by Elsa Jade
Despite the perfectly controlled climate inside the estate, a ghostly touch whispered along his skin as he moved away from her to the edge of the bed. He glanced back warily—that chill usually meant someone was watching, maybe intending to shoot him.
But Trixie slept on, one hand tucked under her soft mishkeet cheek and her blond hair tumbled across the pillows. Against the rich dark green hue of the bedding, her creamy skin beckoned his hand.
He reached out to brush back one of the strands that had strayed across her lips, but then he stopped himself. She would feel that touch. He redirected his finger to the too-cushy pillow where another lock coiled like a treasure on display. The tress wound around his knuckle with a silky caress. So fine and delicate. And yet the strands seemed to bind something deep inside him.
He unraveled himself hastily and slipped out of the bed.
From the safe distance of the doorway, he glanced back. She looked smaller than ever in the big hollow of the bed. Though he’d moved out of the way, there was still room for him to return…
He increased the opacity of the windows to block out the brightening light and shut the door behind him.
The quiet shush of the portal cutting him off from Trixie sounded disapproving.
And he’d left his clothes behind.
Cursing quietly to himself, he checked the wardrobe in the bathing area that was accessible through the communal room. The estate guest quarters were always well stocked with toiletries for different species, and the stylish Thorkon day robes fit many lifeforms. In the wardrobe, hanging alongside the Azthronos gifts was a simple white shift. He reached for it, thinking he could use it as a shirt, but as his fingers snagged on the flimsy material, he realized it was the sole piece of clothing Trixie had brought with her after her rescue from the space station. All the Black Hole Brides had been skimpily dressed in these shifts, the only possessions Blackworm had left them.
Why had the estate staff laundered and returned the shift? Why had Trixie not dropped it in the recycler, a repudiation of her abduction? He would’ve set his plasma blaster to high burn and shot the thing to pieces and then incinerated the ashes.
But Trixie didn’t believe it was over.
His scowl fell away to blankness. He was in charge of security, as he’d told her, but she had no confidence in him. The weak, almost transparent fabric hung there like a shouted accusation.
She might be off the space station, but she hadn’t left it behind.
Nor shoved the flimsy fabric to the back of the wardrobe with a scowl. The Duke of Azthronos let him command a dreadnaught—the flagship of the duchy, thanksverymuch, with all the power and firepower that entailed—and yet this little Earther girl doubted him and his guns. His bare skin prickled with frustration and annoyance at the evidence of his failure tucked in the back of a refugee’s closet.
Although he preferred the militaristic ships fatigues that were fitted and utilitarian, he helped himself to one of the less pompous robes cut straight from the neckline to the hem. It had a subtle geometric pattern woven into the fabric, but nothing that would get him automatically punched in a freighter crews’ lounge. He yanked it around his shoulders and sealed the front with angry twitches of his fingers.
Pacing through the small pantry area while his pixberry tea brewed, he paused to look down at the sunken seats where Trixie had straddled him and kissed him so sweetly, so hot.
Larf it, his erection had just barely subsided, and now…
Scowl returning, he smoothed down the robe, shoving his perky flesh down to a sullen bulk. He needed to get away from this temptation. At least he’d left his dat-pad beside hers by the seating area, not in the bedroom.
Swiping the steaming cup of tea, he stalked out of Trixie’s suite. He had a list of responsibilities longer than the Grandy’s main corridor, but he discovered that her door—which he’d closed himself, and set with an alarm connected to his dat-pad now strapped to his wrist—seemed to have an inordinate gravity that kept him from walking away. Some wistful, needy part of him didn’t want to leave her.
His resentment at that weakness—the part of him that had cried out when his father had turned away, the part that should have finished withering to nothing when his mother walked off the ship that had taken them into exile from Azthronos, leaving him behind—gave him enough escape velocity to stride down the hallway to the doorway at the end. He pushed through to stand on the balcony overlooking the courtyard garden below.
This was where Trixie had found him just a night ago, with his trousers around his knees. At the time, the improper awkwardness had amused him. But remembering it now, he squinted, as if he could stop himself from seeing it again: Trixie’s horrified gaze, Illya’s quizzical glance, his own smug smirk.
No wonder she didn’t believe in him. He hadn’t exactly shown her his best side right then. And even once he’d shown her the rest of him, he’d given her nothing to hold onto. Besides some well-used muscle.
And after that, he’d sneaked out.
To find himself here, walking the pretty balcony in agitation, blind to the morning beauty of the garden below. The orderly procession of the planters lining the balustrade prevented him from pacing along the rail. He had to keep sidestepping the big square containers, striding over the sculpted shadows of the stone balusters stretched across his path like nicely carved prison bars.
How had he found himself stuck on this estate when he’d been a free-roaming privateer with galaxies beneath his boots? Had he really thought he could make a place on this confined world?
When he skirted too close to one planter, the blunt corner clipped his hipbone, nearly spinning him around from the momentum of his own steps bouncing back at him.
He growled at the concussion. That would leave a mark.
To his relief, his dat-pad beeped an incoming message from the Onoffon. A diversion, good.
Placing the device on the balustrade, he stepped back as a half size figure beamed upward in holo-vid mode.
He recognized the younger Quaye sister. Vaughn Quaye had the same dusky skin and wavy brown hair as his half-brother’s woman, but she was taller and broader, and the edge of her polite smile was sharper. She gestured to one side and her mate, the hivre iomale Dejo Jinn, joined her in the hologram.
“Captain,” she said. “We have news.”
He stiffened, the instincts that had carried him through lightyears of danger tingling. “You found Blackworm.”
In the high resolution of the holo-vid, the ripple of the small, striped feathers in Dejo’s hair looked like a glitch. “Not quite. But we found out why.”
Nor hadn’t survived his childhood by wondering why. How and how much had been the driving forces. But he found his curiosity prickling like hivre feathers. “What was he doing on that space station?”
Since Blackworm had already been caught, charged, tried, and sentenced for other crimes, the transgalactic authorities weren’t much interested in the whys either, but after the Earther females had been rescued, Rayna had wanted answers. And her sister Vaughn had the resources to keep looking, thanks to Dejo and his data recovery skills. Before the Onoffon had departed for a recovery, they injected a sample of Dejo’s new neural gel into the data core on the space station. They hoped the artificial intelligence might make some connections to Blackworm’s intent.
Instead of answering, Vaughn eyed him, her suspicion as visible on the high res as Dejo’s feathers. “We couldn’t reach Rayna and Raz.”
“They were going to be touring the outer gas giant,” he told her. “The heavy ores in the rings are a mining asset for the system, but the more exotic metals often interfere with communications.”
Dejo nudged his mate, as if to say I-told-you-so, and when Vaughn huffed, the iomale said, “The duke left you in charge?”
Nor lifted one eyebrow at the disbelieving note. Considering that Dejo Jinn had a questionable past himself, it seemed unfair of him to question Nor.
Although maybe th
at was why they were questioning him.
He set aside his irritation with a slow breath. “What do you have?”
Dejo punched something into his dat-pad, and Nor’s responded with a beep. “I’m sending you the raw data, but here’s the overview of what we found.”
The device whirred again, and Nor scanned the info scrolling below the holo-vid figures. “Blackworm didn’t site the station on the edge of the black hole just to hide?”
Dejo touched his pad which highlighted a section on Nor’s. “No, he was definitely interested in the singularity for reasons beyond the disguising radiation.”
Nor peered at the emphasized section. “He had all the station’s sensors aimed at the black hole. But nothing escapes the event horizon, so what was he looking for?”
“He was watching what went in,” Dejo said.
The dat-pad showed a sensor recording of a small object launching from the space station toward the black hole. Nor peered at the screen. “He was ejecting the station’s emergency life pods?” Probably more accurate to call them death pods, considering their lethal trajectory toward the infinitely crushing gravitational forces of the singularity. “What was he…?”
The pad switched to another view, from earlier according to the time stamp, taken from one of the corridor security vids. The station had been in hibernation mode, mostly powered down, so the lighting was poor. But the vid had enough extrapolated detail to show a tall, dark-haired, Thorkon male hefting a smaller figure, limp in his arms, and opening the hatch on an emergency pod. He slid the figure into the pod, tucking the trailing hem of the white shift inside.
Nor gripped the stone balustrade on either side of the dat-pad, watching. If Blackworm’s neck had been between his palms…
Blackworm stepped back, sealed the hatch, and triggered the release.
“That could’ve been my sister,” Vaughn growled. “She was somebody’s sister or friend or…” She clamped her jaw shut.
Dejo put an arm around her shoulders and leaned his feathered head toward her as if he was sheltering her, even from her own helpless anger. “We know some of the Earther women Blackworm abducted were signed on with the Intergalactic Dating Agency. The Big Sky outpost had records that we’re analyzing to find out who they were, besides Rayna and the other four that the duke recovered. But as Rayna discovered, the mercenary crew Blackworm hired to transport his victims wasn’t always so selective. They took women from Sunset Falls and other Montana towns who never agreed to be part of the alien bride program. We may never know who those were.”
Just closed-world innocents, going about their days, never dreaming they’d be abducted to a fate of eternal darkness. Innocents like Trixie.
Nor scrolled quickly through more of the dates on the security recordings. Blackworm had made many such trips to the life pods. Fury tightened Nor’s voice when he asked, “Is there some other way to find out who they were?” The ones who’d been sent into the black hole couldn’t be saved, obviously, but they could at least be remembered.
“The neural gel we left in the station’s data core is building a timeline of every moment the station was in Blackworm’s possession,” Dejo said. “It’ll cross-reference security vids, any internal or external controls that were accessed, all communications channels. After it compiles, we’ll have a better idea of what all happened.”
“But there’s only so much we can do remotely,” Vaughn said. “If you send a technical team to the station to take physical samples, we might be able to cross-reference DNA swabs with the people we know were on the station…to the ones we don’t know.” Her brown eyes, so like Rayna’s, glinted, fierce and furious. “We’ll find out who they were, and we’ll make sure the authorities add another lifetime to Blackworm’s sentence for each of those missing women.”
The Quaye sisters were their own force of nature, like reverse black holes, spewing righteous justice into Azthronos. No wonder his oh-so proper ducal brother was enamored with the Earther commoner.
For a moment, Nor’s belly tightened, like a strange sort of starvation. How nice for Raz and the Quaye sisters and even the erstwhile data thief Dejo Jinn to rally against a disgraced nobleman’s wicked ways. If the many gods of Thorkon—or, say, trans-galactic legal systems—were weighing good and evil, likely Nor would land on the same side of the scale as Blackworm.
He shoved down the resentful thought. He’d bought his way into semi legitimacy. Certainly that counted for something. Counted by a rather bogglingly large number of galactic credits.
“I’ll send the team,” he said curtly. “I assume the neural gel will create a map of the most likely places to swab for identifying samples?”
Dejo nodded. “I’ll have the gel ping your dat-pad whenever it has a likely location. Although even if we do make identifications, the galactic council likely won’t approve reaching out to the closed-world families who are wondering what happened to the women.”
Vaughn lifted her chin, the jutting bone as blunt and pugnacious as the honed bore of a plasma rifle. “They won’t be forgotten,” she vowed. “We’ll make sure of that.”
Her reference to “we” probably didn’t include him, but Nor nodded anyway. What if Trixie had been one of those girls, gone forever, with no one knowing? The thought of her touchable little body atomized by the tidal forces of the singularity wrenched him as hard as though he’d been captured by those inescapable forces. If he’d never known her…
“Since the Grandy is docked for maintenance, I’ll lead the team myself,” he said. “We’ll get you the rest of the data you need.”
It wouldn’t be of any practical help to the women who’d died in the black hole’s pitiless pull, and as Dejo had pointed out it probably wouldn’t even benefit their families. And Nor considered himself brutally practical, so he wasn’t sure why he had volunteered his efforts. But since he didn’t have anything else to do at the moment…
Except fall back into bed with Trixie.
He signed off with Dejo and Vaughn but kept his gaze painstakingly on his dat-pad as he left the balcony and passed Trixie’s door.
He couldn’t help the Black Hole Brides who were lost forever, but he could at least save himself from the irresistible attraction of one small Earther girl.
Chapter 9
Trixie knew he’d gone, but she kept her eyes closed and her breathing deep until total silence had filled the suite. Only then did she let out a shuddering breath.
Not a sob. She hadn’t cried since she walked out of her mother’s house for the last time after finally realizing that no one changed unless they wanted to. Even getting caught with incriminating photos or a blood alcohol level above the legal limit didn’t really change people. If she didn’t want to be the same sad, hopeless victim as her mother, she’d known she had to leave.
Which got her as far as Sunset Falls where she’d been abducted by aliens, so… So much for wanting to change her life for the better. Maybe even wanting wasn’t enough.
It certainly hadn’t been enough to keep the captain around.
With another breath—a snort of derision this time—she flounced out of bed and into the sonic shower.
She wasn’t going to get all mopey about Nor. It had been a fun, sexy time, that was all. That was how bad boys were: fun, sexy, gone.
And she had to give him credit. She hadn’t had any nightmares last night.
Mostly because she hadn’t slept, but still.
The brisk, waterless shower left her skin flushed and tingling, like invisible all-over whisker burn. One more breath—a wistful one—and she shook off any lingering effects from the night previous. She couldn’t mope about Nor or Blackworm if she was going to take control of her life. And she was going to start by deciding what she wanted from the universe.
As she padded back into the bedroom, she had to step over the black ships fatigues Nor had left behind. She frowned to herself. Was he running around the estate nude? That seemed a little irresponsible even for a rakish bad
boy ex-pirate. Had he been in that much of a hurry to escape from her?
With a sniff—that wasn’t moping; that was disapproving—she tossed his clothes into the shower. It would be his own fault if they shrank.
While she had breakfast (washed down with coffee because she wasn’t going to acknowledge the remnants of pixberry tea she found at the counter) she sent a message to Doctor Boshil about scheduling a translator implantation. The kind medic had overseen the allegedly minor surgeries for Rayna and Lishelle, and nothing bad had happened to them.
Well, nothing bad since getting abducted anyway.
Sipping her coffee, Trixie wandered to the sitting room window. From this angle, her view showed the estate valley sloping up toward the high hills in the distance, which was left slightly more natural than the precisely sculpted gardens nearer the house. But it was nothing like the wilderness around Sunset Falls. She’d never really appreciated the forested mountains, badlands, and broad prairies of Big Sky Country; she’d been so focused on getting away that she’d forgotten about looking around at where she’d gotten away to. Now she wished she’d gone out a little farther, at least hiked to the abandoned observatory that was a popular hookup spot for Sunset Falls lovers. She could’ve looked up at the stars and wondered…
But she would’ve never, in any of her wildest, star-struck fantasies, believed she’d be where she was now.
No more praying or hiding in her suite, no more counting steps along her escape route, no more waiting for a new life to shoot across her sky like a meteor.
Gulping down the last of her coffee—of all the things aliens had stolen from Earth, she supposed coffee was the one she appreciated most—she marched back to the bedroom, shedding the plush Thorkon robe that on her was a big, soft embrace. She needed something more impressive than a robe or even a gown.
Her head swiveled toward the sonic shower. She opened the door and looked down at Nor’s left-behind fatigues.
