Fuckingnineteen years oldand sent to Hourglass Mile. What had she done to get herself locked up in that place? He knew what they did to the inmates there. The mines. The whips. The pairings.
The lunch he’d eaten earlier turned to lead in his stomach. Who had they forced on her? What had he been like?
How the hell had she gotten out?
The sentence stamped in red across her mug shot saidLife.
Then he remembered the explosion about five years back. A bunch of prisoners had died. In the confusion, some had managed to run away, making it to the docks and stealing supply ships. No bounty had ever been offered for any of them, no names given—not on the regular channels and not on his. The galactic government had probably been too embarrassed by the massive amounts of chaos at one of their maximum-security prisons to post.
Beautiful. Ballsy. And brave.
A wanted criminal.
Fuck!
He worked on the fringes of the law, dipping his toes into the murky side of the system, but he was still part of the galactic machine of all-encompassing order. He knew who signed the checks. One big job like this, and he could leave it all behind.
Indecision clawed at Shade’s chest. He’d never agreed to help someone before only to screw them over. He didn’t get to know his targets. They were just prize money, a means to an end.
But Tess Bailey with her little freckles and her mile-long legs was everything he needed and more to finally buy his life back from that scumbag Scarabin White.
His mind worked. He knew where she was.
The easiest nab and grab of his life was waiting for him on the three-hundred-and-fourteenth level of the Squirrel Tree. He could land two hundredmillionin his account.
Double that if she still had the goods.
Chapter 8
I was surprised to seeShade Ganavan show up the next morning practically with the sun. I hadn’t even had my coffee yet, but there he was on the platform, looking ready to work.
Actually, he was checking out the lab attachment. From the outside, it looked like any other piece of space equipment, most likely an additional cargo hold, and luckily, there were no holes inthatpart of the ship to give him a view straight inside.
I kept to the shadows of theEndeavor’s open doorway, watching him. He moved on to examining the rest of the ship, and unless he had X-ray vision, I wasn’t going to worry about the lab attachment too much.
I’d destroyed the test tubes of my blood, flushing the contents and boiling the labels into oblivion before trashing the empty containers via the compactor. That evidence was gone, and I hadn’t found any other hidden compartments with more samples. Just like Big Guy had said, that was it. With any luck, that was it in the entire galaxy, apart from what was pulsing through my veins.
Once I’d eliminated the samples, I’d sealed up the air lock leading to the attachment. Only I knew the pass code. No one was getting into that lab but me, and even I didn’t want to go back.
Shade eventually reached the gash in the hull at the level of my bedroom, which was pretty barren and torn up. There, hecouldsee straight in, and he ducked down for a better look.
Even with Albion City starting to buzz and hum far below, I heard him mutter something aboutmajor repairsas he ran his fingers along the blackened edges of the hole.
A sinking feeling dropped through me. Whatever Shade did was going to cost me an arm and two legs. On top of that, we needed to resupply, and I had some unexpected shopping to do. Space had eaten nearly all my underwear. And plenty of clothes as well. I was too tall to share with Miko, Shiori, or Fiona, and I swam in Jax’s things. I had no choice but to buy new outfits if I wanted to blend into civilian settings, like here on Albion 5, or anywhere we might go for whatever jobs came next.
Shade’s entire upper body disappeared into my bedroom. He looked like he was about to crawl in.
“Morning!” I called out, not really comfortable with him inspecting my unmade bed.
He ducked back out of the damaged ship, straightening as he looked over. Sunglasses masked his expression and reflected my own image back at me.
Squatting low, I braced one hand against theEndeavor’s floor and vaulted down onto the landing dock about four feet below. It was always a bit of a scramble getting back up again, but letting down the ship’s stairs was an unnecessary use of power as far as I was concerned, especially while we were recharging.
“I thought you needed a few days to get the reinforced metal,” I said, moving toward the man who had occupied far too many of my thoughts since the previous afternoon.
“I had two tiles in stock.” Shade turned away from me, resuming his careful perusal of theEndeavor. After a long silence, he added, “Figured I’d get to work while I waited for more to come in from my supplier.”
I nodded, although he wasn’t looking. He seemed to have an expert eye and was wholly concentrated on the ship.
