Braxtyn

by Kate Rudolph

  A retort to Roski’s suggestion almost flew out of her mouth, but he didn’t deserve the reaction. Either he was saying it to hurt her, to make her go without looking back, or he truly thought she could stoop to becoming a slaver herself. She’d thought that he knew her, but it appeared she was wrong, and there was no use trying to fix things now.

  “Follow me,” she told Brax. “We’re returning to the shuttle. No funny business.”

  The halls of the station were just as barren as always. Roski’s wing was one of the safer places in this hive of villainy, and Vita knew if she ventured deeper into the station she’d be at risk of robbery, theft, or worse. There was no honor among these thieves and there was certainly no one she could trust. Not Roski. Not anymore.

  No one had messed with her ship in the dock. Everyone knew Roski’s people used his docks and touching one of his crew was asking for pain.

  Vita gave the station one last look as Braxtyn climbed aboard before shutting the door. Then she reached over and flicked off his cuff. Maybe it would have been smarter to pull out her blaster first or put him back in the cage, but Roski’s suggestion was still ricocheting around her mind and she couldn’t deal.

  The cuff clattered to the floor and Vita kicked it out of the way. It was a disgusting piece of tech, something that robbed people of their free will and made them nothing more than automatons. They were useful for getting slaves from place to place but couldn’t be used in the long term since someone wearing a cuff like that could only follow orders exactly. She’d heard of embedded control chips that some slavers liked to use that were similar to cuffs but allowed for a bit more autonomy. Unfortunately for all involved, they had a bad habit of exploding while still embedded in the slave’s head. Vita had been lucky that nothing like that had ever been used on her.

  Braxtyn rubbed his wrist and studied her with a dazed look on his face. His eyes roved up and down her body as if he was seeing her for the first time, which she supposed he was. She’d been masked throughout their encounters. “For whatever it’s worth, I’m sorry,” she said.

  His chest heaved and the intensity of his gaze rooted Vita in place. Was he going to hurt her? Well, was he going to try? Vita might have felt a little guilty about the way things turned out, but she wasn’t about to submit in a fight just to make this guy feel better. Now if he wanted her under him in other circumstances, they might be able to talk.

  Of course, the likelihood of him being willing to get all tangled up together after she kidnapped him wasn’t that likely, but a girl could dream.

  “Denya.” Brax breathed the word out like it meant everything and it echoed through Vita. She didn’t know what it meant, but she felt like she should. Like it was just out of reach of her subdermal translator’s dictionary and if she stretched for it she might understand.

  He took a step towards her and Vita could feel the magnetic pull between them. Something big was happening here, something she couldn’t deny, even if she didn’t understand it. She wanted it, whatever it was. Some piece slotted into place deep within her, something she hadn’t known she was missing. Something that finally made her complete.

  No.

  There weren’t any missing pieces to her being. She took a step back and turned away from Brax. She’d put herself back together after the decade of torture that was her adolescence. Roski and his people had trained her, but they hadn’t given her anything she hadn’t already earned for herself. She was whole. She’d worked hard to be whole, and she didn’t need some other person to show up and make a mockery of the person she’d become.

  Whatever she was feeling now was some chemical response to Roski’s rejection. That denya word meant nothing. He was just acknowledging her apology. Nothing more.

  “I’ll drop you back... somewhere.” A mental calculation of the fuel reserves told her they didn’t have enough to make it back to Earth, but she’d figure out something. She always did. “There are crew quarters, feel free to stay there instead of in the cell. And there’s food in the galley if you’re hungry.”

  She left him standing there in his daze and headed for the cockpit. If Roski’s mood turned even darker he might do something drastic, like blast them out of space, and the longer they stayed around the station the more likely that was to happen. Vita wasn’t going to wait around ready to die. She hadn’t done that in a long time.

  BRAX’S MIND WAS STILL reeling, trying to catch up to everything that had happened in the last few minutes. He had a denya. A human denya. A woman who didn’t seem to understand what that meant. A woman who had kidnapped him from Earth. But he was free now, so he could forgive that.

  She looked nothing like the woman from his dream, and yet when he thought harder, he realized she did. Her bright hair pulled the focus away from her face, but the features were the same, even if they were a bit older and world weary. Had that been a real memory that he’d been pulled into last night? Had she really once been a slave?

  She said something about finding quarters but Brax was so focused on the recognition of the bond that he couldn’t quite make sense of it. He wanted to sweep her up into his arms and hold her close, taste her red lips and see if they were as fiery as the rest of her. But she wasn’t Detyen, so she didn’t know they were mates. He had to take things slowly, had to convince her that he was more than just some...

  Why was she walking away?

  That broke Brax out of his daze and he took off after her. The ship was small and in as much disrepair as his cell had been. Did she have no other crew? No maintenance bot?

  “Wait!” He took off after her and tried to call out her name before he realized he didn’t know it. What had the man said on the station? She’d called him Roski, but Roski hadn’t used her name. “Wait, bounty hunter person!” He’d call her denya if it would have meant anything, but the more he spoke, the faster she walked, as if she couldn’t get away from him quick enough.

  Still Brax didn’t stop. “Where are we? Where are we going?” He might have been worried that she would take Roski up on his advice to sell him off, but he didn’t think that was going to happen. She’d frozen in place when Roski had laid down that suggestion, and if the dream they’d shared had been anything approaching a glimpse into her past, he was certain she’d never condone the practice.

  He hoped.

  She climbed up a rickety ladder and Brax paused. She really didn’t seem to be in the mood for company, but he was in the mood for answers. Who was she? Why had she thought he was her bounty? How did she feel about Detyen hybrids? Did she want to get to know him better and see if one thing led to another?

  But maybe retreat for a bit was the wiser option. She’d said something about food and his stomach was feeling a bit empty. He’d barely choked down what she’d provided when he was in a cell, but now that he had the ability to choose, maybe his options wouldn’t be so bad.

  He would have walked away, but a flurry of curses and the sound of a fist banging against metal drew his attention, along with the acrid stench of burning wires. Oh yeah, he was more than familiar with that.

  He scurried up the ladder to find Vita holding a wrench over her head and glaring at the control panel.

  “If you smash it, we’ll be stranded here.” He held up a hand as if that would ward off the blow.

  She kept glaring at the control panel. “We’re already stranded. At least I’ll feel better if I hit something. Damn thing’s busted. Again.”

  “Whacking something with a wrench never made anything work better.” Brax took a tentative step forward, hands still outstretched, but now reaching for the tool. “I’m thinking we don’t want to stick around here for long, right?” Some people called Honora Station seedy, but it had nothing on Roski’s headquarters and Brax didn’t want to find out what would happen if they overstayed their welcome.

  The bounty hunter finally took her eyes off the control panel and looked at him. That zing of recognition was still there, still driving him to take a step forward and see
if she tasted as wild as she looked. But Brax held himself in check. For now.

  “No, we don’t want to stay here for long,” she agreed. “Not if we want to leave with all parts accounted for.”

  Brax nodded. “I like all my parts. How about I take a look?”

  “What’s a gam—” she pursed her lips. “I guess you’re not a gambler, are you?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve been known to play a friendly game or two, but never for more than a few dozen credits. I was a mechanic on Honora Station for years.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “How many years? How old are you?”

  Brax bristled. So he might have been a few years younger than her, so what? She looked human and if they went by life expectancy, his age blew hers out of the sky. “Enough time to know how to fix an engine on the fritz,” he said. “Let me at it and I’ll have us flying in no time.”

  Her fingers tightened around the wrench before she handed it over. “I’ve still got my blaster if you try any funny business.”

  Brax took the wrench and just looked at her for a moment. “You’re the only ride out of here that I’ve got. Why would I try something?” He crouched down and wiggled until he was under the control station and went to work on removing one of the small panels that would reveal the wiring. He’d never worked on a small ship like this, but it couldn’t be that much different than what he’d done on Honora Station.

  Hopefully.

  If the programming was shot there was nothing he could do, but as long as the problem was something that could be fixed by tools and sweat, he’d have it fixed... eventually. Something thumped down close to his head. and Brax flinched but was happy to see a toolkit. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “What?” A chair squeaked and his captor/companion must have been sitting.

  “You know mine, thought it might be nice to— oh that’s not good.” Brax cut off curses that would have made his brothers blush and reached blindly into the toolkit for something to patch the sparking wiring. “You need to cut power to the control panel. Should be an emergency shutoff valve in here somewhere.” He barked out the order, forgetting he’d asked his denya for her name.

  The room went dark a moment later before emergency lights came on, giving Brax just enough illumination to work with. He pulled what he needed out of the toolkit and went to work, stripping frayed wires and rewrapping them as best as he could. Under better circumstances he would have completely removed the panel and spent several days getting the wires right, but he doubted his denya wanted to linger for that long, and Brax couldn’t blame her. It took several minutes to get to a state of repair he was willing to trust not to blow up the second they hit top speed and he instructed her to turn the power back on, holding his breath as light flooded the room.

  The control panel beeped to life, all lights blinking except for a view screen in the center that looked dead. They could live without that for now.

  “You fixed it?” she asked, leaning over the control panel and letting her hands hover as if she was afraid to touch.

  Brax shrugged. “There were just a few crossed wires. Nothing too bad.”

  “My name is Vita,” she said. “Now strap in and let’s get out of here.”

  Chapter Six

  VITA HAD TO HAND IT to the guy, Brax was a hell of a mechanic. She didn’t know what she would have done if he hadn’t offered to help when they needed to get away from the station as quickly as possible. She’d had a run of luck cobbling together various parts and making her ship fly, but at the most important moment it had all crapped out. If she’d lingered there... she shuddered and had to swallow hard as she imagined the weight of a slave collar around her neck.

  No. It wouldn’t have come to that. She would have made them kill her before she let herself be enslaved again. Or she would have killed herself.

  But it hadn’t come to that. And in the two days since they’d sailed away from Station 163 Brax had been inspecting the entire ship from top to bottom and fixing what he could from her limited supplies. She tried not to feel judged when he glared at certain more inventive repairs, but she’d survived this long, so clearly it hadn’t all been wrong. Though even she could admit her fix for the power line near the shower was perhaps a bit dangerous.

  It was surprising how well Brax was taking everything. If she’d been in his position she would have insisted he drop her off anywhere and she would have found her own way home. All he’d mentioned was needing to call home to his family, something he wanted to put off until her view screen was repaired and he could see and be seen by his family. He was almost disturbingly calm, and coming from someone else she would have believed he was plotting something, but Brax just seemed... nice. Sweet. Caring.

  It was weird and she didn’t get it.

  “Okay, I’ve had enough!” She nearly jumped out of her seat as Brax clambered up the ladder into the cockpit and tossed a half full bag of tools on the ground. His eyes blazed a bright blue she’d only seen once before and his chest heaved. “My mother’s children have better access to tools and they’re barely old enough to walk. We need to stop for supplies.”

  So the man could have a temper. That was reassuring. Vita leaned back in her seat and crossed her arms, looking him up and down. The view sure was better with him around, but she’d kept her hands to herself. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t her prisoner anymore. She’d still kidnapped him, still held him against his will. And she was acutely aware that she was still his only way home. Years in the slave pens had shown her exactly what an abuse of power looked like and she was determined to do exactly the opposite of whatever her masters would have done.

  Now, if Brax made a move... well, that would be a different story. But he hadn’t so she wouldn’t.

  No matter that her body was screaming at her to take a bite out of him.

  “We’re two days out from the market,” she informed him with a smirk. “We’ll fuel up and get you what you need.” And she almost offered to find him a way home, but couldn’t quite make the words form. She hadn’t spent much time over the past two days with her new crew member, but it had been nice not to be the only living being on the ship. That was no excuse to keep him from going home... but she didn’t have to pave the path for him.

  Brax sank into the navigator’s seat beside her and managed to look like some kind of conquering hero all the while. He’d scrounged up an old shirt that was a bit too tight and a pair of pants from somewhere. It should have looked sloppy on him, but instead he looked right at home. How was he so ridiculously attractive? “My repairs should last for at least two days. Let’s not push it to three.”

  Vita glared at the attractive fucker. Really? “I made it this long,” she countered. She kicked her legs up on the control panel as if that would prove some kind of point.

  “And you wouldn’t have made it much longer. The only thing not on the verge of dying is your life support. And that might be more curse than blessing if you’re a thousand light years from anywhere with no hope of rescue.” He had started the jab out with a grin but his expression grew serious. “No risk of that for now.”

  “I won’t let you die.”

  The corner of his mouth ticked up and it did something strange to her stomach. “It’s not me I’m worried about.” Something she couldn’t define hung between them for a long moment. Vita tried to convince herself it was only the lack of companionship since... well... since ever, but she was afraid it was just Brax. Thankfully he broke the moment. “So what’s it like stealing unsuspecting people from their planets and zooming all over the galaxy?”

  She bristled at that description. She wasn’t some slaver. “They’re usually suspecting it,” she insisted. “I’m not nabbing children from their beds. But it’s a living. One I’m good at. Or... it was.” She was trying hard not to think about what she would do now that Roski had cut her loose. Hunting bounties was a tough job, and tougher still since she wouldn’t touch the slave trade. But what other skills did she eve
n have?

  “Do you like it?” Brax asked. He was looking at her with an intensity that should have raised her hackles. Instead she wanted to preen.

  Did she like it? What kind of question even was that? There were a handful of responses she could have shot off, things she might have told her contacts to keep them from getting too close to the heart of her, but she didn’t want to dismiss Brax with something trivial. He didn’t deserve that. “It’s all I’ve ever done. Ever since...”

  “You were freed?” he asked gently, but it was still a knife to the gut to hear the words spoken aloud.

  She wanted to deny it, wanted to demand how he knew, but a part of her wasn’t surprised that he’d figured it out. It was almost... right... that he should know. “Yeah.” She nodded and tried to ignore the memory of the taste of blood in her mouth. “I found Roski not long after...” No, she wasn’t going to go into all of it. That was too much to share. “Not long after. He saw potential in me, and he was horrified by what had happened. And... well, a living’s a living, right? Freedom in any form.”

  He looked like he might have some kind of retort for that. She didn’t want to talk about her life before Roski. She didn’t want to talk about her life at all. It was one tragedy leading to the next, and even when she thought she had escaped it all she still ended up here, with no job and no way to return the man she had wrongly stolen back to his home. And it occurred to her that she really didn’t know much about Braxtyn NaZade.

  “So you want to get back to Earth so you can be a mech?” If she had any means to pay him she might have offered him a job. A few days of letting him go wild on her ship had proved just how much she needed the help. But her bank account was in even worse shape than it had been before she snatched him, and she wasn’t about to start paying in sexual favors.