He almost felt sorry for her.
Leaning back against the opposite wall, he crossed his arms carefully to hide the blood seeping through the rag. It was starting to feel cold and sticky now. “Relax, kelarris. You did good. We’re in the air.”
Then the lights changed.
It wasn’t dramatic. Just a subtle shift in the spectrum, and the harsh white of the utility strips bled into a predatory red.
Click.
A hum started up. It was low and subsonic, and he felt it in his back teeth before he heard it properly.
He froze.
Draanth.
He knew that sound. He’d heard it in garrison lockdowns and in high-security vaults. That was the sound of a local weapons system cycling from standby to active.
He looked at the little human as she pushed a tangle of red hair out of her face, and ice rolled down his spine.
Talk about draanthing it up, sunshine.
Stillness was not the stillness of someone who was defeated or who’d run out of fight. It was the stillness of a predator, the stillness that meant the fight had moved to somewhere he couldn’t see.
Oh.
“I suggest you stay perfectly still,” she said, her voice level and quiet. “Or Fred will blow your head off.”
Raaze stayed perfectly still. Because, despite all evidence to the contrary, he wasn’t an actual idiot. And because he really didn’t want a hole in his forehead today.
He scanned the corridor from his peripheral vision. It was empty. There were no guards and no automated turrets dropped from the corners of the ceiling. There was just the red light, the hum, and the woman looking at him with eyes so emotionless, he couldn’t read her.
Fred.
That was a male name. It was a human male name. He wasn’t really sure of human naming conventions, but it sounded short and familiar. Like a pet name or nickname, something.
She’d kept her eyes on him as she said it, hadn’t bothered to look at the ceiling or down the corridor. Instead, she’d looked at him, steady as a locked targeting system. Which meant that someone on this ship with weapons access had her back. Not just someone, a male on this ship with weapons access had her back, and that male was someone she trusted enough to hand that kind of power to. Probably some invisible lapdog with a finger on the trigger.
His jaw locked, aching from the tension.
He didn’t know why. She wasn’t important. She was just a mark… transport, little more than a means to an end. So it didn’t matter who she had backing her up as long as those weapons stayed pointed the draanth away from him.
Yeah, the voice in his head said, You keep telling yourself that, handsome.
His jaw was still locked.
“Fred.” His voice was flat. “Let me guess. The strong and silent type.”
“He has his moments.” She didn’t look away. Her expression was as hard as a liiraas snake. “Put your hands where I can see them. Slowly.”
He did as he was told, lifting his hands slowly, the movement pulling at his wounded arm.
The hum in the walls pitched up a fraction. Yeah, that was a targeting lock. Someone had a bead on him. The hair on the back of his neck prickled.
“You’re not armed,” he said. It was a statement, rather than a question. Ignore from the moment that he approached her that she wasn’t armed, that all she had was a wrench and a diagnostic tool. The day he didn’t know what weaponry a person was carrying was the day they could put him on his funeral pyre.
“I don’t need to be.” She tilted her head slightly and her eyes unfocused for half a second. She wasn’t looking at him or the corridor. She was looking somewhere else. Then she blinked, and she was back, looking at him like nothing had happened.
She hadn’t been looking at him. She had been listening to someone else.
