A Bounty of Love (Love Between the Stars Book 1)

by Willow Walker

  Yeva was frustrated by this, but equally relieved. Her hands were hurting so much. She had a more complete patch kit in her ship, and while she fussed with her hands, Tobias set to work clearing the vines that had built up while they were in the temple. Somehow they settled into a routine. It took days to get a sense of what the maze below the temple was doing. It wasn’t just arbitrarily going through different configurations. There was something decidedly planned in this madness. Yeva quickly learned on their fourth trip into the maze that it was restructuring to bypass the areas they had already passed. It was on some kind of rotation, or it was aware of the areas they had traversed and not letting them do them again. It was odd to think that the thing had some sentience or some kind of AI, but Yeva had already convinced herself that the maze was potentially run by some kind of ancient AI. It wouldn’t be unheard of, but the lack of tech in the exposed walls made the mystery even more compelling. She wasn’t sure what the point of not repeating areas of the maze would be, but it wasn’t futile, the longer they worked at the maze, the closer to the center they got.

  She would be lying to herself if said she wasn’t enjoying it. She wasn’t used to doing these kinds of things with another person, but Tobias had long proved himself to be a capable maze partner. Everything was built to be done in pairs, some physical, some mental. She was also getting to the point that Tobias was at. She couldn’t even lie to herself now. She liked Tobias. A lot.

  Night after night the space between them shortened. Some nights they would fall asleep right away, and others they would talk for hours about one thing or another. One night after a hefty day in the temple solving problems together, Tobias was complaining about achy limbs, and Yeva sheepishly offered to rub his back. She had some nice smelling lotion that Beks had given her, and he laid flat on his stomach on the bed. He was warm to the touch, and her cold hands made him flinch. She pressed her fingers into his muscled but untoned skin.

  She worked all the knots out, falling into the methodical motions of pressing loose his tight muscles until she started to feel her eyelids getting heavy from the long day.

  “All done,” she said softly, just in case he had fallen asleep. He turned over before she had a chance to back away, and he pulled her down to where she was firmly straddled over him. She leaned down unprompted and pressed her chest to his. Just the thin fabric of her sleep shirt between them prevented skin-to-skin contact.

  “Can I return the favor?” He asked softly. There was that heat in his eyes again.

  “Later,” she said and rolled off him. She was getting a sense of attraction from him, and it baffled her. She was always messy from the maze, her hands were scabbed over and covered in salve every day from the vine slip, and she never did anything with her hair other than pull it into a ponytail. She could rectify that she was attracted to him, but him attracted to her? She was afraid it was the attraction of convenience. Men like him were probably used to bedding any woman or man they wanted, and she was the only one here right now. Hormones could make people do the strangest things in certain situations.

  She went to sleep that night, rolling the memory of the way he had looked at her in her mind, wishing she had the guts to resolve the aching twinge between her legs but afraid that if she did, he would just see her as another conquest. She didn’t want that.

  Day after day, the vines would take more and more of her ship. She tried to remove what she could, and Tobias was there to help, but after two weeks of fighting the maze, the vines were beginning to work faster than they could clear them.

  Yeva was frustrated and could sense the frustration coming off Tobias at the same time. They entered the maze that day in the wrong headspace, and Yeva knew it. Even a cup of malva with her breakfast hadn’t helped to soothe her nerves. Before they had even reached the staircase into the maze where the lights went off and they would have to walk down the steps hand-in-hand to open the maze, Yeva stopped at a hallway they had never gone down. There was the same deep darkness beyond it that the main entrance held. Tobias didn’t see her stop and look down it, didn’t turn around in time to stop her before she was caught in the hypnotizing dark and plunged into it.

  She was drifting in a dark place, but around her were the whispers of her past. Every single one of her faults, her mistakes, her problems, her worries, her successes, her dreams, her desires, spread out before her and created a tableau of imagery and sound. At the focal point was her love for her friend Beks. When she finished paying off the debt, she should be happy, and she would have so much room to grow as a bounty hunter. And there, off to the side, was a new image, of Tobias looking at her with a combination of amusement and curiosity.

  She started to reach out for the images of him, but suddenly, she was yanked back, and she was thrown out of the dark onto the temple floor. Tobias was gasping and choking on a mess of brackish grime that covered him head to toe, one hand was still clenched around the strap of her pack. She felt a piercing headache rising between her temples and groaned softly. “What was that?”

  “Not totally sure, but when I first got here, that thing was what had me trapped in here for a whole week. It showed you stuff didn’t it?” Tobias let go of her, and she pushed herself to a sitting position. She was covered in the same brackish grime. She spat out some of what had gotten into her mouth and tried to shake it from her hands. “It showed me a lot of stuff. How long was I in there? It felt like I was in there for hours.”

  “Maybe a couple minutes. As soon as I realized what had happened, I was able to drag you out.”

  “You were in that for a whole week? That must have felt like--”

  “--Like years.” He finished her sentence for her. She watched his face, and she saw something there that hit her heart.

  What must that have been like?

  “Come on, I think we need to call it a day today. There’s no way we are going to get through the maze covered in this crap.” Yeva agreed with him.

  Tobias pulled her to her feet, and they got out of the temple just as the always cloudy sky opened up, and it began to pour down with rain.

  What a miserable day, and we barely got started. Yeva thought to herself.

  Yeva and Tobias took turns showering after Tobias assured her the grime was water soluble and wouldn’t clog her plumbing and water reclamation system.

  When Tobias got out of the shower, she already had a cup of malva waiting for him, and they sat at the table not talking. Yeva had time to unpack all the thoughts dredged up by the short excursion into whatever secrets the temple had. More than anything, she wanted to know what it was that Tobias had experienced. If he had spent a week in that, it might explain why he seemed like a different person than who she had expected. That grime had shown her the very beginning of some of her demons. If he had spent a whole week in it, he probably had time to face every little thing about himself. And he had done it again, very briefly to save her from it.

  They barely spoke the rest of the day, and when night finally fell, and they were lying side by side on her bed, Yeva finally broke the silence with determination.

  “Do you still want to know why I need this bounty?” Yeva asked.

  Tobias looked over at her and nodded. He had a slight smile on his face too. “If you want to tell me.”

  “Years ago, I got in some hot water with a mob boss I happened to start working for--”

  “Happened…?”

  “Shh, do you want to hear or not?”

  Tobias raised his hands and put on an innocent expression. “I want to hear. I want to hear.”

  “Then don’t interrupt. Anyway, my best friend Beks bailed me out, with a ton of money she was going to invest in her shipyard to bring it up to date with new tech, better docking equipment, all the bells and whistles. She told me I didn’t have to pay her back, that I...didn’t owe her anything. So once I was free from the mob guy, I started pulling less risky bounty jobs to try and save up enough to help her remodel her shipyard.”

  “
Is that all? Here I thought you were trying to do something more shady, that’s actually kinda adorable.”

  “It’s not adorable, Tobias, it’s serious. If it weren’t for Beks, I’d probably be dead in the vacuum of space. She inherited that shipyard from her dad and had been saving up for most of her life to remodel. One moment of idiocy from me and that was over.”

  “Is she saving up again?”

  “Yes, but that’s not the point. She has an old shipyard with old equipment, and she can only really service old ships. The new generation of ship cores can’t even work with her shipyard. She’s losing more business with every year, and if she can ever save up enough money to remodel, it will probably be too late to salvage any of her clientele.”

  Tobias nodded, his expression more sombre as he listened to her.

  “She cares about you.”

  “She’s my friend, and I owe her my life. It’s the least I could do to repay her.”

  “She doesn’t know you’re doing it?”

  “I’m not going to tell her until I have it all. I don’t want her to tell me not to, and I don’t want to get her hopes up if I fail.”

  Tobias considered Yeva for a moment, and she felt a little uncomfortable at the intensity of his gaze. “Who did you owe money to, and how much did your friend give them?”

  Yeva didn’t want to tell him, but all the same, she didn’t know what it could hurt. They were likely going to die here, and he’d already been so open with her. “His name was Dev Gast, and I owed him 20 million credits.”

  Tobias’s eyes nearly bugged out of his face. “Dev Gast? 20 million? What did… how?”

  Yeva felt her face burn. “I might have crashed his very expensive yacht into his very expensive casino while on a job. I was pretty reckless starting out, and I don’t think I thought things out like I should have. Back then, I was just trying to gain my independence from my family, buy a good ship, and just have as much fun as I could. Beks was almost done with her shipbuilding and repair classes, so she couldn’t play with me as much and I got bored easy!”

  “Dev Gast. Oh my god, Yeva. You really go all out don’t you?” He turned over on his side and propped his head up onto his palm.

  “I try to be more responsible these days,” Yeva said and hid the bashful smile. Tobias reached over and pulled her hand away. He was smiling at her, the humor in his face evident.

  “I can see that.”

  Yeva wanted to change the subject and blurted out the biggest thing on her mind. “What did it feel like being in that gunk for a whole week?” She nearly backtracked when she saw his smile fall.

  “It was hard.” Tobias settled back down and stared at the ceiling. “I was face to face with myself. With everything that I was, good and bad. I focused on the areas of my life where I could have done better and what the ‘gunk’ decided I needed to focus on. It forced me to see the truth about myself, and it didn’t let me go until I accepted that I needed to change to better myself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It means that the long I went, not acknowledging the bad parts of myself the more they festered and toxified my life. I always said I was going to prove that I wasn’t a useless child, but that was just to prove someone wrong, to get some kind of revenge on how I was treated. It wasn’t about who I was as a person, it wasn’t about who I needed to be, it wasn’t about what kind of person I wanted to be beyond all that. This places makes you see the truth regardless of how you try to ignore it.”

  “I was starting to get the sense of that,” Yeva said as a thought occurred to her. What would have happened if she had stayed in the gunk and let it show her what it wanted. How long would it have taken? Her curiosity was going to get her killed, but she had to know. Something about just a taste of the feeling that had exploded in her mind in the gunk was intoxicating.

  When their conversation died down, and she knew he was fast asleep she crawled over him, put on a jumpsuit she didn’t care got messy and headed out into the darkness. She didn’t bother going into the temple and threw herself into the main entrance of the temple. The gunk seized her right away and pulled her down, down, down.

  7

  She was plunged into a dream. Even though she intrinsically knew that it was a dream, her impulsive brain embraced the terror she found herself in. She was walking through a desert, and every step she took, her legs grew heavier. She looked down and saw a ringlets of a chain growing up her calves. The chain trailed behind her. Yeva looked back and followed the length of the chain with her eyes. A crack in the earth was opening up behind her, and the maw of the crevasse roared angrily. I am your fear, it said to her. And I control you. And she was dragged into it.

  The purpose of the temple had eluded her until now. This wasn’t just some temple devoted to some old dead god. It wasn’t here as a monument to an ancient civilisation. It wasn’t even a place to house an artefact. It was all that and more.

  This place was by no means natural. It was here to drive a person directly to their fear. She’d heard of vision quests. It was a common practice among the religions of certain cultures to go on vision quests as a rite-of-passage for children into adulthood.

  Behind the fear that this place showed her, behind the feelings of terror that it evoked in her, there was something else. An agreement, an understanding, and a promise to not harm her but to make her aware of the things hidden in her mind that she had failed to address.

  She let herself drift in the echoing dark as it peeled away all her insecurities and fears. The most striking of the things that she was afraid of, other than failing Beks and never making her mark on the universe, was the fear that she would allow herself to get too close, too attached to Tobias. She barely knew the man, but he had already made an impression on her. She didn’t want to be afraid, she wanted to be more than defined by her fear.

  The feeling from the darkness was a sense of pleased acceptance. She had seen what it wanted her to see, and she had made the right leap of thought. This place wasn’t just a temple. This place was aware.

  It ejected her a day later into the worried arms of Tobias. She took one look at his face and cried. He didn’t say anything but held onto her until she regained her composure. He picked her up, took her back to her ship, and methodically helped her undress, telling her to tell him when he needed to stop helping, and get her into a clean outfit. She could care less about modesty right now. Her head was a jumble of emotions and thoughts. She laid on the bed and tried to come to terms with what she had seen. She felt broken, shattered to pieces, and if it weren’t for Tobias fussing over her, she wasn’t sure if she would have done as good of job cleaning herself up. She was a mess.

  “Why did you do that?” Tobias asked incredulously after he had her settled in bed. It was exactly a whole planetary day since she had gone into the temple, so it was night again.

  “Because I can’t stand not knowing something, and that thing wanted to show me something.”

  “Did you see it? What you wanted?”

  Yeva nodded and pulled a pillow over her head. She was exhausted. Mentally, physically, and everything in between. She felt Tobias’s hand on her shoulder, and she moved the pillow just enough to see him with a questioning gaze. His other hand was held over her as if he was asking permission to embrace her. She rolled over into his embrace and wrapped herself around him. This was what she wanted, too. There were some uncomfortable truths about herself that she had learned in the temple, but this had been one of the welcome ones. She wanted to be held by him. She wanted to get to know him better. She wanted to let him be a part of her life if he wanted to.

  She couldn’t get the image of the heat in his eyes as she had crawled over him days before, and with that in mind, she tilted her head up and pressed her lips to the corner of his jaw. He froze and, for a second, she thought she had screwed up and misinterpreted everything. But then he shifted slightly to press his own lips to her temple. The tenderness there made her ache everywhere and no
t just the place between her legs.

  “Do you trust me?” He asked softly.

  “I wouldn’t be doing this with you if I didn’t.” She replied.

  He clutched her tighter and ran his hands up and down her back. The gentle caresses soothed her, and she began to drift into sleep.

  ***

  When Yeva awoke she saw Tobias over the crest of the pillow she was lying on. He was fussing with her kettle and hot plate. She quietly watched him work and enjoyed the view of his strong back and the shift of the muscles under his skin as he moved. At some point he had removed his shirt so her view was one of soft skin.

  She pushed herself up and off the bed and peered over Tobias's shoulder. She could tell he sensed her, but he didn't turn away from his work with the hotplate. He was making eggs, and there was already a pot of malva in the kettle.

  “You cook too?” Yeva asked.

  “On occasion I can be convinced.” He looked over his shoulder at her and smiled. He turned off the hotplate and divided the eggs between two plates. Yeva's stomach growled noisily, and she blushed. She had no idea she was that hungry. She accepted the plate from him quietly and sat on the edge of the bed to eat. Tobias sat next to her, and their elbows touched as they ate.

  When they were done, she took the plates and washed them clean. She could feel him watching her as she had done prior to breakfast. When she dried her hands on a towel, she turned and found him standing next to her. That heat in his eyes was back, and she dropped the towel to the counter.

  She reached up and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, and he responded in kind by placing his hands on her hips and pressing a kiss to her lips. Yeva hadn’t been this close to someone in years, and she allowed herself to abandon herself to the feelings roiling throughout her whole body.

  Tobias pushed lightly at her shoulders, and she leaned back onto the bed. She had her hands intertwined into his hair and pulled him down with her. He pressed soft kisses to the corner of her mouth and made a trail down her jawline and into the crook of her neck. She released his hair and began to work at the buttons of his shirt. He sucked at the skin on her neck, his breath catching every time a button of his shirt popped open and her nails grazed his skin.