Barron's Last Stand (The Black Wing Chronicles Book 3)

by JC Cassels

  Bo’s eyes narrowed. Q’mann normally shunned such adornments. She would have to watch that one. Such a break in tradition marked him as a greater threat than usual. Q’mann weren’t a species she took lightly. An unpredictable Q’mann was dangerous, even by her standards.

  “Hello, Gray,” she said, coming to a halt across the table from the crime boss. “Here he is, delivered alive and well, as promised.”

  “So I see, Bo.” Gray took his time looking her over.

  She’d been leered at before. She’d been leered at by the best…and the worst. Gray fell somewhere in between.

  Sure, he was a disgusting slob; he was also a sadistic misogynist looking for a way to get under her skin and between her legs – by force, if necessary.

  The main thing that kept him in check was the well-known fact that she could drop both Q’mann before Gray finished ordering them to grab her.

  He licked his fleshy lips, which curved into an angelic smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “It’s everything I would have expected from you.”

  Bo lifted an eyebrow at his remark, but otherwise didn’t acknowledge it.

  Gray stared past her shoulder. “I didn’t know you were bringing company along.”

  Bo followed his pointed look.

  Blade stopped a few steps away. He leaned his shoulder against the support column that marked the edge of the VIP section. The very picture of indolent boredom, his gaze roamed the restaurant, passing over Gray and his entourage with only minimal apparent interest. No doubt he had already identified and planned how to dispatch every potential threat in the restaurant and calculated at least two avenues of escape. Whatever their personal feelings, the man was a consummate professional. If she could trust nothing else, she trusted that.

  She smiled.

  “Your business is with me, not him.” She gestured toward the communications terminal on the table. “My credit transfer?”

  Gray keyed in a code and leaned back in his seat. “Done.”

  Bo flashed him a bland smile. “You don’t mind if I check for myself?”

  Gray waved a hand, and one of the Q’mann pushed the terminal across the table to her.

  Bo glanced down at the terminal and shook her head. “I prefer to use my own data reader.”

  With an imperious nod, Gray watched her with all the intensity of a trapper waiting to see which way the prey was going to wander.

  Careful to make no sudden movements, with two fingers, Bo pulled her data reader from her pocket and accessed her financials. A message flashed up on the screen in Gallic.

  “When dark clouds gather,

  When the wind howls through the Bluestone Valley

  And whispers through the trees atop the Gallis Highlands,

  When the light of hope is fading...”

  Bo swayed as her vision receded to a narrow point of light. Adrenaline flooded her system, making her hands tremble.

  Bo glanced over her shoulder at Blade, catching his eye. The small crease between his eyebrows was the only visible evidence of his unease. He offered her a benign smile, and kept a casual watch on Gray’s entourage. He’d seen the message, and spoke Gallic like a native, but did he understand the significance?

  Bo deleted the message, switched off the display, and tucked the reader back into her pocket. “I’m satisfied, gentlemen,” she said. Taking a step back, she gestured toward Nix. “He’s all yours, Gray.”

  Gray nodded. “It’s always a pleasure doing business with you, Commander,” he said. “That job offer still stands.”

  She grinned. “Thanks, Gray, but I’m happy working with Redmaster Blue.”

  “Redmaster Blue is a myth.” Gray’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “My offer might be more attractive to you in light of recent events,” he said calmly. “With the news reports coming out, you’ll need all the friends you can get.” He looked meaningfully to Blade. “I can guarantee that he won’t be able to protect you as well as I can.”

  A warning chill crept up her spine. She kept her smile plastered in place. “What’s coming?”

  Gray shook his head. “It’s probably nothing, Bo,” he assured her. “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. You know how to reach me.”

  With a wave of his hand, Gray ended their audience.

  “Wait,” she said. “What news, Gray?”

  He rose and his retinue fell into step around him.

  “Gray?”

  She started to follow them, but Blade touched her lightly on the hand. She glanced at him and he stopped her with a barely perceptible shake of his head.

  With one final look of regret, Nix followed his brother from the restaurant, leaving Bo staring helplessly after them.

  “Why did you stop me, Blade?”

  “Because there’s nothing wrong with your instincts,” he said. He waited for her to look at him before he nodded toward Gray. “The bastard is up to something. First thing we need to do is find out what the news reports are saying.”

  Blade was right, of course. She tended to prefer direct assaults, while he relied on subtlety and intelligence gathering.

  “I need to call Edge…”

  “Come on,” he said. Glancing around, he nudged her ahead of him, keeping a proprietary hand on the small of her back.

  Bo swallowed a long-suffering sigh. So much for Blade keeping his hands to himself. Although, if she were being honest, there was something comforting in the gesture.

  His jaw tightened. “What was the big deal about that message?”

  “It was from an epic poem, Requiem for the Broken Wing. It’s a warning, a signal, a distress call. Edge is in trouble…or I am.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Every child of Barron Clan has to memorize that poem in school. It’s about the day Mondhuoun fell to the Second Sector. It’s about The Barron’s Last Stand. Something horrible has happened…or is about to.”

  ***

  Though they walked in companionable silence along the business level of the promenade, Blade maintained a casual vigil. He hadn’t kept himself alive by ignoring the tiny, niggling sense of unease that set the flesh on the back of his neck crawling. Gray had either been trying to warn Bo of impending disaster, or gloating over it. Either way, it would be to her benefit to be completely unpredictable. That was where he excelled.

  Without warning, he changed direction, pulling her into an upscale female clothier.

  “What are you…?”

  “Do you have your ‘Marissa’ identification on you?”

  Bo stopped beside a rack of brightly-colored dresses and glared up at him. “What are you playing at?”

  He shook his head and scanned the promenade outside the shop’s front window. “Something is off,” he said. “Don’t you feel it?”

  His blue eyes flicked over her, and his lips quirked. “Or are you so distracted by me that you aren’t paying attention?”

  Bo bristled. “Please, you’re not that irresistible.”

  The challenge hung unspoken in the air between them. Never one to back down, he leaned toward her. Bo held up her hand to stop him. The fingers pressed against his lips trembled slightly, holding him at bay. Her eyes widened as she realized the intimacy of her touch. Her pupils dilated slightly, and her chest rose and fell quickly.

  He chuckled against her fingertips and pulled her hand away from his mouth, but not before he brushed a kiss into her palm.

  “What’s the first thing you do when you take on a contract?”

  “What does this have to do with anything?”

  He smiled. “Humor me. I’m trying to reason with a stubborn woman.” He took both her hands in his. “Now, what’s the first thing you do?”

  Bo sighed. “Intel. Learn everything you can. Regular routes, routines…”

  “You said you’ve known Gray for years. That means he’s had time to observe you and find patterns in your behavior. If he’s got enough intel on you, he can predict your moves and push you into a trap. He’s p
robably counting on you to check in with Edge and then go back to Sundance.”

  “So…what? I don’t get information and I abandon ship?”

  “He may have learned your patterns. He won’t know ours.”

  “Ours? You mean you and your team?”

  He shook his head. “No. The boys and I have a pretty substantial intelligence file with several organizations. I meant you and me. We worked well together, Bo.”

  “Yeah, until you screwed me over.”

  He bit back a comment. Now was not the time to get into an argument about the past.

  “Do you have your Joy Babe ID?” he asked again.

  Glancing past him out the window, Bo hesitated. “I’m in some unknown trouble and your solution is for me to disarm myself and dress like a Joy Babe? Do you not see a problem with that?”

  “Until five minutes ago, no one had ever put the two of us together. For seven years, Blade and Marissa have been a very public and law-abiding couple. Which woman do you think stands a better chance of getting off this station without shots being fired?”

  “Since when are you so eager to avoid a gunfight?”

  His lips twitched. “Since the only blaster I’ve got is a girl gun,” he said. “Bo, I am asking you to trust me.”

  He waited patiently for her to wrestle with her doubts.

  Longing and apprehension roiled the air around her. Her lips tightened. Bo pulled her hands from his.

  He sighed in defeat. Their enemies and his own secrets had done enough damage to her trust in him. He didn’t blame her for not trusting him now.

  She reached into her jacket and pulled out a stack of data cards.

  A spark of hope flickered to life in his chest.

  She sorted through the stack until she found the one he wanted. Her amber eyes locked with his. Without comment, she placed the card in his outstretched hand. His fingers closed over the hard plastiform card, brushing hers. The warm touch of her fingers lit up his nerves like an electrical shock. His pulse thrummed with a new rhythm.

  Her smile contained more than a hint of self-mockery. “I may be stubborn, but I do eventually respond to reason.”

  “Thank you.” Tucking the card into the inside pocket of his jacket, he glanced around the colorful racks of clothing. “You don’t need my help finding something that Marissa would wear, do you?”

  She frowned at him. “Where will you be?”

  “I’ll be over here keeping a lookout.”

  Her eyes narrowed, drawing a chuckle from him.

  “I’m a guy,” he said with a grin. “I don’t even like shopping for my own clothes.”

  Rolling her eyes, she didn’t say anything more, but turned and ventured deeper into the shop.

  Staring after her, he canted his head, admiring the way her black trousers molded to her shapely bottom until she rounded the corner, putting a rack of clothing between them.

  He probably shouldn’t have kissed her, but dammit – when she grabbed him like that, what had she expected? He wasn’t a gentleman. He never had been. Of course, the joke was on him. She was angrier than ever and he wanted her so badly it hurt.

  With a shake of his head, he turned his attention to the crowd milling about outside. They’d been under surveillance since they’d stepped aboard the station. Blade scanned the promenade. Whoever had been following them was like a ghost. If it hadn’t been for his training with Tahar, he might never have noticed it.

  Awareness crackled along the back of his neck like ribbons of plasma, setting the short hair there on end. Predatory eyes watched them. He could feel it. Clearing his mind, he brought his awareness inward, settling his anxieties with an ease borne of long years of practice. Dismissing the scattered energies of the crowd casually milling by, he waited patiently as the patterns settled around him like dust clouds stirred by a hapless breeze, leaving only the laser sharp beacon pointing the way to the one who watched them. It took only seconds, but it felt like several long minutes as time seemed to slow around him, dilating to accommodate his expanded senses.

  The crowd shifted and, for a brief instant, he met a pair of cold amber eyes peering at him from deep in the shadows across the wide promenade. He pushed away from the rack of colorful dresses, not taking his gaze from his quarry.

  “Blade?”

  “Don’t leave this shop for any reason,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  He didn’t wait for her retort, but stepped out onto the crowded promenade. Wending his way through the flowing mass of life forms, he headed straight for his target. The moment Blade made him they both had known it. Glancing behind him to make sure Bo hadn’t followed, he stepped into the dark corridor. He didn’t need to wait for his eyes to adjust to the dimmer light. His senses were still open wide enough to recognize the large man standing unmoving in the shadows.

  “Royce, what are you doing here?”

  Royce Barron, Bo’s uncle, didn’t crack a smile. “Tracking Bo,” he said with his customary Barron terseness. “She’s in it deep this time.”

  “Yeah, I’m getting that,” Blade said, peering over his shoulder at the dress shop. “What’s going on?”

  “How long have you been with her?”

  A question answered with another question. That didn’t bode well. Blade’s eyes narrowed.

  “We just got in from Akita,” he said. “Gray hired her to break out his kid brother. She accidentally broke me out, too, and I stowed away. What’s wrong?”

  Some of the tension eased out of Royce’s shoulders. “She didn’t have time to do it, then.”

  A warning chill rippled down Blade’s spine. “Do what?”

  Royce shifted from one foot to another and, in the darkness, refused to meet Blade’s stare. “There’s been an attempt on your father.”

  “That’s why I stowed away,” Blade said. “I heard rumors.”

  Royce cleared his throat. “Yeah, well…did you hear all the rumors?”

  Blade shook his head. “I’m guessing no.”

  Royce nodded toward the dress shop. “I lost her a few weeks ago,” he said. “There were raids on Redmaster Blue holdings on Altair. Edge went dark.”

  With Edge’s help, Royce had been tracking Bo for the past five years, keeping a distant watch and helping her without ever coming into direct contact with her.

  Worry creased Blade’s brow. “Have you heard from him?”

  Royce shook his head. “Not directly,” he said. “I keep getting the same message – a distress call.”

  “Requiem for the Broken Wing?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Bo got it too, just now. What does it mean?”

  “It can’t be a coincidence. The timing of the attack on Marin and the raids on Redmaster Blue…when Edge went dark, I picked up Bo’s trail on Trisdos.”

  Blade’s smile faded. “Trisdos? Bo wouldn’t go to Trisdos on her own. She’d be arrested before she stepped off the ramp.”

  Royce nodded. “That’s why I burned up hyperspace to get there,” he said. “I figured if she were on Trisdos, she’d need backup. I got there about the same time the attack on your father went down.” Royce reached into his jacket and pulled out an IC issue data reader. He called up a news report and handed it to Blade. “Whoever arranged this is damn good. They even fooled me. I thought she’d orchestrated the whole thing.”

  Blade read the report of the attack on his father. The evidence against Bo was damning. His jaw tightened. Hell, if he hadn’t known better, he might have believed it himself. Anger, fear, hatred…all of the emotions he’d spent so many years mastering boiled up inside him, tightening his throat, choking him. His blood pressure soared as his heart pounded, forcing a cocktail of blood and adrenaline through his veins. The dark monster he’d worked so hard to bury twisted and stretched inside him, reaching for a means of escape. A muscle in his jaw twitched.

  “Hey kid?” Royce touched his shoulder. “You okay?”

  Blade swallowed his emotions, ruth
lessly bludgeoning the monster back into its cell. He’d come too far to succumb to his darkness now.

  No.

  He was not okay.

  Falling back on the professional detachment the Inner Circle had drilled into him so many years ago, he handed the data reader back to Royce. He turned his gaze toward the dress shop, catching a glimpse of Bo moving through the racks of clothes, blessedly unaware of her predicament.

  “And you tracked her here?”

  “She left a pretty good trail,” Royce said, “like she wanted to be caught. Extra security is on the way here. They know she’s aboard. There is an armed squad at Sundance waiting for you to come back. They’re just trying to pin down her location now.”

  Blade nodded.

  “Nobody was counting on you to be with her. Nobody knows that you two even know each other.”

  “Gray knows now,” Blade corrected Royce. “The way he was acting, he’s up to his neck in this. Likely, they hired him to get Bo out of the way so she wouldn’t have an alibi that could be corroborated.”

  “Lucky break you were in the right place at the right time.”

  Blade snorted in amusement. “Tahar would call it fate.”

  “Fate. Divine providence. Call it what you will, I’m inclined to agree.” Royce rested his fists on his hips. “You gotta get her out of here, kid – while the getting is good.”

  “Not if I can’t get her back on Sundance without a running gun battle.” A sense of calm settled over him. “Find Edge,” Blade said, his voice firm. “He’s your priority now. We’re going to need him for what’s coming. In the meantime, I’ll fire off a message to Adin to get things moving on Trisdos. It’s time we came out of the shadows.”

  “You sure about that? We’ll only get one shot at this.”