by Kris Delake
Her plan was to get his DNA—which was stupid. Because if she had thought of this plan earlier, she would have had a much easier time of it. After all, he had given of his DNA freely—and frequently—last night.
If she was half a step dumber, she would go back to his suite, rip his shirt off, slide her hands down his pants, and have her way with him.
The problem was, she wasn’t sure if she could get out of that suite again. Not because of the sex. She could control herself enough to stop after one go. (She hoped.)
No, she figured he might try to keep her in that suite for good, especially now that she had left. She had surprised him at that breakfast table. He had thought she was some kind of sex-crazed bimbo, and while she had done a reasonable impression of one (or at least, had let the sex-crazed bimbo side of her personality have sway over the rest of her [much more reasonable] personality), she really wasn’t one.
She was smart and competent, and she had survived a long time because of it. He finally realized that.
So if he thought she was a threat before, he really had to think she was a threat now.
Her only option, then, was to find him in a public place. She knew he didn’t spend his evenings in the ship’s casino, because Testrial had, and she had been with Testrial every night as his “good luck charm.” (Heh. That hadn’t turned out well for him.) She hadn’t seen Misha at all—and she doubted she would have missed him.
Although she had missed him up until last night, and he made it sound like he had been following her. Still, if he had been in the casino, she would have seen him. She had made a point of sizing everyone up, including the people who were trying not to get noticed.
So, assuming he wouldn’t be there and assuming he would be out of his gorgeous suite—which, she had to admit, was a hell of an assumption given how damn comfortable that suite was—then he would either be in the pubs, the restaurants, or the ballroom.
She would haunt them all until she saw him again. Then she would get just a bit of DNA, and figure out a way to get it to the Assassins Guild’s database.
Civilians didn’t have access to that database, but she would solve that problem after she had solved the others.
She slipped a DNA holder on the tip of her little finger. The holder looked like a part of her, but if she flicked it on and then swiped, she would get a few skin cells or a tiny strand of hair. That would be all she needed.
The DNA holder was the easy part of her wardrobe. She stood in front of her tiny closet for what seemed like eternity while she figured out what to wear for the evening.
She had brought along a variety of fancy dresses, all but one of them revealing a lot of skin. The one that didn’t had seduced her with its material. It was made of a watery silk, and had cost more than she usually made at her highest paying job. It was black and silver, with long sleeves and a high neckline, both of which she needed on this night. It had no slit along the side, so her legs didn’t show at all.
She wore it with pointy-toed silver heels that made her taller, and she wound her chestnut hair around the top of her head. She looked expensive and a lot more seductive than she planned. The silk was thin and the silver panels looked more like white skin peeking through the black.
Only up close did the material appear as what it was: a soft silver, as smooth to the touch as the black silk itself.
The dress made her feel beautiful, and she needed that after her humiliation in front of Misha that morning. She wouldn’t have needed it at all if she hadn’t thought that his passion was based in more than lust, but his words had convinced her otherwise. He was probably one of those sexually insatiable men, the kind who could perform no matter who the woman (or the man or the android) was.
The very thought made her cheeks heat up.
She took one last glance at herself in the room’s full-length mirror. Then she took a deep breath and headed into the corridor.
She would find him, get his DNA, and figure out exactly what to do next.
Chapter 9
Misha initially found her through the identi-card the ship had given her when she booked her room. The card listed her name as Rachel Carter. When he first found her, he wasn’t sure that Rachel Carter was the woman he wanted. He had a list of four that he was keeping an eye on.
He had followed the down payment he had sent her for the job, and had watched as she transferred the funds from place to place. By the time she paid for her cruise, he had the amount and the ship’s name, but not her name. She had used some kind of trick to book her passage, a trick he couldn’t quite follow.
So he had to go through the difficult task of eliminating the other passengers. He managed to eliminate all of the wrong gender and the wrong age, but that left him with four single women. He had had to eyeball all of them.
And he had been surprised when he realized who Rachel Carter really was.
Then he switched out her identi-card so that he could follow her. That had taken some work and some planning. If she had a more expensive passage, she would have had a subcutaneous chip like he did. Those expensive identi-chips made it possible for the very wealthy to visit all parts of the ship. The chips got read as the passenger went from deck to deck, lounge to lounge, even if the passenger didn’t touch an identi-circuit.
He liked cruise ships for that very reason. They had to keep track of passengers, and they used a short-term tracking system that he could easily access. He had been doing it for years, and he had become so good at it, he could turn his own identi-chip on and off, something he hadn’t told Rikki when he’d been slamming his fist against the airlock circuitry.
But identi-cards didn’t allow the easy passage throughout the ship. Any identi-card user had to scan the card as she went from section to section. Rikki had altered her card enough to give her access to the parts of the ship she had frequented with Elio Testrial, but she never would have gotten into the B Deck lounge (for example) without Misha.
She couldn’t have done a lot without Misha.
She seemed to think she had completed her job well. She didn’t realize that he had saved her ass, and part of the way he had done so was with his own identi-chip.
When he hit that airlock with his fist, the circuitry had identified him as Low-Level Maintenance Staff, a designation it used in the first few days of a trip, when the new employees hadn’t yet been assigned their exact jobs.
That meant neither he nor she would get caught. Only later, when the security guards would mention seeing them, after someone figured out that Elio Testrial was missing, would the security guards would remember that incident. Then they would find the identi-chip reading and realize that it was suspicious.
Right now, he assumed, the ship’s staff considered that a malfunction, and nothing to worry about, since it had only been a pair of drunks messing with the airlock doors. He had identified himself at that airlock, after all, so as far as the ship was concerned, the mistake with the identi-chip was just that: a mistake, a malfunction, not something to worry about.
Of course, he was (theoretically) one of the richest, if not the richest, passenger on this ship. Had Rikki tried a stunt like that, with her lower-level berth and her cheap boarding pass, then the staff would instantly have been suspicious.
He had protected her, and she hadn’t realized it.
It still galled him. Everything about her galled him.
She had spent most of the day in her room. That had surprised him. He would have thought that she would go all over the ship, trying to be visible after the kill like so many amateur assassins did.
But she didn’t seem to care who saw her—or so he thought until he watched her little identi-card move along the corridor map he had brought up on his wristscreen.
About an hour after the nightly dress ball began, she went into the ballroom.
That surprised him too, since she had spent all of the preceding evenings in the casino.
Apparently the casino had been where Testrial wanted to go, an
d had nothing to do with her.
Misha had planned to keep a distant eye on her, but he couldn’t stay away. He told himself that he needed to watch her, to make sure she didn’t pin Testrial’s death on some innocent passenger, but he knew that was just an excuse.
He wanted to see her.
He wanted to see if the past twenty-four hours had rattled her as much as they had rattled him.
Chapter 10
Maybe coming to the ballroom had been a mistake.
Rikki stood off to one side, holding a champagne flute and watching the dancers. The light was dim to give the illusion of privacy, but there were stage lights on the orchestra in the very center of the cavernous room.
The orchestra was made up of real humans, not some holographic players. She’d been in a dozen different ballrooms over the years and only a few had even bowed to the niceties of a holographic orchestra. Most places simply had music piped in, music the passengers or the dancers or whomever was running the place chose.
This place had more class than she had expected.
Except for the cost. Her stupid identi-card was barely designated for this place. She could get in through a side entrance—no one announced her like they announced the rich and famous guests—and she had to pay for every damn thing.
Like this flute of champagne. She had opted for the cheapest stuff because she didn’t want to pay the equivalent of the cost of her room for the good stuff. Not that she was planning to drink it.
She had had more than enough to drink the night before.
She stood near the wide-open staircases that flowed up the second floor, figuring she could see and hear best from this position. She couldn’t see all of the entrances, but enough of them were visible. Even if Misha entered through one of those entrances and she didn’t see him walk in, she would be able to hear the announcement and glide her way over to him.
Or at least, she would try to glide. She liked to imagine that she could glide in this dress. She knew it looked good because at least a half dozen men (and one quite beautiful woman) had hit on her since she took her position near the steps.
“No, I don’t want to dance, thank you so much,” she had said repeatedly. Six of them went away murmuring regrets, but one guy had parked himself in front of her. He was a bulldog of a man, with a pugnacious face and a tuxedo one size too small. His muscles bulged out of it.
“If you don’t want to dance,” he said, “then why the hell are you here?”
Good question, she thought, but didn’t say. Maybe that DNA idea wasn’t as good as she initially thought. Maybe she should just put the entire encounter with Misha behind her and go on with her plan.
She had an optional ticket, one that allowed her to disembark at any port if she ran out of funds. The limitation was in the small print, and really it was designed for the cruise line so that it could legally toss her off the ship if she ran out of money.
Apparently, back in the early days of the cruise line, too many people paid the starting fee and then never paid for anything else, and the ship couldn’t legally toss them off. Instead, the cruise line had to sue for its money, and that never really worked out.
Hence the “new” guidelines, which only existed on lower-class fares. Upper-class fares, like Misha’s, forced the purchaser to pay for everything, including meals, even if the passenger disembarked early.
She had checked on those regulations before she followed Testrial on the ship. She hadn’t mentioned that little piece of information to Misha in their fight that morning because she didn’t want to tip her hand about when she might be leaving the ship.
But that nice little clause in the cruise line’s fare regulations made it even harder for the ship to prove that Testrial didn’t just disembark at some earlier port. Eventually they would find out that his identi-chip—the one she had disabled after she killed him—hadn’t been found leaving the ship, but it would be an eventual discovery, not a quick up-front one.
“C’mon, honey,” that pugnacious bulldog said to her, extending his fat hand. He was dressed well. He clearly had money. Although dancing with him might have been uncomfortable, given that he only came up to her shoulder.
Still, if she hadn’t spent the night with Misha, she would have taken this guy up on his offer. He would have been one of her alibis. But she needed him out of the way, in case Misha showed up.
If Misha showed up.
“Thank you,” she said, “but I’m not in the mood to dance.”
“C’mon,” he said, grabbing at her wrist, “just one.”
She moved her hand slightly so that he didn’t catch her wrist. Instead, he caught her fingers. She gripped his thumb and pushed it backwards enough to hurt him, but not enough to send him to his knees.
“I’m really not a woman you want to mess with,” she said.
His eyes widened. His face had grown pale.
“Yes, right, okay,” he said. “Just let go, all right?”
She did.
He rubbed his hand, kneading the area near his thumb particularly hard. “You could’ve just said no, you know,” he said.
“I did,” she snapped. “You didn’t listen.”
He nodded and scurried away—if a bulldog could scurry. He looked a bit like a tottering tree stump.
She watched him go. She might have felt sorry for him, if he hadn’t been the second man in twenty-four hours who didn’t listen to her.
In fact, that was the hallmark of this entire trip, because Testrial had laughed when she started her litany of his crimes. He hadn’t gotten serious until he saw how serious she was, and how much she had changed.
She was so intent on watching the bulldog that she almost missed the announcement.
The androgynous voice with the formal tone and upper-class accent said, in its snotty little way, “Rafael de Brovnik.”
She turned toward the main doors, and there he was. Her breath caught. She had forgotten in just a few hours how absolutely gorgeous he was.
A diffuse light had fallen on him for just a moment. That was how the entrances of the rich and famous worked in this ballroom—they had everyone’s attention, if everyone wanted to give it to them.
Misha looked a bit uncomfortable, like he didn’t want to be here. He was wearing a long black coat, a brocade vest, and snug black trousers. The brocade brought out his blond hair and highlighted his boots, which were threaded with what looked like real amber.
The light found amber all over him—cuff links, ear posts, buttons. Amber made him look expensive and softened him a bit.
Or maybe the room softened him a bit.
For the first time ever, he seemed out of his element.
He looked around as if he was searching for her. She slipped behind the staircase. She could still see him, but knew that the shadows here protected her from him.
She wanted to observe him for a few minutes, just to get her breath back.
God, he was beautiful.
God, she wanted him.
Her entire body remembered exactly how his felt. She could almost imagine his hands on her right now, touching her—
She didn’t quite shake her head this time, but close. She hated the effect he had on her. Or rather, she wanted to hate it.
She was mad at him, that was it. She was mad and she hated the way he had made her feel, so cheap and used.
She had to remind herself of that because she also loved the way he had made her feel—all night long.
Maybe she could turn into one of those women who didn’t care how their lover treated them because the sex was so very good.
Yeah, right. And maybe she could step out of an airlock and breathe without any special equipment.
Speaking of breathing—or thinking of it, anyway—she made herself take a deep calming breath. She had to get control of herself.
And as she breathed, she had a thought:
How had he known she would be here? Or had he known? Had he been frequenting the ballroom all along?
She doubted that, given the discomfort on his face.
Which meant that he knew she was here.
Which meant that he had been following her from the moment she got on this ship.
The son of a bitch.
She felt the anger slide over her. She grabbed onto it like a lifeline, using it to cancel out the attraction.
Then she squared her shoulders, and walked across the ballroom, keeping to the shadows so he couldn’t see her.
For once, she would have the element of surprise.
For once, he wouldn’t know what hit him.
And then she would find out who he was, and what he really wanted. Once she knew that, she could make her next move.
She could figure out just how much of a threat this Misha/Rafael de Brovnik really and truly was.
Chapter 11
Misha hated dancing. He really and truly did. The very idea of going into the ballroom made him uncomfortable.
But Rikki had gone into the ballroom, and she wasn’t leaving. He had watched her icon for a good fifteen minutes before he headed there. He had hoped that she would go elsewhere, a bar or one of the portside pubs. But given her reaction to his suggestions about drinking the night before—and hell, given her reaction to the tiny bit of alcohol she had consumed—he had a hunch that drinking of any sort was low on her priority list.
He usually avoided cruise ship ballrooms. Even on a ship this large—one of the largest in the fleet—the ballroom seemed stuffy. On some ships, the ballroom actually was stuffy, but here it couldn’t be. The environmental systems and the design of the room wouldn’t allow air to overheat or get stale.
Still, it felt that way to him. On the first night, he had gone inside, stared at the room in awe, and then had gotten overwhelmed and left. Most passengers stuck with the awe. The ballroom was one of the largest rooms on the ship, extending upwards three stories, in addition to taking up a space as big as the lower-class dining room.
