Gunner stiffened.
The sound of Ely’s voice clashed in his head. It was deliberately adjusted, deepened with a rasp brought on by saliva caught in the back of the throat. It wasn’t straight from the vocal cords or damaged from breathing in too much smoke. It was altered on purpose.
His fingers twitched.Feminine undertones...
Ely’s a girl?
Suddenly, a new puzzle presented itself and he took the bait readily.
The likelihood of encountering a woman in the middle of nowhere space-wise was so minuscule, even the calculations running through his head still calculated...
It doesn’t make sense.
Even given the odds of being on a ship, in a pirate fleet, where there was sure to be at least one ship whore aboard, it was improbable. Sex-bots like his Browning typically filled that role—if one could afford something like Browning.
It’d been years since he was last in the presence of a woman, years since the possibility of subduing one occurred to him. He was banned by the government from entering any main Earthian spaceways, commercial or otherwise, and although he still entered them, he never stayed long enough to get caught.
“It ain’t like you got much left to lose! Chesnik ain’t coming back.” The man broke into gleeful, misplaced laughter. “I’ll sweeten the deal. You check the fucker’s pulse and I’ll leave you alone. For three cycles.”
Who’s Chesnik?
Gunner waited, forgetting the codes, and focused on the events taking place. He remained still, curious, intrigued. All of his attention was on the prisoner between him and the heckler.
There’s no fucking way a girl’s locked in the brig.
The absurdity of it, among so many men, was hard for him to grasp.No fucking way.He ran the odds again, and the odds were against it.
Ely moved closer to him.
He sensed every sound and vibration, each heartbeat and couldn’t tell who or what Ely was.No way in hell.
“That’s it. Just gotta check his pulse. Do that and I won’t try and hurt ya for three cycles. This daddy’ll keep his hands off his son.”
It took everything in him to keep still because if Ely really was a woman, he was going to find out.
Do it, Ely. Check my pulse.
***
ELODIE INCHED CLOSERto the unmoving man but she couldn’t bring herself to reach through the bars and touch him. Kallan’s voice filled the weak space in her mind, egging her on, and it was difficult to shut him out. Even though her hunger had waned, her mental capacity still teetered on the brink. The brink ofwhat, she didn’t know.
One part of her wanted to close her eyes and zone out, find her hazy space and settle in for a nice reprieve into oblivion. But the other part of her, the one that dissected every horrible scenario that could possibly happen, the part that had a tighter grip on her survival instincts, pushed her to check the man’s pulse.
Right now, Kallan was inciting that part of her brain, and it came with incentives.
Her attention remained on the man’s closed eyes.Please wake up. Don’t wake up.And the more she stared at them, the more she convinced herself he was dead.
“He’s dead,” she said, loud enough for Kallan to hear. Maybe if she said it aloud, it’d be true.
“You ain’t checked, boy-o. I want his jacket!”
That was what this was all about, not about the man himself, but what he wore and how frigid the brig really was. It wasn’t even about her.
Gristly-guy spoke up. “I want it too but I don’t have the strength to pull him closer, and if I don’t have it, you really thinkhe’sgoing to be able to?” The grunts and murmurs of other prisoners responded in agreement and Elodie caught his eye over the unconscious prisoner, feeling grim.
I also want his jacket.She eyed it for the umpteenth time. It was big, big enough to cover her—most of her—and keep her warm for however long she had it. It was also clean.Clean.
All of it is clean.Though it was stained, it still had a clean look to it. A month ago, she would’ve considered it dirty, but now she knew what dirty really was. She was contemplating stealing it now, like the others, and it made her feel a little uneasy.
