Cetan threw open the door to the communications room with a little too much drama to try to play it cool. “We need eyes on our people,” he was saying as he walked in. He had his comm to a secondary channel, and Allie was annoyed to realize that Cetan had arranged for backup to be on-station. Backup was good, but it would have been even better if he’d shared the plan with her.
“Are they talking yet?” Cetan asked as he dropped into the third chair.
“No,” Becca said. She gripped the edge of the desk so tightly her knuckles were white. “But that looks too serious for them to be just checking out a buyer.”
The three men spread out. At first their attention went to Shank, but Allie could see the second that someone really got a good look at Ben. The others shifted to better cover him. Yeah, Ben did kind of screamdanger. If Allie had met him under any circumstances other than being in the middle of running for her life, he would have scared her too.
“Hey,” Shank said, his voice tinny as it came through the ship’s speakers. He had a wariness to his body language, and Allie didn’t understand why until she spotted a new figure at the edge of the camera’s range.
The woman was beautiful, with long limbs and a natural grace that definitely caught Allie’s attention. Shank’s camera shifted, and now he was facing her. Claire. She couldn’t be anyone else. Her dark brown hair was pulled up at the sides, and then soft curls came down to her shoulders, but there wasn’t anything else soft about the woman. From the gun on her hip to the way she held her body and the sharp facial features—everything about her had an air of threat.
Cetan cursed softly in his own language. “What the hell is she doing handling trades?”
“Chankoowashtay,” she greeted Shank, her tone dismissive.
Allie thought about everything Shank had told her, about how Claire didn’t respect him, about how she thought being submissive in the bedroom meant he should be submissive everywhere. Suddenly Allie was convinced they’d played this wrong. Copta was too quiet to come off as a power player. Ben planned to play Shank’s backup, and Shank was out of his depth. Under normal circumstances, Allie would have trusted Shank to handle anything, but these circumstances weren’t normal. Claire wasn’t going to work with Shank. She didn’t respect his power, and God knew what she would do if she thought she had the upper hand.
“I’m going down there.” Allie spun her chair around and got up. “I need a sidearm and a couple of Shank’s cousins and, on the lift down, enough information to make her believe I’m one of you.”
“What? No,” Cetan quickly answered. Now he was on his feet.
“You, me, or Anpaytoo have a few minutes to get down there, or this is going to get ugly. Make up your mind about who’s going, or so help me...” Allie let her words trail off because she didn’t know what she would do. Those were her crew. Shank was her lover, her family in every sense of the word.
Cetan frowned, glanced at the monitors, and then touched his earpiece. “Lúta, Crow. Get down to hatch three double time. Bring a sidearm and a small holster.” He looked at Allie. “If you fuck this up, Anpaytoo isn’t going to let you on this ship again.”
Allie nodded. She already knew that.
Cetan added something else in Lakota. Allie was really getting tired of people using words she didn’t know.
“Let’s go,” she said firmly.
Cetan gave her a long look filled with doubts and distrust, but he turned and headed out into the corridor at a healthy trot, and Allie followed.
Chapter Twenty
Lúta turned out tobe a huge man with salt-and-pepper gray hair and a grim expression, at least when he didn’t smile. When Cetan had ordered him not to get himself killed, Lúta had grinned and become a different man. Crow was about the same age as Shank, with marine-short hair and a stocky build. Both looked like they knew how to handle trouble. Now Allie just had to figure out how to keep Shank away from Claire while still getting Ben and his scanners close to that damn ship she had hidden in a dark berth.
