by Layla Nash
Jess’s head tilted and her lips twitched, close to a smile. “Right. More engineering problems to deal with. Well, girl, no use delaying. Let’s get you ready.”
“Ready?” Rowan blinked and looked down at herself. “What do you mean, ready?”
“You have to look presentable, otherwise the Dablonians won’t deal with you.” Jess linked her arm through Rowan’s and dragged her toward the cabin. “Gentlemen, just give us a few minutes.”
Rowan wanted to claw the doorframe to keep from entering the dark interior, but Jess’s surprising strength carried Rowan all the way to the bedroom she occupied. Jess paused in the doorway and then shut the door behind them. A huge grin spread across her face as she caught Rowan’s shoulders. “You sneaky engineer.”
“What?” Rowan cleared her throat and hauled out her duffel of uniforms and other assorted clothes. “I didn’t mean to just leave this morning, I—”
“Not that,” Jess said. She jerked her chin at the neatly-made bed. “I’ve never seen you make a bed in your life. But Mrax is very fastidious, isn’t he?”
Rowan froze. She didn’t dare look at Jess for fear she would blurt everything out. Despite her pondering as she worked on the surface runner, Rowan just couldn’t imagine telling Jess what she and Mrax did. It was too personal, too intimate. Even if it looked like Jess already suspected.
The information officer picked through Rowan’s clothes to find something suitable. “You want to tell me or should I guess?”
Rowan could have made a joke. She could have denied it. She could have said almost anything. Instead she whispered, “Please don’t.”
Jess went still, then glanced over her shoulder at where Rowan waited near the door. “Did he hurt you? Force you to do something?”
There was a coldness, a rage, in her eyes that made Rowan blink. Mrax would have been dead within the minute, Rowan had no doubt, if she answered in the affirmative and Jess took action. Rowan cleared her throat and shook her head. “No.”
Jess’s eyes narrowed again, like maybe she didn’t believe Rowan, then she pulled some old Earther clothes from the bottom of the duffel and handed them over. “Look, Rowan. You can talk to me. Please talk to me. If you’ve got questions or want to laugh about something or just talk, please talk to me. I promise there’s nothing you can say that would surprise me or offend me or anything. I promise.”
It warmed Rowan’s heart and made her want to cry at the same time.
Jess caught her shoulders and crouched enough she could make eye contact, and Jess’s expression softened. “Honey, I’m serious. If something happened that you didn’t want to happen, I will march outside right now and butcher Mrax like a country hog. I won’t even blink. And Trazzak will help me.”
“It’s not that.” Rowan took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. They were wasting daylight and she didn’t want to be the reason they had to delay the mission another day. “I’ve never really had a friend like this. To…confide in.”
“Well, you do now.” Jess smiled brightly and tugged on the end of Rowan’s ponytail. “So we will have a girl’s night tonight to go through every damn detail. First you have to go buy some fancy-ass weapons, though. Are you okay to still go with Mrax? We can adjust the plan if—”
Rowan shook her head, relief making her lightheaded. “No, we shouldn’t change the plan. We’ll be fine.”
“Yeah you will.” Jess grinned and winked, then sauntered toward the door. “You get changed, then I’ll do something with your hair. Let’s get a move on.”
Rowan held back a nervous shiver until the door closed, then changed her clothes as quickly as possible. She didn’t really know what a girl’s night entailed, but it sounded like Jess wanted to talk about all of it. Maybe she had some recommendations on what Rowan could do to really make Mrax’s scales change. Rowan’s whole face roasted. She just assumed she and Mrax would... do it again. Maybe that night.
Rowan stared at herself in the dingy, wavy mirror on the wall. What if Mrax didn’t want to? What if she hadn’t done it well enough, despite what he claimed, and he didn’t want to sleep with her again? Her heart sped up with anxiety and she gulped for air. It was too late to worry about that, and almost too early, too.
She had to focus. Had to. There wasn’t any other option. They had business to do, and everything else had to wait.
Or so she told herself.
Chapter 25
Mrax
Mrax stood outside with Trazzak as the Earthers went into the cabin. The second-in-command didn’t comment on Mrax’s alerted scales and spikes while they waited for Rowan to reappear from the boneyard where she’d disappeared. Jess didn’t pick up on Mrax’s changed posture and attention to the engineer, but Trazzak noted it immediately. Mrax knew it from the other Xaravian’s quickly-hidden grin. He refused to acknowledge Trazzak’s chuckle, and kept his attention on the boneyard even as he shoved down the immediate, insane need to find her.
He’d woken to find her gone and it triggered every hunter’s instinct he possessed. He needed her safe and warm and content with him, in bed—not wandering around in the world where she could get hurt or lost. Mrax had roared awake and immediately searched the area surrounding the cabin. When that didn’t turn up any sign of Rowan, he gambled on finding her before Trazzak and Jess left the fighter. He ran—flat-out sprinted—through the boneyard until he heard the telltale sounds of Rowan’s tinkering.
Mrax stayed out of view so he could listen to her soft humming and occasional burst of song while she worked. She mesmerized him even in the simplest of actions. He could have watched her work for hours. Instead, he returned to the cabin to clean himself and the room and prepare for the mission. After their night together, he liked even less the idea of walking Rowan into the armaments company filled with Dablonians. It set his teeth on edge still more when she flew that surface runner up to the cabin and hopped out, so pleased with herself she practically swung her arms and whistled. He liked seeing her proud of her accomplishments. He loved seeing her bold and confident and so fucking beautiful in the early morning light.
Mrax almost had to excuse himself—or drag Rowan back into the cabin—when he caught Trazzak’s grin and the curious tilt to Jess’s head. Mrax pushed down the need to mark Rowan more and instead thought about the mission in front of them. Trazzak, still laughing, spread out a rough approximation of a blueprint for the headquarters building. Since it was based on the second-in-command’s recollection of their mission several moons prior, Mrax didn’t have a lot of faith in the accuracy. Of course, since Jess was a former information officer and had been trained to observe and take notes, Mrax figured there was at least a small chance the blueprints would hold up once he was inside.
A very small chance. Minuscule.
It felt like an eternity before the Earthers reappeared. Rowan looked both competent and very fetching in heavy trousers, a neat shirt, and a toolbelt with a variety of small implements, notebooks, and other doodads he didn’t recognize. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face but still trailed around her shoulders, leaving her silhouette still feminine but able to work on machines. His heart cracked and started to melt. She was still Rowan, just... more. Better. More comfortable with herself.
Trazzak snorted and Mrax looked down at his scales to see the blue-purple swirls of affection covering Mrax from head to toe. Jess blinked in stunned silence, though Rowan frowned at her own clothes like she was looking for the joke.
Mrax’s voice came out too gruff as he picked up his bag with all the currency needed to purchase the weapons. “We should go.”
Rowan studied him intensely, then glanced at Jess. Something unspoken passed between them, then Rowan bolted for the surface runner. Color bloomed across her cheeks, though he couldn’t tell if it was good or bad.
He drew breath to ask her or curse Trazzak for his lack of manners, but Jess stepped in front of him. The Earther’s expression turned to stone, a chilling echo of the information offic
ers who’d tortured him during his years in prison, and she slammed her fist into his chest. She wasn’t strong enough to really hurt him, though he took the message seriously.
Jess’s voice dropped and she spoke in passable Low Xarav, guttural and filled with every low class curse he’d heard—and a few he hadn’t. “Listen to me, you motherless hawgmaut spawn. If you hurt her, the years you spent in that prison will be a joyous memory compared to what I’ll do to you. They rewrote the interrogation manual after I went through because I came up with shit that no one else would do. I will fuck up your world and destroy your suns. Your universe will be a desert and I’ll be the sandstorm that buries you. Understood?”
Mrax blinked, impressed despite himself. Even Trazzak’s eyes widened, and he leaned away from his mate like he’d never seen that side of her. Mrax filed that away to tease the warrior about later. He kept his expression grave, though, and met the furious Earther’s gaze evenly. “First, don’t talk about my mother like that.”
She practically hissed and spit like one of those startled Earther cats that Vaant’s mate brought on the ship.
He held up a hand to prevent her from cursing at him more and making him homesick for his sisters insulting him in his mother tongue. “Second, I will not hurt her. She is dear to me. What has passed between us is between us and not something I will discuss with you. She made me scales, Earther. She has offered me something no one else in the universe even noticed was missing. How could I not protect her, if only because of that?”
Trazzak sucked in a breath and said something under his breath about new scales, but Jess didn’t even blink.
They might have stood there forever, facing off, but Rowan’s head popped up from the cockpit of the surface runner. “Are we going? Is there a problem?”
She sounded like a kid wanting to take a new toy out for a spin—which was a pretty apt description of the crazy engineer. He didn’t look away from Jess and arched an eyebrow. “Is there a problem?”
“Not yet,” Jess growled. She jerked her head at the surface runner. “Bring her back to me and I will consider a truce. Eventually.”
Trazzak looped his arm around her neck, mostly affectionately but also to drag her away from Mrax, and he murmured in his mate’s ear, “Stop threatening my brother. You are fierce and I enjoy that about you, but you should not show that to everyone. Particularly another warrior. What if he decides he wants you? Then I would have to kill him.”
“He loves Rowan,” Jess said. She easily maneuvered out of Trazzak’s hold and stalked toward the cabin. “Don’t fuck this up, Mrax.”
Which left Mrax and Trazzak standing there like two idiots as the cabin door slammed and Rowan ducked once more into the ship. Trazzak started to laugh, a deep belly laugh that turned his scales a brilliant sky-blue. “We’re both fucked, brother. These Earthers...” He shook his head and wandered back to the fighter craft after wishing Mrax good luck, chuckling the whole way.
Mrax took a deep breath as he hauled himself into the surface runner and squeezed Rowan’s shoulder as he took the seat next to hers. “You ready to fly this?”
“Hell yeah,” she said. She even grinned at him as she revved the engines and launched them into the air.
He suddenly wished he’d brought a larger medical bag with him.
Chapter 26
Rowan
Rowan only paid half attention to the conversation between Jess and Mrax, since she figured Jess would tell her about it later during that “girl’s night” and she wanted to make sure the surface runner’s juiced-up engines wouldn’t malfunction on the way to the Dablonian company. Nerves sped up her heart as she flew the ship low to the ground to avoid radar, glancing at the coordinates she’d fed into the computers. She corrected the course once or twice, satisfied that the runner’s navigation system functioned well, and sat back to enjoy the sight of the Dablonian terrain blurring past.
Of course, that gave her time and space to think about Mrax sitting right next to her. He hadn’t said anything about their night together, though she hadn’t given him any opportunity to comment. Maybe he was angry that she’d disappeared on him. Rowan held her breath and struggled to find something to say.
Mrax made it easy, though. He studied a few scraps of paper and a battered old tablet, and didn’t stare at her or invade her space. “Are you well, Rowan?”
“Y-Yes,” she said. She hated stuttering; it just reminded her of being taunted in the Fleet when she’d enlisted. Country bumpkin, they’d called her. Dirt farmer. Hick. And those were just from the other Earthers. What the non-Earthers called her... She pushed away the memories. “I’m good. Are you?”
And that left her waiting, breathless, for his response. What if he said he wasn’t? What if he said he was?
Mrax nodded and kept his attention on what looked like schematics or blueprints. “I am well. I slept very well. Best rest I’ve had in weeks.”
Her cheeks heated. Did he mean that she had something to do with it? Rowan tried to stop the parade of questions in her racing thoughts, and instead focused on the surface runner and the landscape as they approached the company headquarters. “I slept well, too.”
She caught a hint of his smile in her peripheral vision, but he didn’t say anything else. Rowan took a deep breath as the silence stretched. She took the controls once more and disengaged the guidance system, slowing the ship so it didn’t set off any alarms with the corporation’s defensive systems.
Dust blew up in great gusty clouds as she finally set the surface runner down on a designated landing zone, and began the process of cooling the engines and resetting the navigation system so they’d be able to start up fast and get out of there immediately. Just in case.
“Let’s do this,” Mrax said under his breath. He glanced out one of the windows and shouldered his bag full of currency. “Here they come.”
Rowan nodded, checked the panels one last time, and shoved to her feet to follow him down the ladder. She could do it. She could. It was her time to shine.
Chapter 27
Rowan
Three Dablonians approached the landing zone and the surface runner; two were definitely security, and the third was just as clearly a salesman of some kind. Rowan dropped to the ground, skipping most of the rungs on the ladder, and adjusted her toolbelt and clothes as she followed Mrax to where the Dablonians waited.
Rowan’s stomach turned over to see them and the disconcerting way they arranged their limbs while in motion. While three arms and four legs might have been useful for building and tearing down complex machines, it looked just as complicated to get them all moving in the same direction. Blue-gray skin gave them an eerie pallor, even in the blazing brightness of their two suns. And something about the way their teeth clicked together as they murmured to each other gave her goosebumps on top of goosebumps.
And their eyes… Rowan had interacted with—well, argued with—any number of predatory species that had joined the Alliance just for the sake of stealing technology. She’d defended the interests of the entire engineering corps against creepier bastards than the Dablonians, but something in their flat eyes reminded her of the glassy emptiness of the Earther animals her brothers hunted for food during the lean times. As if the Dablonians were already dead and had nothing left to lose…
The lead Dablonian pressed two of his hands together near his chest, though his eyes showed enough life to glint with greed. “We always welcome the opportunity for increased trade. It has been some time since we’ve seen an individual with the financial means to acquire one of our systems.”
Mrax didn’t rattle the bag around to prove they did have the means. “I’m motivated. I’ve heard what you’ve got and would like to take care of this today. My engineer can deal with the mechanics of it. Leave the rest to me.”
The Dablonian’s head tilted as he leaned around Mrax to study Rowan; she refused to blink or react to the ugly thing’s description. The salesman smiled and displayed sharp teeth in a
disconcerting double row of spikiness. “An Earther for an engineer. I suppose it is useful to have such small, delicate hands around. For all manner of things, I’m sure.”
Rowan clenched her jaw; she’d heard a lot worse in the Fleet, but that didn’t mean she was going to tolerate that kind of disrespect right to her face. She lurched forward a step, loosening the hammer in the belt loop, but Mrax’s arm snapped out to hold her back.
The Dablonian smiled wider. “I must have mistranslated my meaning. I meant only that Earthers are so very clever with machinery. They never seem to use the proper mechanics and physics, always something of their own creation. Such risk-takers. It’s stunning, really, how your species survived this long.”
“We’re scrappy,” she said. And hoped she’d get a chance to mistranslate that with a fist in his face.
“Scrappy,” the Dablonian mused. “This word I have not heard. I look forward to learning its meaning.”
She muttered under her breath but quieted when Mrax frowned at her. Rowan didn’t mind pretending to be a pirate engineer on the run from the Alliance, since the engineer wouldn’t have given a crap about what the Dablonian thought, or at least would have challenged the salesman on whatever he said. A pirate engineer had a mission and would damn well see it through whether anyone else wanted her to succeed or not.
Rowan was still musing over this as Mrax and the Dablonian exchanged a few more words, then started the long walk to the pristine building with no visible doors. She didn’t like that, either. How could anyone work without light and windows and a hint of the landscape around them? She shoved her hands in her pockets and ignored the tense security guards. It sounded like Mrax and the Dablonian got along like a house on fire, which meant she’d have a hell of a lot of work getting the weapons secured in the surface runner in a very short window of time.