KIKO (MC Bear Mates Book 3)

by Becca Fanning

  “Custer,” Ingram said. “You’re on guard duty. With any luck you’ll drive her insane.”

  “I’ll do my very best, Captain,” Monroe said with a smile, saluting.

  “Great. Everyone, back to wherever it is you should be right now. Custer, don’t fuck up.”

  The crew began to file out of the room. Kane took Chapel’s hand and squeezed.

  “You go ahead,” she said. “I want to talk to her.”

  Chapel’s eyebrows shot up. “You want me to leave you alone with the woman who is currently trying to kill you?”

  “I’m not alone,” she answered with a slight smile. “Custer’s here.”

  “You want me to leave you alone with the woman who is currently trying to kill you and Custer?”

  “Just go. If I’m not out in five, you have my permission to come in, guns blazing.” Muttering under his breath, Chapel obeyed.

  It was just Delphine, the woman she’d failed to kill, and man who would probably not kill her left in the room. She studied them both, fighting off the haze of the drugs to think of what to say, if anything. Zoshanna Kane: abandoned by her mother and raised by the streets of an asteroid colony infamous for vice. Had the misfortune to be involved with Sylas Rahm disposing of his brother. Intelligent but neither aggressive nor physically threatening. Anthony “Custer” Monroe: No record of criminal activity until joining the crew of the ICS Starstriker, running weapons. Left due to irreconcilable differences with the crew. Similar incidents while working for the crews of the Bloodsport, Sidewinder, and Kingkiller. Newest core member of the Breakwater, serving for three years.

  What did all of that add up to? All that information, and what was it for? They would hardly let her go knowing she still intended to kill them. What was the point of all her knowledge, all her strength, tied to a chair?

  “Um, hi,” Kane said. She looked more awkward than afraid, like maybe Delphine was someone she ran into on the street that she didn’t know how to talk to and not someone who was responsible for the sizable bruise covering the left side of her face. “I have a few questions before I head up. Why are Rick, the captain, and I targets? A few of the others on the ship have done a lot more than we have, and I’ve only been part of the crew for a few months.”

  “Are you talking about the murder charge leveled against Mr. Jones,” Delphine inquired, “or Ms. Heathcoat’s role in the disappearance and presumed death of Captain Strathmore of the Appomattox?”

  From the sharp inhale, Kane hadn’t been expecting her to know either of those things. Monroe, for his part, just looked interested.

  Delphine kept speaking. “My employers have nothing to lose or gain from the frame job your communications officer fell prey to, and any damage that could be done by Strathmore’s death has already been done.”

  “Then what?” Kane asked.

  “U4, obviously,” Monroe said, mouth curling into a smile far more catlike than Delphine had expected from a bear shifter. “You because it’s your fault we were in the position to enter the business, Rick because he loves you and because he helped you, and Leo because the captain is responsible for his crew. I was wondering when that business was going to come back to bite us in the ass. The only real question is, who do you work for? Remnants of the younger Rahm brother’s empire? The smugglers we replaced?”

  Delphine remained silent. The only thing she was sure she could not tell these people was the name of her employers. It was a betrayal, a failure.

  Delphine’s record was flawless, despite the setbacks her cluster had experienced in their developmental stage. She did not fail. She would not. Instead, she studied the man in front of her.

  Strange that the man with a galaxy-wide reputation for lunacy and drunken violence would be the one shrewd enough to pick apart her motives. She looked over him slowly. His hair, parted to the right, was light gold and seemed to glow under the artificial lights of the cargo bay. His cheekbones were high and sharp, his jaw clean-shaven. His eyes were, of course, gold, but they seemed to be lighter than his crew mates’. She could see nothing marring his pale skin, giving him an illusion of youth only disrupted by the smirk on his full lips. He seemed to Delphine for a drug-addled second to be made of gold and marble. Then he ruined it by talking.

  “No, of course it isn’t the smugglers,” he said, his smile morphing into something that assumed victory. “They can find other work. Not as good, of course, but still better than chasing down someone with our collective reputation. The suppliers, on the other hand… we switched to a source our friend recommended when we took over, which means someone suddenly came into the frankly ridiculous money that comes with supplying Lytos with its favorite drug. That means someone suddenly lost all that money, and I’m thinking that just might be enough to kill for. Glare at me silently if I’m right.”

  He didn’t need the confirmation; the look in his eyes was full of certain. Delphine drew up all the dignity she could muster tied to a chair and stared at him coolly.

  “I see it wasn’t a fluke that you scored so highly in your courses, Mr. Monroe,” she said. “Your deductive reasoning skills are impressive.”

  The change that came over his was so small that if the person talking to him wasn’t both observant and looking for it they wouldn’t have noticed. Delphine was both of these things. His eyes shuttered, and though neither his facial expression nor his posture changed he suddenly gave off an air of stillness.

  “My, my,” he said. “You’re well informed. And here I don’t even know your name.” Delphine didn’t answer, and Monroe clearly wasn’t expecting her to. He turned to Kane. “Zosha, please go ask your spidery friend if he could pretty please find out who the previous U4 supplier to Lytos was.”

  Kane looked like she had more to say, but turned and left anyways.

  “So. Is there anything else about my past you’d like to tell me?” Monroe asked in a tone that would be perfectly amiable coming from anyone else.

  “What would you like to know?” she asked blandly.

  “How about your name?” he said. “We’ve been referring to you as ‘the assassin’ and ‘that bitch that punched Zosha.’”

  Delphine thought it over. “I’ll tell you my name if you tell me something.”

  Monroe raised an eyebrow. None of his expression, Delphine noted, felt real. It was more like he was imitating what a genuine expression would look like. “You’re trying to trade information? Information, by the way, that we don’t actually need for information you probably do? While you’re drugged and tied to a chair in our cargo bay?”

  “Yes,” Delphine said. “You knew I was coming. How?”

  It had been a niggling feeling of irritation in the back of her mind since she’d woken up. She had been meticulous in her planning and flawless in her execution. And yet, she hadn’t been able to do more than land a blow to the weakest link on the ship before the cold kiss of a tranquilizer dart landed on the side of her neck. The only way it could have gone down like that was if they were tipped off. That meant one of two things: either there was a mole at Mason Corporation or there was someone intelligent and with enough resources to get past Mason Co.’s security. Most likely, the answer was both. The idea stirred something frightened and nervous in the pit of Delphine’s stomach that she thought she’d killed years ago.

  “Zosha’s friend is very interested in her continued well-being, which is one of the only reasons we survived meeting her,” Monroe said.

  Delphine frowned ever so slightly. It confirmed her suspicions, but didn’t tell her anything new. She never did this sort of investigative work on her targets. Mason Co. was a well-oiled machine, every cog in place. She had never done her own research because she had never been told to. Her job was to learn to neutralize the faces in the files handed to her by a handler and now that she was in a position where she couldn’t fulfill her purpose she found it difficult to find the inner balance her trainers had drilled into her. She chose to blame the drugs.

  “
Delphine,” she said softly, because she had no reason to lie. She realized with a start that she couldn’t remember actually telling anyone her name before. Everyone who needed to know it knew it before meeting her and everyone who didn’t need to know it…didn’t.

  “Pretty name,” Monroe said. “I was expecting something like ‘Killer,’ to be honest. ‘Delphine’ is much nicer.”

  “Thank you,” Delphine said because she didn’t know what else to say. A tingle of something like pride ran through.

  “You’re welcome. Anyways, we’ll know who hired you soon enough,” Monroe said cheerily. “Captain won’t sign off on executing you until we know enough about them to plan around whatever their next wave of attack might be.”

  “Then why would I want to tell you?” Delphine asked.

  “I don’t expect you will. Which, honestly, works for me. You’re the most interesting thing to happen to this ship since, well, Zosha.”

  It didn’t make sense. Monroe’s files said he was prone to impulsive, nonsensical decisions, but this… “You should want me to die. All the rest of your crew does.”

  “I am not my crew, Delphine,” he said. “And even though they refuse to see it, I am always right in these situations. My madness has method to it. You’re going to be important to us, I just don’t know how yet.”

  “Is it maybe because I try, and hopefully succeed, to kill at least some of you?” Delphine asked, a little confused how the conversation had ended up here.

  “Definitely not,” Monroe said. “I have a good feeling about you.”

  “I don’t understand you,” Delphine told him, because it was true. All the others, she had read their files and understood them. She knew them, could predict them—apart, apparently, from having better connections than initial reports had suggested. But Monroe… “I could see why you suddenly started calling yourself Custer and boarded a smuggler ship. There was nothing in your history that pointed to you becoming…this. You had good grades, you had no criminal history, you just…were. You hadn’t done anything to merit that kind of drastic lifestyle change. And then I realized that’s exactly what it was. You didn’t want to escape being Anthony Monroe because of what you’d done, you wanted it because Anthony Monroe did nothing. And I understood that---you were purposeless and wanted to change. But I couldn’t…I didn’t…” Delphine shook her head. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she was mortified. This wasn’t her. She was created to be great and trained to be perfect and here she was, a mess because of a few drugs and a handsome, confusing blond. “You gave yourself a purpose. You shouldn’t be able to—we all have our places that we belong in. I have mine. I understand it, and I am content in it. But you, you made your own and it worked. I don’t understand how.”

  Monroe’s face had, over the course of her rant, steadily lost all trace of its previous sardonic expression. Now it was guarded, his eyes intensely studying over her. Delphine had a feeling that he was more authentic than most people saw him.

  “I think,” he said slowly, “that it’s less of a matter of finding and staying in your place as it is realizing that the notion of having a place in the first place is a fabrication of people who want to exploit others. And I must say, you have a surprising mentality about the issue for a mercenary.”

  Delphine managed, barely, to keep her mouth shut tightly against the onslaught of words wanting to pour out. She would keep at least one secret.

  Monroe’s honey-colored gaze slid away from her face and rested somewhere over her left shoulder.

  “I think,” he murmured, “that it would be best to put you back under for now. I have a few things I’d like to discuss with the captain before we get any further.”

  He walked towards her, reaching into his pocket. Drawing out a syringe, he leaned forward and gently placed a hand against one side of her neck to tilt her head back. The contact was, irritatingly enough, soothing, and Delphine cursed at her faulty upbringing and the memory of warm, dark eyes that she couldn’t shake years later. As Monroe pressed the syringe to her neck, she barely had time to decide she was extremely sick of getting stuck in the neck with various paraphernalia before she felt the tell-tale prick.

  “You should be out pretty quickly,” Monroe said. “This shit’s designed to knock Dom on his ass for a few hours if it looks like he’s going to lose it.” He paused, then smirked. It was as carefully crafted as it had been before, but he looked far less like the serious-faced man he had been moments before. “One last thing. My name’s Custer. Call me anything else, and we’re going to start having problems. And you have enough of those already.”

  Delphine began to rapidly sink back into oblivion. It was almost a relief; she couldn’t be the embarrassing mess she had been for last half hour if she was unconscious. She was addled enough that she barely registered the warm, gentle pressure of Custer’s gloved hand didn’t leave. If she found it comforting, then… well. it wasn’t as though she was likely to live long enough to put it in a report.

  -

  When she woke up again, she was no longer tied to the chair, but she could feel the pressure of something wrapped around her neck. She reached up and ran her fingers along the smooth collar, toying with what could only be a lock mechanism.

  “Hello again,” Captain Ingram said. There didn’t appear to be anyone else in the bay. “You lucked out. Custer and I had a long discussion in which he, somehow, convinced me to not keep you tied to that chair until either we kill you or the inevitable heat death of the universe. The tradeoff is the collar. I don’t care how good your training was, if that thing’s activated you will be on the ground in about two seconds. Everyone on the crew can activate it, and all of them know not to go anywhere alone. I don’t recommend trying anything.”

  “Why haven’t you killed me yet?” Delphine asked. It came out a rasp; she hadn’t had anything to drink in, by her estimation, about six hours. Combined with the drugs, her mouth felt dry. “You know who sent me. Or you will know.”

  “Like I said, Custer’s apparently decided he wants a fellow homicidal maniac on board. More importantly, once we find out who hired you, we need to be able to avoid whoever they send next. I’m assuming the second act will be better than the first, and even if you don’t tell us anything, we can still use you for ransom.”

  Delphine could have laughed. Her handlers knew she would die on this mission. They would never pay to have her back. She was the last remaining splice of a defective batch, like clumps of coffee grains at the bottom of the cup. It was easier to throw her away.

  “Sporting of you, I suppose,” she said. “Was there anything else?”

  “Yup. You can go anywhere on the ship except the cockpit, the crew’s private rooms, and engineering. Also, you won’t be able to access the terminals and we’ll get an alert if you try.”

  “So, where exactly can I go?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “The kitchen, where, by the way, you’re not allowed to touch our food. Here. We have several nice hallways,” the captain answered.

  “Thank you for your hospitality, then,” Delphine said.

  “Yeah, well, you tried to kill my crew. Honestly, I’m not even sure why I agreed to let you out of that chair, other than Custer is disturbingly good at people for some who…never mind. Point is, don’t cross any boundaries, or we’ll nail you to the ceiling until we decide what to do with you. Also, please remember that most of the people on this ship turn into giant carnivores,” he said.

  “Actually, bears are omnivores,” Delphine answered absently, rubbing her wrists.

  “Doesn’t take you off the menu. Remember: nails, ceiling, bears. No funny business. And don’t think you’re ever off camera.” With that, the captain turned and walked back out.

  Delphine considered leaving the cargo hold, but there didn’t seem to be a point. She wasn’t very hungry yet and she doubted she could do anything worthwhile for her mission, so instead she lay on her back, closed her eyes, and forced herself to calm down e
nough to sleep. Unconsciousness caused by drugs never really left anyone feeling rested, and she could afford to burn energy and waste calories at the moment. It took a few moments of breathing deeply, but soon her body was relaxed enough. Eventually, her thoughts stopped whirring around her head and she slipped into sleep.