by Cathryn Cade
Bronc grimaced. That had been a nearly unbelievable slip on the part of the InterGalactic Bureau of Investigation. No doubt at least one agent had already lost his or her job because of it.
He took a drink of his ale and set it aside, not without regret. It was one of his favorites, and he’d like to sit and enjoy it. He hadn’t had much chance lately.
“She seduced one of the guards on the transport,” he said. “Then killed him. She’s beautiful and she’s a sociopath. That combination can take a woman a long way. The oversight agents didn’t discover her escape until she was long gone.”
Darkrunner sat very still, peering out at Bronc from the shadow of the braids hanging around his face. “Any idea where she is, or where she may go next?”
Satisfaction warmed Bronc’s chest, but he merely shrugged. “Suspect she’ll head for one of Vadyal’s homes on Serpentia or his casino called the Pleasure Palace, currently moored off Frontiera.”
“The IBI must have a watch on those places.”
“They do. Like I said, they’re after her. I’m sure they’ll catch up sooner or later.”
“You don’t think she’ll come here?”
Bronc had been waiting for this. He nodded. “Matter of fact, this is the first place she came. But she’s not here any longer. She was last sighted entering a hangar at the space port, place that runs low-end transports and charter flights. She didn’t walk out, so we assume she slipped the planet.”
Then Bronc waited while Darkrunner considered this information. Bronc took another sip of his ale and then set it aside with distaste. Just as he’d feared, it was now warm.
“Why doesn’t Stark have you chasing her?” Darkrunner asked, regarding Bronc from under his lashes. It was a look as beguiling as any Bronc had seen.
Bronc shrugged. “Like I said, he and Ms. te Nawa have split up. He didn’t share why, and it’s not my business to ask. But I hate like hells to see this vicious bitch get away free.
“Believe me, if I were free to do so, I’d be chasing her, as fast as I could. Since I can’t, and I’m here on business, thought I’d drop a word. Your choice what you do with the information.”
He rose and nodded to the ganger, who remained in his chair, watching him with those eerie eyes. “Thanks for listening. Oh, and one other thing. Slidi worked with one of your rivals while she was here … a Mordacent or some name like that.”
“Mordacity,” Darkrunner said. Although he couldn’t see it, Bronc swore a charge of electricity filled the room, emanating from the ganger. The man’s face was taut as a statue.
Bronc shrugged indifferently, but inside he was doing a fist pump. That name had definitely caught the ganger’s interest. “Yeah. Anyway, if you find her, maybe you can get some intel. Never hurts to know your enemy, right?”
“I’ve listened,” Darkrunner said. “And I’ll consider what you’ve said. What I’m wondering is why you’ve come.” He gazed up at Bronc, and his eyes seemed to take on a deeper hue, almost blue in the shadows of his black hair. “Are we to be friends now?”
Bronc blinked to counter the urge to keep staring into those eyes, and forced his own gaze away. Fuck. No wonder the guy was so successful at what he did. He radiated a stealthy power.
All right, time to open a vein—metaphorically at least. Anything to keep the ganger from learning why he was really here.
“Because I hate slavers,” Bronc told him, his deep voice grating. “The fuckers took my own brother, Bart. And I’ve heard rumors that Vadyal’s gang was involved. I want this bitch and all her slimy hangers-on dead. And if it takes her a long, long time to die ... if she screams and begs for it in the end ... that’s okay with me too.”
Darkrunner’s brows rose. He nodded with what almost looked like respect. “Understood.”
Bronc nodded curtly and turned for the door.
“However,” the ganger said behind him, “If I find out I’ve been lied to ... there won’t be enough of you to gather for cremation. You get me?”
Bronc looked over his shoulder. “I get you.”
He walked out the door with his back itching, as if there were a laser pointed at it. Probably was. And he made a quarking big target.
Darkrunner didn’t bother to say goodbye, but then Bronc hadn’t really expected him to. He’d given the ganger a great deal to think about.
He walked back past the Mau guard lurking outside, through the crowded club, wincing at the intense blast of the music, the humid heat and smells of the worked-up crowd.
The elevator zipped him up to the landing pad on the top of the building, where his unmarked LodeStar cruiser waited. He boarded and nodded to the pilot and the four heavily armed LodeStar employees seated in the cabin.
He stopped just inside the door, waiting for the holovid scanner. It showed a virtual readout of his body, from head to toe. After a sec, the scanner having found no spybots planted on him, a green light flashed. Only then did Bronc move to one of the leather seats. He sank into it with a silent groan, suddenly exhausted.
“Think he’ll go for it?” the oldest man asked as Bronc strapped in. Gray-haired and square-jawed, Rak had been with LodeStar a long time.
“You were listening in, what do you think?”
“Sounded interested to me,” Rak said as the cruiser leapt under them, rising into the black night. “His kind don’t give away much.”
Bronc nodded. The ganger was indeed a man who didn’t reveal himself, but Bronc’s instincts said their plan was working. “I think he bit. We’ll know in a day or two.”
“I hope he goes for it,” Opal said, looking down at the lights of the city below as the cruiser gained altitude. Stark’s attendant and bodyguard on his cruiser, the silver-haired woman had also been with LodeStar for years.
Bronc looked down as well, his gut tightening. “I hope so too.”
Because somewhere down there beneath the garish lights, the streamers of fog and rain, was Logan Stark. Completely on his own, and for some strange reason, not himself. Lost, or hiding in one of the deadliest urban jungles on this planet, away from all the wealth, stature and people who could keep him safe.
“If Darkrunner finds Stark before we do ...”
Opal didn’t finish, but then she didn’t need to. If the ganger found Stark in his present state, whatever it was, it would be the perfect opportunity to finish his rival, for good.
“We’ll know soon, one way or the other,” put in Cork, a young but sharp ex-IGSF soldier. “If Darkrunner goes for it, he’ll do it within the next day or so, don’t you think?”
“He’ll go for it,” Rak said grimly. “The slimer won’t miss a chance to get Ms. te Nawa back. I escorted her to his club one night, and I saw the way he looked at her. You’re right about him, Bronc. He’s just the kind to think a flash move like presenting her with that Serp’s bloody corpse will get her back.”
“Let’s hope you’re right about Ms. te Nawa, too,” Opal added darkly. “That it won’t work.”
Bronc hoped he was right, too. When they found Stark—he wouldn’t let himself consider any alternative but his boss’s safe rescue—the man was going to need everyone who cared about him. And that included his woman. They might be estranged, but Bronc was sure Stark was in love with her. He’d seen the way the man looked at her when they brought her brother home to her, as if it was all he could do to walk away and leave her.
Bronc just hoped she was still in love with Stark.
Tal Darkrunner might be an outlaw, but he was charismatic as hell. Beautiful in his own way, from his crystalline eyes to those beringed hands that promised every kind of wicked pleasure.
Hells, if Bronc wasn’t hopelessly moonsick over another man, he’d go for the man himself, and for the smaller blond man with the streaky, flyaway hair and pretty brown eyes seated at Darkrunner’s elbow in the club. Darry Wazo, according to Bronc’s intel, was one of the gang leader’s trusted insiders, along with Trix Benali, the little strawberry blond woman on Darkrunner�
�s other side. Bronc would bet the three of them were intimate in other ways, too. Something about the body language between them.
The mind-picture that built sent heat arrowing down in his groin.
But only for a sec, because he’d never have anything to do with the kind of slime that had built an empire preying on the foolish and unfortunate. Darkrunner might be sexy, but he was like a drug promising sweet oblivion, only to drag his unwary victim into the depths with him.
He wasn’t as bad as the slavers, but in Bronc’s opinion, he was only a shallow step up.
Chapter Two
Tal paced back and forth in the dark room deep in the bowels of his lair. His long, black leather duster swirled about his legs with each stride, giving him the appearance of a great raven ruffling its wings to take flight.
The chill air was rank with sour fear-induced sweat.
The thud of Tal’s boots on the hard floor punctuated the ragged breathing of the prisoner. The skinny human hung from his wrists, bound with flexible chainrope that had been looped over a hook under a hover platform, and then raised so the man’s toes just brushed the floor. A floor splattered with old, rusty stains.
Darry stood before the prisoner, a long whip coiling from one hand. An ancient device, but one that still wrought pain and fear in its recipient. Of course the process of intimidation began when the prisoner was grabbed and hustled into one of Tal’s unmarked cruisers, then dragged into this room.
The room hadn’t been used for its apparent purpose in a very long time. Hadn’t been needed. Tough, street-hardened beings had been known to piss themselves when the door creaked shut behind them and to start talking the minute the whip came out. The harder cases received a patch of a drug that freed their tongues.
Tal had others who usually handled the work here, but this case he wanted kept very quiet, so he’d asked Darry to step in. Neither he nor Dalg would repeat anything they heard.
The prisoner’s reddened gaze darted from the whip to Tal and clung. He was at least clever enough to recognize the greatest threat in the room, if not smart enough to tell the truth the first time Tal asked.
And another time Tal might have waited with greater patience, would have let the man remain safe in his own small, shabby domain until he was ready to tell Tal everything he wanted to know. But not this time. He needed answers now, tonight. Time was of the essence if he was going to catch a female who was already half a galaxy ahead of him. And this miserable street rat was stonewalling him.
“All right,” Tal said, stopping with his back to the man. “Enough of your lies. Now once again—five nights ago, you helped a woman find a space charter to take her off planet.”
“Did I?” the man quavered defiantly, a sneer in his voice. “I don’t remember.”
Tal scowled and gestured. Behind him, the whip cracked, and the prisoner cried out, the chainrope creaking as the whip slashed the air before him. Darry cracked the whip again, leading to another yell, this one louder. Tal rolled his eyes. Fuck, Darry hadn’t even hit the man yet.
He turned with a threatening flourish.
“My associate can keep this up for a long time,” he said. “The question is, can you?” The skinny human was shivering now, each breath audible. But as Tal faced him, he sneered defiantly—or tried to.
Great God Beyond, deliver him from heroes. Tal paced closer and reached out to grasp the man’s whiskered chin in one hand. “I’m going to share something with you, Bill. You don’t mind if I call you Bill, do you? Since we’re so intimate here.”
Bill swallowed convulsively, his gaze riveted on Tal through the greasy strands of his hair.
Tal narrowed his eyes and Bill stared into them, the sneer slipping from his face.
“The Serpentian I’m after,” Tal went on, “the redhead. Beautiful, isn’t she? And I’ll bet she cried alligator tears all over you, told you how frightened she was of the bad men who were after her. Maybe she even let you fuck her, out of gratitude for being her savior. Told you what a brave one you are for daring to go against a powerful, evil man.”
“Wait. How’d you know?” Bill’s scraggy brows shot together.
“Because I know how that kind of woman works on a man.” He ought to, he’d fallen prey to one once himself. And it had cost him a fuckuva lot more than this one would cost Bill.
His own seduction had cost him what little credit and reputation he’d managed to scavenge by the time he reached adulthood while surviving in these slums. It had cost the lives of beings who had called him friend, even brother. It had also cost him every shred of his self-respect.
The man he was today had been formed in the crucible of absolute betrayal.
“Now I’ll tell you the truth, Bill. She’s a lying, cheating slut. And she’s a killer.”
The man jerked, his face contorting like a small child who’d been told a promised treat was only stardust.
Tal tightened his grip on the man’s jaw. “She’s snake mean, Bill. She’s tortured and killed innocent beings captured by her own gang of slavers. Oh, yes. You’re lucky you aren’t better looking. She might have thrown you in the hold of that ship the way she did to my woman.”
“No...” his prisoner mumbled. “No, she was ... escaping from creditors, because she couldn’t pay the shakedown on her little store. She told me.”
Tal cocked his head. “Hear that, Darry? He did help the bitch.”
Darry played the whip, snaking it across the floor with a sinister whoosh. “You were right, boss. As usual.”
“Yes, I was,” Tal agreed. He tightened his grip again and unleashed the full force of his will, letting the man have a look at the ferocity inside him. “I’m going to give you one last chance, Bill. Tell me where she was going and what charter service you sent her to.”
He nodded his head at Dalg, standing silently by the door. “Or I up the ante, and let Darry really get going. He can cut you to ribbons with that whip. Or maybe ... I’ll let the Mau do what he wants with that big knife strapped to his belt. His particular favorite is fingers. He likes ‘em with hot sauce.”
Bill whimpered, and the sharp odor of fresh urine joined his other unsavory smells.
Darry stopped at Tal’s shoulder, his back to the prisoner. “Let me put a patch on him,” he whispered urgently, his gaze full of worry. “He’ll talk, he won’t be able to help himself.”
Tal shook his head, intent on his purpose. Darry sighed, but he stepped aside.
Tal didn’t have time to argue with Darry, either. He needed to be absolutely certain he got the right info out of this interrogation. He trusted his own skills more than any drug, no matter how refined.
Bill continued to gaze into Tal’s eyes, mesmerized.
“Okay. I’ll tell you,” he mumbled. “She wanted to get to Serpentia. Said she had a safe place just off planet where she could hide. She said she’d send for me as soon as it was safe.”
He smiled dreamily at Tal. “I was just trying to help a lady, that’s all.”
Tal ignored this, focusing all his effort. Perspiration sprang out all over his skin. “And who took her there?”
“Buddy of mine from the spaceport. His name’s Soto. Runs an old Solar Wars surplus ship—a Starfire class. He’s registered. Completely legit ... or mostly.”
“Where will they land?”
“Probably a port called Sunspot City, Solaria. It’s the closest when you’re coming in from this direction. You refuel and hop to Serpentia.”
Tal sucked in a deep, shaky breath. He staggered, and Darry slid forward to stand close behind him, supporting him without seeming to.
Darry nodded at Dalg, who lumbered forward.
“He’s not gonna cut off my fingers, is he?” Bill asked woozily.
“Lucky for you, I believe you, Bill.” Tal shook his head to fight off the wave of exhaustion sweeping over him. “That’s why you’ve still got all your parts.”
“Right,” Bill said. He looked down at himself and his eyes widened,
as if he was surprised to still be in one piece.
“Anything else you want to tell us?” Darry demanded.
Bill shook his head and sniffled. Tears of relief trickling down his face. “That’s all I know, I swear.”
Dalg deactivated the power on the hoverpad holding the chainropes, and the skinny man dropped to his knees in a heap.
“All right,” Tal said. “And next time I ask you about anything, you’ll tell the truth.”
Bill managed a nod.
“Get him out of here.” Tal leaned into Darry, unable to do more than let his lieutenant hold him up.
He didn’t know who was the more pitiful specimen at the moment, Bill or himself, but Tal had an image to uphold in this city. He could neither afford to show mercy or weakness. Both would be seen as a sign that he was slipping, and others could move in on his territory.
Of all the monsters that lurked in the dark alleys and dens of these slums, Tal Darkrunner was the most frightening. He had to be.
Darry half-carried Tal into his office, and let him down on the long leather divan at one side of the room. Then he straightened with a grunt. “Don’t move. I’ll get you an energy drink.”
His eyes closed, Tal mumbled his dissent. “No. Gimme a shot of adrenaline.”
“Tal, no. That shit’s dangerous. Just sleep it off. You just need some rest, that’s all.”
“Don’t have ... time. Get it.”
Darry threw up his hands. “All right, damn it.”
He went to a locked safe in the corner and opened it. Reaching in, he withdrew a small meds container. He opened it, took out a plaspac, and carried it to Tal. Ripping open the pac, he pulled Tal’s sleeve up to expose his inner wrist.
“All right,” he warned. “Here it comes.”
He laid the patch on Tal’s skin, and then straightened watchfully.
Tal sucked in a sharp breath, his chest jumping. Shit, he hated this part as bad as the dragging exhaustion. He began to tremble, his arms and legs jerking as the adrenaline flooded his system.
His eyes flew open, and his mouth as well, his head arching back. He gave a choked cry and flailed his arms.
