Solan refused to look at me, his expression stony.
“Take the key card from my pocket and give it to Tess. Anddon’ttouch her.” They had me. As promised, they’d better leave her out of this.
“Shade…” Tess’s weak croak made me want to set fire to the universe—and then burn it down a second time. Raw pain ripped through me. This couldn’t be over.
“Tess!” My end wouldn’t be hers. I’d make sure of it. “498721BVR—that’ll turn on the cruiser. Do what you need to do and get out of here.”
She moaned, her eyelids drooping.
“Baby! 498721BVR,” I shouted again, trying to penetrate the fog she was in. “You gotta remember the ignition numbers!”
If she didn’t, she’d be stranded here. The crew might think she didn’t make it. She didn’t even have her tablet to contact them. They had one device, and it was on theEndeavor. She’d never get into mine unless she had expert hacking skills I didn’t know about. The thought of Tess alone halfway across the galaxy from her crew with no ship, no money, and Nathaniel Bridgebane as her only possible point of contact sent me into a blind panic.
“Tess!” I bellowed.
Raquel rolled her eyes and dropped Tess in a way that could’ve been disfiguring if she’d gone over face-first. I jerked against my restraints—an automatic impulse to catch her. But I was too far away and fuckingtied up. I howled. Tess lay on her side, breathing shallowly, her eyes half-open and on me.
I glared at Raquel, white-hot fury consuming me. How had I ever had a normal conversation with this woman? Sat at her table? Shared meals with her and Solan? “You’re such a bitch. Just wait until you find out that payback is an even bigger one.”
Raquel smirked. “Good luck with that—from life in prison.”
Oh, she had no idea. If the Dark Watch killed me, I’d haunt Solan and Raquel across the galaxy until I had my revenge for this, but I wasn’t thinking about me. I was thinking about Tess and her friends. If Tess asked them to, they’d find the bounty hunters and fuck them up in ways these two couldn’t even imagine. If Fiona had her say in it, it might involve tetrafumic acid.
Raquel took a pen from her utility belt and wrote the cruiser’s ignition numbers on the inside of Tess’s forearm. She scowled at me. “Happy?”
“No. Not ever again in this lifetime.”
Her chin went up, her expression brittle. “Let’s go.” Her eyes flicked to Solan. “We have to get back to Maya.”
My eyes narrowed. They loved their daughter—the little girl was probably the only thing they loved besides each other—but I’d never heard one of them saythatbefore, especially when a hunt had been this fast and easy.
I refused to move, even when Solan pushed me. “What about Maya?” As far as I knew, the five-year-old was home in Sector 6, as usual.
Raquel’s face lost some of its habitual callousness. For the first time in ages, she looked almost human. Actually, she looked like her daughter, with big mahogany eyes, heavy dark lashes, and wavy hair down to her elbows. Maya’s long hair was blacker and springier, which she got from her father.
A visible anxiety I’d never seen before in her crept into Raquel’s features. “Why do you think it took us ten days to come after you?” She shook her head like I was the idiot and the asshole, when they were the ones who’d just ambushed us, captured me, and drugged my girlfriend.
“I don’t know. You tell me,” I ground out.
“Even though we chipped you, we didn’t pursue you ourselves or tell any of the other bounty hunters where you were because we chosenotto.” Raquel seemed to regret that decision wholeheartedly in retrospect. “In spite of her two hundredmillionunits being transferred toyourhead.” She pointed back and forth between Tess and me, as if I needed the visual cues to know exactly who she was talking about.
Did she want me to thank them? Fuck that.“What changed?” I asked.
She clamped her mouth shut, so I glared at Solan.
He scrubbed a hand over his shaved head, grimacing. “Maya got sick.”
“What?” My brow slammed down. “What kind of sick? What happened?”
“Everything was normal at first,” he answered. “After your asinine behavior on the Squirrel Tree, we went home and kept tabs on you. We watched you go to Starway 8 for some reason, then you zigzagged around the Outer Zones with no logical direction, then you disappeared. We thought you’d been blown up or something. There was no trace of you anywhere. Then Maya collapsed the other day.”
Solan took a deep breath. He glanced at his wife. She stared straight ahead at nothing. “She was playing normally. Then she started complaining about feeling dizzy. ‘Spots in my eyes,’ she said. We gave her a snack and thought she was okay again. A few hours later, she just dropped, folded like her strength fell out from under her. She couldn’t get back up. She’s in a clinic now. They say it’s an aggressive new blood disease, and they don’t know how to treat it.” His next words choked him. “They say she won’t make it.”
“Shit. I’m sorry.” I was sorry, despite the rest of this. Then anger reared up. “And you ditched her in a clinic to go hunt down the one person who might actually care about her besides you two?”
They both flinched, which was unprecedented. I’d only seen Maya here and there, a couple of times a year, on average. She wasn’t the easiest kid in the galaxy—hell, look at her parents—but I usually got her to come around to games that didn’t involve setting things on fire or beating the crap out of something. And I knew where Solan and Raquel kept the paperwork. The paperwork that fucking namedmeas Maya’s guardian if the two of them bit it somewhere.
“We didn’t ditch her,” Raquel said stiffly, not sounding like herself either as she moved closer to me and Solan. “We put out feelers. There’s a black-market dealer who says he’s got a cure-all like nothing anyone’s ever seen before. He swears it’ll fix anything, even this, but he’s only got one. He’ll sell it.”
