“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 bou
ndaries, 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 enough 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.
She woke up to someone kicking her gently in the leg. She looked up to see Monroe holding two mugs and two bottles of water.
“Good morning,” he said, smiling. “I mean, it’s actually about 6 in what would be an afternoon were we not in the depths of space. I just figured you might want food.”
Want or not, she needed to eat and she knew it. She sat up and accepted one mug from him carefully.
“What is this?” she asked.
“I have no idea, but it tastes okay,” Custer cheerfully informed her.
“Is it poisoned?”
“Why would I poison it?”
Delphine sighed. “You have something of a reputation.”
“Oooh,” Custer said, looking thrilled as he dropped down to sit beside her, laying the bottles on the ground in between them. “Tell me more.”
“That you’re widely considered to be a homicidal maniac?” she asked, dipping a spoon into the mug, which appeared to contain rice in some sort of sauce.
“Oh, that’s all,” he said. “I was hoping someone came up with something new.”
“Why?” Delphine popped the spoon into her mouth. Custer had been right. The food was both unidentifiable and okay tasting.
“We’re at the end of an empire, I fear,” Custer said, sighing dramatically. “Imagination has died out. Instead, we recycled old grudges and old insults from our forefathers. It all gets boring very fast. We are witnessing the inevitable decline.”
“That so?” Delphine asked.
“It is. We can travel at the speed of light, but we can’t be interesting. Ah, civilization, you meant well, I suppose.”
“You know,” Delphine said thoughtfully, chewing. “I’ve met a lot of guys like you to cover up the fact that they’re secretly a mess.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah.” She swallowed and scooped up more rice-and-mystery-sauce. “You’re not one of them.”
Custer laughed. “Thank you.”
She studied him. He was unlike anyone she had ever met, and she had yet to decide if that was a good or bad thing. She was sure he wasn’t actually a psychopath, just a dramatic asshole, but he had a sort of charisma around him that stopped her from looking away. It was the kind that didn’t mesh well with others, but was intoxicating when it did. Whether they loved or hated him, Delphine doubted many people forgot meeting Custer. It was a shame he’d gotten on the bad side of Mason. Removing someone like him from the galaxy seemed like it’d make the whole thing darker.
“So, how long do we have until Mason sends someone else to kill us?” Custer asked as though he knew what she was thinking.
Delphine refused to allow herself to react to the name. Instead, she went through all the people who had the power to find that out in the short amount of time she’d been on the ship and dearly hoped that none of them were correct.
“I’m not sure,” she said instead. “It’ll depend on how long it takes them to find you again. The only reason they could in the first place was because they were already familiar with the U4 route.”
“That’s good, then,” Custer said, tapping his finger on his chin. “We’re good at not being found. It’ll give us time to figure something else out, at least.”
“They won’t engage you anywhere with a significant amount of water,” she told him. “They know what the ship can do.”
“Hopefully, it won’t come to that. The last time we had to use that particular function was interesting, but not something I want to repeat right now.”
Delphine cocked her head. “Was that when you killed Strathmore?”
“I didn’t kill him personally. But yes,” Custer said, setting his mug down. “How did you know about that, exactly?”
His eyes were suddenly very, very cold. His apparent protective streak really shouldn’t have been attractive but, to Delphine’s chagrin, it was.
“It was easy enough. Anyanka Heathcoat was announced as Strathmore’s fiancée. A week later, she disappears. A day later, Strathmore’s dead and she’s reappeared on the Breakwater,” Delphine spooned the last of her food into her mouth, forcing herself to seem uncaring even as the intensity of Custer’s gaze sent tingles down her spine.
“And how many others know this?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she told him. “I don’t do the research.”
“And why should I believe you?”
Delphine shrugged. “No point in lying. You won’t be able to get away from whoever they send next.”
“We’ll see,” Custer said distantly, his smile gone. “I’m going to go check in with the captain.”
With that, he stood and grabbed the mugs and spoons and walked into the main body of the ship.
Delphine sat alone with the two bottles of water for the moment, then sighed and stretched out. She lay staring at the ceiling until she felt less full, then stripped off her over shirt and started a set of pushups. She alternated between working out and resting, not seeing a point in interacting with the crew. She splashed some of the water on herself to keep herself as clean as she could and saved the other to drink. Eventually, she went back to sleep, the bitter taste of failing to accomplish anything coating her mouth.
The next few days passed similarly. At some point, someone would bring her food. When not eating, she would meditate, sleep, or work out.
Out of everyone who brought her food, the only one who stayed to talk was Custer, who seemed to have brushed off the conversation about Strathmore. He sat with her, telling her bad jokes and detailing ludicrous jobs they’d had, not seeming to mind when she didn’t provide information about her own life. He filled in the silences and after a few days, Delphine was horrified to realize that she’d grown ridiculously fond of him.
He was prattling on about something to do with engine failures when she realized she was smiling a little helplessly, no trace of irritation in her mind. It was more than not minding if he was there. She actively didn’t want him to go.
Her blood froze. She had been so sure she had recovered from Ramirez’s faulty methods of raising her cluster, but here she was. Swallowing down bile, she tried to force the feeling away through sheer willpower. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work.
“You okay?” he asked, his voice cutting through her reverie. His eyes were uncharacteristically earnest and despite her impending panic it made something warm in her stomach bloom.
“Absolutely fine,” she said. “Go on.”
Jackson (BBW Secret Baby Bear Shifter Romance) (Secret Baby Bears Book 3) Page 32
