lightness, as if he could float upward, and wondered if it was the laz hit, or if he really was almost weightless as the lift plummeted down. It decelerated suddenly, and the lift door pivoted open.

  Sofie stepped close to him, put an arm around him and took his weight.

  She drew him out of the enclosed space as fast as she could without hurting him more, and that, more than anything else, quelled the tiny voice in his head that said this might be a set-up, that she might be part of the Cores' plot.

  He'd tried to entice her into revealing her stance on the Cores before, and she'd kept her opinions bland and disinterested.

  The woman who'd foiled an assassination attempt with two sandals and an empty bottle of wine didn't have a bland bone in her very lovely body.

  He wondered how she planned to get them out.

  While Leo knew the powerful owners of the Cores had originally mandated a single entry and exit point when they built their tethered way station, that had proved so impractical, they'd had to create several.

  What they had planned to be a tightly controlled structure was in fact a leaky sieve. Still, if they were behind this attempt to murder him then they'd be watching all of the ways out.

  Sofie gently pushed him up against a cold stone wall and then tap tap tapped away on her heels, taking her warmth and the truly lovely scent he couldn't get enough of with her.

  The stone told him they'd gone deep. Underground deep.

  Every part of the way station that sat above the ground was tough, rigid and as light as the engineers could get it. It was only the underground levels that would include stone.

  He'd never come down this far.

  He didn't even realize the lifts reached this low and that anyone other than authorized personnel would have the codes to get to it.

  One thing he was sure about, Sofie Erdo was not authorized personnel.

  There was a faint squeak of rubber wheels on a smooth surface, and then Sofie was back.

  He forced eyes he hadn't realized were closed back open, and saw she'd gone to fetch a tiny electro-magnetic cart.

  “In you go.” She got an arm around him, and he staggered toward it. As she lowered him down, she lost her grip on him, and he fell awkwardly into the passenger seat.

  Pain overwhelmed him.

  When he struggled back to consciousness, he guessed only a moment or two had passed because they were still in the same spot, but Sofie was stroking his face.

  There were tears on her cheeks, which made him frown. She gave an exclamation of relief when she saw he was back, and ran around to the other seat with the tap tap tap of her shoes, and eased the EM off into the darkness.

  “Where . . . going?” he mumbled. He didn't hear her answer.

  Panic gripped him, spiking his adrenaline and bringing him a little more into consciousness.

  “It's all right.” Sofie glanced at him. “I'm getting us out of here.”

  Her words shouldn't have calmed him--he'd just come to the conclusion he didn't know her at all--but they did. He leaned back in his seat, and let the darkness around them swallow him up.

  Leo was a big man.

  Sofie looked down at him and considered her options.

&n
bsp; Picking him up was way beyond her. She guessed his weight was nearly double her own, and while she wasn't short by any means, he was a good head and shoulders taller than her.

  She didn't want a repeat of what happened near the lifts. She'd seen him go white with pain as he hit the center console between the seats of the EM with his injured side and then pass out.

  It had shaken her, and she'd try just about anything to make sure it didn't happen again.

  She'd have to engage brain power here, rather than muscles.

  She looked around her at what she had to work with.

  The EM track ended in front of what appeared to be a solid wall in a narrow passageway. On one side, an air pump hummed quietly, and lightweight metal boxes lined the opposite wall, labeled with the names of spare parts.

  The wall wasn't a dead end, though.

  She went to the air pump and typed a code into the keypad on its lock mechanism.

  There was a faint click, and the end wall popped open, swinging outward on its hinges.

  The EM wouldn't work beyond this point, though, an oversight so egregious she felt like chasing down a few of the construction workers who'd created it and yelling at them.

  Of course, they'd built it in secret, risking their lives to create hidden ways into the tethered way station the Cores didn't know about. And this wasn't the only one they'd built.

  But still.

  You needed to be able to walk out for it to be useful. And Leo wasn't walking anywhere right now.

  She opened the door wider, peering down the tunnel to see if anyone had left anything useful inside for her.