“The best?” Gunner’s eyes burned.
“You’re an unpredictable motherfucker. I’m surprised this woman let you get close at all. You have a tendency of making everyone walk in the opposite direction of you and it’s not just because you’re an asshole, but because their life usually depends on it.”
Elodiehadlet him close. But did she really have a choice?So close.
She had let him in and then she’d let him stay. Gunner had never felt more at home than he did with her. Her touch was bliss. He wanted to sink himself into it, drown in it, and never reach the surface.
Gunner stopped himself, pulling at his hair, shutting the thoughts down. Bringing forth phantoms of her tortured him. The memories played perfectly in his head, every nuance recorded for eternity, every detail his to scrutinize and overanalyze.
And like a drug, he wanted more of it. He wanted new memories to replay and add to the old ones, to seduce and feed off of. He let out a heavy breath.
“I don’t think I can let her go.”
The snake grumbled. “Let me be the voice of fucking reason. No one should be around you. No one. I shouldn’t even be around you. I don’t need my ass to get exiled like yours.”
“Could you give up Norah?” Gunner asked. Stryker had told him all about what happened and why he’d never responded to Gunner’s communications. That this woman, Norah, had sent out a distress call of her own, and like the hero Stryker always pretended to be, he’d answered it.
Gunner chuckled. It was almost laughable, the timing. Stryker glared at him as if he’d gone crazy.
If the snake hadn’t answered that distress call and responded to Gunner’s communications instead, Gunner wouldn’t have stopped to investigate theBlessed. If they had both just done their fucking jobs, they would still both be monster hunters for the EPED. A month ago they had been.
Now, the snake—perfection himself—had quit, and Gunner was stuck dealing with Dommik for all future drop-offs. That’s if he didn’t jump ship himself.
He thought about dropping the job, especially after discovering that he’d been tracked and that the EPED had been keeping tabs on him for god knows how long.
The fucking swarm himself tracked him. No one else had that deadly combination of access and resources. Gunner had no proof...but he wasn’t done searching for it.
When he’d taken back his ship, after the Peace Keepers—enlisted by the EPED—followed it across the galaxy in search of him, Gunner had docked it on the same ship Elodie was on and then searched his vessel thoroughly. He knew what he was looking for but he’d been unable to find it. A piece of the swarm himself.
“I could never give Norah up,” Stryker said.
“And yet you can kill her with a kiss,” Gunner provoked.
No answer for that. Stryker shifted and his hologram moved to emulate. It was thick, the heavy few minutes of silence that hung between them.
“Did you eat the captain?”
Gunner warily lowered himself into a chair. “No.”
“Then there’s hope for you at least.”
Hope and Elodie were one and the same.
Hours later, Gunner washed himself up, scrubbed until his skin was red and raw enough to trigger his healing nanobots. He trimmed his hair and shaved away the stubble he let grow over his face the last couple of weeks. He rubbed his thumb, still not fully healed, knowing the other half remained deep within the bowels of the broken down mass of the legionnaire. A piece of him left behind, although a new piece would soon replace what he’d lost.
He donned his new uniform, one he had to replicate, as the last had been destroyed when the pirates raided his ship.
Gunner pressed his hand against the walls of the lavatory-turned-brewery and slid it over the whirlpool tank that sat quietly in the corner. The beer was long gone but the machines had been untouched. He could smell the lingering fragrance of hops in the air, bitter and sweet.
But the rest of the ship wasn’t the same. Not after what the pirates had done to it, and not after whathehad done to it in search of the tracker.
The armory had been pillaged, the medical bay depleted of all its stores, the hidden cybernetics room looted of all its million-dollar tech. His bridge stank of others who’d made a home in his place as they attempted to hack his machines. He could even smell Ballsy when he focused, thin as the trail was.
The EPED acquisitions, for the most part, were fine. The doors that led to the laboratory were destroyed almost beyond repair, brought down by a bomb or a cannon of some sort. There had been a bazooka in his armory. It could’ve been that.Waste of perfectly good munitions.
Gunner wished he could’ve seen the pirates’ faces when they finally made it through. When they first laid their eyes upon the giant glass enclosures that were filled with flora. Flora that still waited to be offloaded and sent back to the EPED base on Earth.
There was very little money in the prospects he had stored within his most heavily barricaded part of the ship. There was nothing for the pirates to want. But still, if there’d never been a tracker on board his vessel, they would’ve made a killing selling off his personal gear.
