by Kris Delake
Naive, confused, incompetent, funny—and beautiful.
He had found her attractive the moment he saw her on this ship, noting how she moved when he followed her, watching her laugh in the ship’s casino, watching her flirt in one of the ship’s bars.
And then he had touched her. At that moment, he had stopped thinking. He had gotten her out of her terrible little mess—which he had thought so cute. Amazing—he had thought, his arm around her shoulder, her body pressed against his, that scent of hers filling his nostrils—how someone so incompetent had managed to complete so many jobs.
He had actually thought she had bungled her way toward success, and as he led her from corridor to corridor, airlock to airlock, controlling her every move, he had two concurrent thoughts: first that she would be grateful he had rescued her, and second that she would beg him to teach her how to do the job right.
Beg him. Yeah, that had worked. He hadn’t expected the mad, no matter how it made her eyes flash and animated her face. He hadn’t expected her utter ruthlessness.
He hadn’t expected that passionate, passionate woman he had touched the night before to be so very cold.
He made himself sit back down. He took the eggs and shoved them into the heater behind the table. He put the bacon into the recycler, and made himself eat some of the fresh fruit while he was waiting for the eggs to warm.
Assassins Guild Rule Number 65: An assassin’s body is his first weapon. Therefore it must be in the best possible condition at all times.
He believed in the Guild. He believed in the rules. They had kept him alive. They had kept the other assassins alive. Assassins, like any other profession, formed a community. They had gotten most of the organized sector governments to agree, allowing the profession to proceed with honor. Ethics were a big part of that honor. Ethics made certain that random people didn’t die unnecessarily, that civilians didn’t get accused of a crime for which they would have no defense, that everyone—from the assassin to the client to the victim—understood the rules, even in the abstract.
The profession was an old one. It had existed as long as human societies had existed, and was sometimes legal and sometimes not. Throughout this galaxy, the legality of the profession varied. But in the sectors where Misha worked, the Assassins Guild held sway.
He had joined at the urging of his mother, so that he could stay out of the situation she had found herself in. She had been an assassin for a particular government, and had been unable to tell anyone, including her husband, Misha’s father. When she refused to do a job so heinous that it even got through her shady ethics and then she rigged things so that no one could ever do that job, her own government hired an assassin to take her out.
Only the assassin had decided to go one step further: he also targeted her family. Misha and his father were on a vacation cruise on a much smaller ship than this one when that assassin opened fire, killing everyone except Misha. The assassin left Misha gravely wounded but alive, then made sure the ship docked at the space station where his mother was hiding out. She found Misha and saved him, and she was the one who realized all of those deaths were a warning to her and other assassins to always do their job.
She tracked down that assassin, but Misha killed him. Barely thirteen, he had managed—through anger and sheer adrenaline—to take down a man three times his size. That was when his mother realized she had a talent on her hands. That was when she realized that together, she and he could hire out for difficult jobs.
She took him to a more civilized part of the galaxy, joined the Assassins Guild, and sent him to their training. He had taken to their rules—she once said—as if she had sent him to a religious school. He never returned to the area of his birth, and except for traveling through places like the NetherRealm, he never left Assassins Guild territory.
He worked legally or not at all.
But Rikki didn’t. Apparently she was as amoral as the man who killed Misha’s father. Apparently she didn’t care who got hurt when she performed her job.
She finished, got paid, and then left the mess for someone else.
And lately that someone else had been him.
But no longer.
Now he would stop her. If she didn’t want to join the Guild, then her career would have to end.
One way or another.
Chapter 7
After spending the night in Misha’s suite, Rikki found her room to be so small she wondered how she had managed to stay there for the first part of the trip. When the door opened, it brushed against the bed. The bed itself barely fit her, and it was uncomfortable as hell.
Uncomfortable probably wasn’t the right word. Torturous would be better.
It had no mattress, not really. It was some kind of pad that supposedly remembered her sleeping position and lulled her into some kind of deep sleep. She had slept well here before she had gone to Misha’s room—where she hadn’t slept, thank you very much, or slept much, as the case might be.
She would never ever ever get that mattress out of her mind. (That night, really. The best night of her life. The morning after—not so good [well, it started out great]—but the night, the night was spectacular.)
She sat on the edge of her horrible bed, thinking that it did her no good. The mattress (or whatever the hell it was) remembered her sleeping position when what she really wanted was a place to sit. And the bed didn’t remember her sitting position. She looked at the room’s only chair. It was some metal thing with no padding that was more uncomfortable than the bed. She certainly couldn’t work on that chair, and the room wasn’t big enough for a table.
Hell, it wasn’t big enough for a real closet either, but that hadn’t bothered her until—
She shook her head, trying to get that suite out of her mind. She had to concentrate.
She ate the last bite of the most sinfully delicious pastry she had ever had, wished for real coffee, regretted that she hadn’t poured herself a cup when she had been in Misha’s suite, then ordered up a cup from the little servo unit on the wall.
The servo unit had been specific when she arrived. If she wanted high-end anything, she had to leave the room and go to the high-end restaurants, bars, or lounges. She could only get the things included in her tab here. And real coffee—the kind made from beans and not some reconstituted fake-o garbage—was not included in her tab.
Nothing fresh was. She got bread that had clearly been stored in some kind of container, cheese that tasted like plastic, meat that actually said on its little patty that it was made from vegetable and animal by-product (whatever that meant), and pastries that tasted like they had been made on Earth before the first spaceships took off back at the dawn of time.
Her room was designed to keep her out of it, in the shopping areas and restaurants spending money. Misha’s room—well, Misha’s room had been designed for exactly what they had done in it.
And more.
She shook her head again, and willed him out of her mind. Which was hard to do, considering how her nipples were still sensitive so that every time she moved her arms, her shirt brushed them and reminded her of him. Her lips were swollen, her neck covered with so many love bites that she was going to have to wear the only high-collared dress she had purchased later that evening.
Getting him out of her mind was, in fact, easier than getting his imprint off her body. And the weird thing was, she still craved him.
Even though she had figured out he was using her.
She leaned over the non-networked tablet she had brought with her. She had it flat on the bed. Her tablet didn’t have all of her information on it—she knew better than that—but she had downloaded most of the research materials she needed so that she had easy access to it without going through the ship’s systems.
She had learned long ago that she was better off not leaving a computer trail—and that was hard to do.
Before she had gotten on this ship, she had downloaded its passenger manifest. The man in the room she had left w
as not named Misha. Or at least, he wasn’t traveling under that name. He was traveling as Rafael de Brovnik, a man with incredible financials and a history marked private. She had learned long ago that anyone who spent enough money at these places got all kinds of preferential treatment, no questions asked.
She had been required to fill out all kinds of details about her fake identity’s financial situation. She had nearly three dozen identities, all of them airtight, and so far she had used none of them twice.
Instead of using her real name, Rikki Bastogne, on this ship, she was Rachel Carter, a recently divorced woman who was using her settlement to take the trip of a lifetime. She had learned that “recently divorced” was code for “willing to party in excess,” and that ships like this loved passengers like Rachel. Even though the room was crappy, she had gotten it at the last minute at half price, partly because the ship wanted to fill every berth and partly because it wanted to fill every berth with the kind of passenger who encouraged other passengers to have fun.
Supposedly Rachel was that passenger. She had certainly played the role with Elio Testrial, flirting, laughing, eating meals with him, letting him think she was interested. Then when they got back to his suite—which wasn’t nearly as nice as Misha’s—she had killed him after, of course, she had recited a list of his crimes that the client (which apparently was Misha) had instructed her to recite.
Testrial had listened the entire time while she held his face between her hands. Then she had asked if he understood, and when he nodded, she finished the job.
Which Misha hadn’t finished paying her for, even though she had reminded him as she left the suite. She doubted he would ever pay her now. The last part of the payment and the expenses were probably never going to arrive in her account.
Good thing she always overcharged.
The job was technically done, all except for the escape. Normally, she wouldn’t be worried about that, but this morning (last night) meant that nothing was normal. Misha might try to have her arrested, and she wasn’t sure how she would survive that, since he—as Rafael de Brovnik, the filthy rich trustworthy suite-renter—could swear that she had committed the crime in front of him.
He would automatically have more cachet with any authorities than she would.
Unless she could prove Rafael de Brovnik a fraud.
She supposed she could do that—she supposed she needed to do that—but she wasn’t doing that. In fact, she wasn’t sure why she was doing what she was doing because she’d been over this ground before.
She was researching Elio Testrial.
Unlike what she had implied to Misha (or whatever the hell his name was), she actually did have standards. She didn’t kill nice people. She didn’t kill heirs to thrones or political rivals. She didn’t kill business partners, no matter how legal it was, or widows who stumbled into a fortune after two years of marriage, no matter how bitchy they were.
She prided herself on one thing: she killed bad guys.
And, yeah, occasionally her definition of bad was a bit eccentric, which if anyone had asked her (and no one ever had) she would have blamed on her horrific childhood. But mostly, her definition of bad was the universe’s definition.
She killed folks who continually preyed on the innocent, the weak, and the impoverished. She killed folks who stole billions and caused suicides; she killed folks who ordered mass murder and helped carry it out; she killed real long-term dictators and child molesters and illegal weapons traffickers. She killed people who left a trail of destruction behind them—and not the kind she left. She killed people who would not be missed, not because no one ever noticed them but because no one would mourn them.
And she made sure all the information she had was correct.
She never took the client’s word. She always spent weeks researching the target. And then she hired a service (a different one each time) to do similar research, because she knew her favorite databases could be tampered with.
Sometimes she found serious discrepancies. Sometimes the client was the bad guy and the target was the innocent victim. She turned down those cases, and a few times, she had even warned the target.
But mostly, she accepted a few jobs a year, which kept her in cash. She wasn’t in it for the money. She did the work because she was good at it, and because it provided a challenge, and because she felt the need to wipe the scum off the universe’s metaphorical shoe.
She could never be any kind of law-enforcement official. Their worlds were too narrow. Plus they were bound by all kinds of strange laws, some of which made prosecution difficult or actually protected the really bad guys.
She liked working without rules.
Which was why she avoided the Assassins Guild, sanctimonious bastards that they were. A “license” was required. “Rules” had to be followed. “Hands” couldn’t be dirtied, or there would be some kind of review.
She had looked at the Guild early on, when she realized she had a talent for these things, saw the list of one thousand rules and twenty-five hundred guidelines, and realized that the organization was not for her.
Mostly she tried to stay out of their territory—or at least, that had been her plan until she realized that other territories were a lot less friendly to assassins. So she stayed on the fringes, accepted only jobs that could be done away from the main population centers, and kept her prices low. Yes, she undercut most members of the Guild, but she didn’t have to give 20 percent of her earnings in dues every year.
Amazing what kind of money that saved over time.
Maybe that was why this Misha had hired her. Not so much for Testrial, but to get her out of the Guild’s territory. To shut her down.
She sighed, got up, and nearly hit her head on the ceiling. She grabbed her so-called coffee, took a sip, and winced. At least the stuff had caffeine, or some kind of stimulant. And at least it wiped out the taste of that pastry, because the sinfully good taste of that pastry reminded her of Misha, and that suite, and that bed, and the way his eyes softened when his hand cupped her—
She shook her head for—what was it? The third time? Five hundredth? She had no idea. She wished there was some kind of drug that selectively wiped the memory because she would use it now. She needed to forget that fantastic night so she could properly hate the man without her hormones getting in the way.
She went back to the bed, and stared at the tablet. Everything she had on Elio Testrial from both sources—hers and the service she hired under yet another name—made it clear that this man had bilked thousands of people of their life savings, then destroyed their ability to work. He had savaged them financially and emotionally, and when their families had come to him, begging for refunds, for mercy, for help, he had turned them away.
Which sadly hadn’t been enough for Rikki to kill him—not in cold blood. Although she might have trained one or two of those family members to do so if she had known about Testrial during that period.
Nope. What convinced Rikki was this: he decided to “help” the families. If they had a family member who met certain physical specifications, he would not only abolish the family’s debts, but he would restore their finances—with interest—so long as that family member worked for him.
It all sounded well and good until it became clear that the new employee wouldn’t survive the year. Testrial sent people into mines that couldn’t be mechanized. Nothing human beings invented could work inside those mines for long. Neither could humans. But the human body was resilient and survived longer than anything with cogs and wheels and drives and bits. Not a lot longer, but long enough to actually do some valuable work. Besides, paying those families their lost funds was cheaper than building an android with the same specifications as the humans who ventured into the mines.
It was icky, it was gross, and it was entirely legal, because Testrial’s string of mines were in Yhgred Sector, where human life was generally not valued like it was elsewhere in the galaxy. The laws were lax there, so lax that she never
traveled into that sector, not even for a job.
If Testrial hadn’t had business in Litaera Sector, she would never have taken this job in the first place.
She sighed. Thousands and thousands of families destroyed by Testrial. If she searched for a Misha among them or a Rafael or a slender blond man, she would find thousands of them.
This wasn’t the way to figure out who he was. Or if he had lied to her.
Because she wasn’t sure about that either.
Maybe he wasn’t a licensed assassin. Maybe he worked for Testrial or Testrial’s cohorts. Or maybe he was after her for a different reason.
She stretched, and shut off the tablet, setting it back in the tiny excuse for a closet.
She should just get off at the next port. Or, if things got really bad, steal an escape pod.
And maybe she would do those things.
But not yet. So far, no one had knocked on her door and demanded her identification. No one had accused her of unjustly killing Testrial.
Probably no one except this Misha guy even knew that Testrial was dead.
The problem with leaving now was that Misha—or whoever the hell he was—would still be tracking her. She wouldn’t know how to get him off her back or even why he had been interested in her.
If she wanted answers, she needed to stay. For a while, anyway.
At least until Misha gave her a few answers—whether he wanted to or not.
Chapter 8
Rikki worked best when she had a course of action, even if she abandoned it later. After much pacing inside her little cabin, she decided on a plan. (“Pacing” being a hopeful, delusional word. “Pivoting” would have been more accurate.)
What she needed to do first was figure out if Misha was actually a member of the Assassins Guild or if he had lied about that to put her on the defensive. And there was an easy way to figure it out: Guild members had DNA on file. If she put his DNA into the right database, then she would find out not only if he was a member of the Guild, but what his real (or at least his admitted) name was.
