Stealing Mercury (Arena Dogs Book 1)

by Charlee Allden

  “Just a prick.”

  “Good.” He bent down to speak directly against her ear. “We’ll do it together.”

  “But—”

  Before she could get anything else out he’d seized her hand. He pulled it up to the pad, laid his hand over hers and pushed forward.

  She never felt the prick. His hot breath tickling her neck and the subtle thrust of his hips rubbing his length against her ass distracted her until the box’s seal released with a whispered whoosh.

  Mercury pressed a kiss to her temple and stepped back just enough to break the seal of warmth that had connected their bodies. “Time to see what’s inside.”

  She pulled open the drawer, holding her breath as if she did expect that sand-viper Jebedi had reassured her wouldn’t be jumping out. He’d been right about the viper, but the neatly organized carrier bit her as surely as any slithering reptile. She could feel the poison spreading under her skin. All that was left was to determine how deadly it’s effects.

  She lifted the carrier out. Through the transparent material she could see the title to the Bucket and a data-strip with her name. Tears welled in her eyes and threatened to fall, but she managed to swallow down the sudden surge of grief and regret. And then she saw the rest--a half-dozen keys each labeled with a familiar name.

  Mercury’s heat returned and his hand settled low on her belly as he looked over her shoulder. “What is it?”

  It took her befuddled brain a moment to realize he had no idea what he was looking at. “It’s the Bucket. It’s mine.” If she could manage to reclaim it.

  “What’s wrong, courra? You’re shaking. Doesn’t this ease your doubts about your father’s feelings for you?”

  “I wasted so much time being angry.”

  “Yes, but you cannot change what is past.”

  A startled bubble of laughter escaped her tight throat before the mirth dissolved under the weight of her regret.

  Mercury turned her in his arms. “I didn’t mean that to make you laugh.”

  “Oh, I know. You just reminded me why I lo—” She choked on the word she had no right to say. Not when she was sharing her bed with two men and had feelings for them both. Two men who might be in her bed, whether they understood it or not, because they needed her. Two men who planned to risk their lives for another woman.

  He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her tight against his chest. “Something else in the box is making you sad. Tell me.”

  “Key codes for my father’s lovers.” Her voice broke on the end of the sentence. Her father had cared for her, but he had cared for them all. She wasn’t jealous of them, not for her own sake. It wasn’t that at all. But she expected Mercury to come to that conclusion.

  He stroked a hand down her spine. “Talk to me. I know you’re hurting and I want to understand.”

  “They don’t know,” she tried to explain.

  “Of his death.”

  “No. I mean…I did make sure they were all notified. All the ones I knew off. But the key codes. If he left them credits or property…”

  He cupped her face in his palms. “Don’t blame yourself, courra.”

  He understood. Her self-pity had caused others to suffer. To think her father had forgotten them and maybe to go without support they’d relied on.

  “They were his responsibility, not yours.”

  “He counted on me and I let him down.”

  “No. He let you down by not making sure you knew how he felt about you.”

  Just as she was doing to Mercury. Stars, she was her father’s daughter and making all of his mistakes.

  “You can’t change the past,” he said again. “You must change the future.”

  “Is that what you’re trying to do?”

  “Yes. I let my brothers down. I acted rashly when the counted on me to be clever.” He pulled her close again. “Because of me, my brothers were condemned to die. Because of you, I have a chance to make things right.”

  “We all make mistakes.”

  “Yes,” he said. “We do.”

  But when, she wondered, would she stop making them.

  Her father’s ship—no. Her ship…was parked somewhere in the port. A part of Samantha had wanted to hunt down Shred and kick him off the Bucket the moment she realized the truth. Ironic since she’d told Chief she’d never do such a thing.

  When her anger cooled she realized there’d be no point anyway. “Even though the Bucket’s mine,” she explained to Mercury, Lo, and Carn as they headed back to her mother’s home. “I’ll never be able to fly her legitimately again. I could take her, to get us back to Roma. Pillar would back up my claim. But the Bucket isn’t a speedy ship. It would take us over a month to get there.”

  Carn protested immediately. “We can’t leave Hera alone there for another month.”

  “I agree,” she reassured. “Besides that, Owens would be suspicious if the Bucket turned up in the Roma port.”

  “Agreed,” said Lo.

  “Explain about you not being able to fly the Bucket again,” said Mercury.

  The man didn’t miss a thing.

  “Right now I’m wanted for theft on the other side of the border. And the minute Drake or Resler reports my Cerrillian heritage to the Earth Alliance authorities, they’ll pull my license. I can’t even own property of any kind on that side of the border.”

  “What about here, in Gollerra territory?”

  “I can own the ship, but there’s no work for her here. The Golley have a monopoly on all freight and transport in this sector. They only accept non-Golley ships at the border ports. Shipping anything from here to further inside Golley territory can only been done through one of their authorized carriers.”

  When they stepped into her mother’s tent, Moira sat waiting at the table. She had a sealed packet in her hands. Shades of blue and indigo swirled across her skin—a mix of grief and other emotions, but Samantha had never seen this exact combination.

  “Mom?”

  The tense smile that appeared on Moira’s face aged her. “Come, sit with me.”

  Samantha turned to see Lo and Carn backing out through the opening and Mercury waiting for her attention. “We’ll be outside.”

  She nodded then sat with her mother. “You know what I found.”

  Moira shook her head. “I don’t know for certain, but I can guess.”

  Samantha reached out and clutched at her mother’s hand. “The title for the Bucket. He left it to me. Shred kicked me off my own ship.”

  “You allowed it, Samantha.” Her mother’s voice socked her in the gut. “You let your anger at your father blind you.”

  Samantha didn’t know whether to feel betrayed by her words or sad that she’d let this happen. “Did you know?”

  “He never spoke of it, but I knew he’d never have left you with nothing.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “You needed to figure it out for yourself. You’ve never been able to see him clearly.”

  “You’re right,” said Samantha. “My opinion was always clouded by the knowledge of how he’d hurt you.”

  “I never complained,” denied Moira. “I never blamed him for not being able to stay with us.”

  “You didn’t have to. I could see your pain every time he left.”

  “Yes, I suppose any woman who loves a man is sad when he leaves. Maybe I should have talked to you about it more so you could understand, but you were so angry. You didn’t want to listen.”

  Samantha searched her feelings for her father. There was such a jumble of love, respect, animosity. “I’m listening now.”

  “I knew your father would never be one to settle on a planet when I met him.” Moira smoothed her hand over the packet. “I allowed myself to become involved anyway. That’s why I never blamed him for leaving. Space, his crew, his ship…they were all a part of him and I loved him as he was.”

  “What about the other women? I know you knew about them.”

  �
�Of course I knew,” she lowered her head for a moment, as if the weight of it bowed her spine, then she straightened. “He asked me once to live with him on his ship, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t the place for me. It was after I turned him down that he began seeing the others. I can’t tell you it didn’t hurt. Your father wasn’t a perfect man, but he was a good man. He did so much for others. For all of us.”

  “What do you mean, Mom?” Samantha’s heart rate accelerated.

  Her mother squeezed her hand then let go. She lifted the packet in her hand and opened the seal. “It was enough that he loved me. Made me feel for someone when the wars had made me numb.” She pulled a handful of encrypted stills. She traced her fingers over the corner of one and the view sheet leapt to life. The still showed young versions of her father and mother standing close. Her mother shimmered with gold. Around them dozens of people crowded together. They all looked weary, but relieved. She could see transport bags on the ground at their feet and the Haverlee dunes stretched out behind them.

  “This was the group I was in. We were no longer on Cerrillia by then, but the Alliance had bounty hunters out looking for us on the Alliance side of the border. They were afraid we were building an army.” She grinned and flushed more golden. “We would have if we could, but there just weren’t enough of us. When Aurilia—the planet where we’d been hiding—became too dangerous, your father smuggled us to Haverlee.”

  Her father truly had been a refugee runner. Emotion dropped on Samantha’s head like a confused mass of sand-cats, scratching and scoring her as they purred their way into her heart.

  Samantha pressed her nose against Mercury’s neck. They sat on the side of a sand dune far enough out of the camp to guarantee a little privacy.

  “I feel like my life has turned upside down in the last week. It seems I was wrong about everything.”

  Mercury tipped her chin up and rubbed his thumb across her lip. “Tell me what I can do to make it better?”

  She shook her head. “I’m not even sure I want to make it better—or at least not to change it back to the way things were.”

  She could see he didn’t understand. He looked at her with those storm cloud eyes, letting her talk. Trying to give her what she needed when she had no idea what that was.

  “A few weeks ago,” she explained. “I was alone. I mean, there where people around, but I was still alone. I thought the indies, my father’s friends, had abandoned me as surely as his crew did when they left me on Sydney3. Now I don’t know what to think.”

  “Chief Pillar was right about your father’s past.”

  “Yes. I need to let it soak in, to figure out how I feel about it.”

  Mercury frowned. “I thought that was a good thing.”

  He might not understand the history and politics of the Earth Alliance, but he knew when things made her happy and sad. For him that was all he needed to know and as far as she was concerned it was more than enough.

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “That’s a good thing. It means he wasn’t as selfish as I thought. But he never told me. And it doesn’t make up for everything else he did.”

  “Drake claimed your father was a friend of Grande Owens.” Mercury offered up the slight with no malice, but Samantha bristled at the thought of it.

  “No way would he deal with that dune-slug.” That she was sure of.

  “I didn’t think so either,” he said. “I know his daughter and such a woman could not have been born to a man who accepted the suffering of others.”

  She cupped his hand where he still held her. “It isn’t important what he did in the past. We have plenty to worry about in the present.”

  “But your father—”

  “Yeah.” She sighed. “I thought he was a complete bastard. Turns out it was my own insecurity that was the real problem.” She held his intense gaze for several minutes and he allowed it, letting her think her way through to what she needed to say. That was Mercury. He always knew what she needed. In his eyes there was complete acceptance. Complete confidence of who he was. Stars, she didn’t want to lose him. Not to Roma and not to her own fears. She looked down and studied her knees, unable to face him with fear choking her. Her heart pounded and she couldn’t breathe. “I don’t want to make the same mistakes with you.”

  He pressed his forehead to hers. “Don’t be afraid...”

  She pushed back, needing to gage his reaction to what she wanted, no, needed to talk to him about. “I know you made a promise to Carn. But you’re going back, taking that risk, it’s about more than that isn’t it? You’re pack bonded with his mate.”

  He turned her in his lap and wrapped both big hands around her face. “You are my mate.” When she started to protest he silenced her with a look. “I know you don’t believe it yet, but it’s true.”

  She pressed her lips together to stop the protests she wanted to spew out. She wouldn’t be distracted. She needed an answer. “But you’re bonded?” This time she made it a clear question. Demanded an answer even if she knew the answer and didn’t want the confirmation.

  “I was bonded to her, but nothing comes before mates. Carn knows this. Hera knows this.”

  She swallowed against the lump that formed deep in her throat. “It was the one thing I swore, Mercury. That I’d never fall in love with a man who couldn’t give me his whole heart. Who wouldn’t be with only me. I know it isn’t fair after I had sex with Lo... but I couldn’t bear it if you were with someone else. I couldn’t.”

  “We’re mated,” he said. “I’ll never touch another. Think, Samantha. Think of Carn. He’s my pack brother and he cares for you, but he doesn’t touch you. He can’t touch any female but his mate. This is our way. I need no one but you.”

  She wanted to believe him and she was terrified to let herself believe. Maybe if she didn’t believe now it would hurt less if— No! She couldn’t think that way. She loved Mercury whether she wanted to or not. He’d never lied to her. She had to trust him or end it and she knew she couldn’t leave him now.

  “Okay.” She took a deep breath. “I’ve been wrong about a lot of things lately. Maybe there’s one more thing I’ve been wrong about.”

  He sat quiet, waiting.

  “Maybe I’ve been wrong about not having any way to help you get back to Hera. I think it’s time I go back to the port and make a few calls.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Mug and Grub, Haverlee, Krena

  Gollerra Sector

  2210.171

  Mercury had walked proudly at his mate’s side all day as she’d worked amongst the Golley at the space port, contacted old friends, and called in old favors on his behalf. He’d thought he’d seen her strong and confident when he’d watched her through the bars of his cage as she took on the whip-master and his guard. He’d thought he’d seen her at her most courageous when she’d crawled down the side of a collapsed ravine and gone head-first down a dark hole to save Carn’s life. He’d thought he’d seen her clever and competent when she’d exhausted herself, single handedly flying the unfamiliar, low-on-fuel transport to Haverlee. But he knew now he’d been wrong.

  The woman beside him was the one who’d snuck into the port as a child and changed her future. He suspected this woman was stronger, more confident, more courageous than he’d yet seen. The events of the morning had led her back to herself and a fierce joy for her wrapped around his heart, even as it fed the doubt in his gut. Doubt that he could keep her with him after they freed Hera. Doubt that she would accept his mate-claim. Doubt that she would ever find him worthy.

  When they arrived at the backdoor to the Mug and Grub, a small crowd waited outside in the twilight. The humans all had mugs in their hands, several were propped against the exterior of the building. As they approached, the humans fixed their attention on Samantha. They all dressed alike in shades of pale blue and gray and wore heavy boots similar to the ones Samantha and the men of her father’s crew had worn.

  “Do you know them?”

 
“Yes,” she said. “I haven’t seen them in years, but yes.”

  He urged Samantha forward and signaled Lo with a low-sound bark. The command went unanswered, but Mercury knew Lo lurked in the shadows. “You should introduce them before Lo decides to shred them.”

  Samantha hurried forward and he thought he heard her whisper the word friends under her breath as she approached them. Her voice sparkled with happiness as she called each of them by name, three males and two females. Mercury forgot Lo’s discomfort and bristled with his own when she allowed the males to hug her. He wanted to knock them away and then he wanted to strip her clothes off her and roll around with her on the silken bed sheets in her mother’s tent until she smelled only of him.

  The hugs were over before his possessiveness got the better of him. He settled as she introduced them to him and to Carn and finally to Lo as he materialized out of the darkness.

  As she spoke Lo’s name with her hand resting softly on his arm, Mercury realized he didn’t mind at all if she smelled of Lo. It was their way, but the more time he spent in her world the more he understood how she might have trouble making sense of things he accepted without question.

  The humans turned out to be from the Gwendella, the ship she’d contacted that afternoon. Samantha had explained that she’d done some of her pilot’s training there. He’d only been expecting this meeting to be with the captain Samantha had asked to help them and he hadn’t been entirely comfortable with the idea. But this was her world and he had to trust her judgment.

  The plain door into the building’s back room had no markings and had to be opened with a code. Samantha had explained that customers entered through the front, but the captain had arranged for a private meeting. Inside, dozens of dimly glowing, fist-sized balls lit the interior. Scattered across the tabletops and the counter that ringed the small room, their combined output left much of the room in shadow.

  The chairs sat empty for the most part. Samantha led the way to a large table at the center of the room where the room’s only occupants, two females and a male, got to their feet. He recognized the man as Knock, the man who’d thought he had a right to walk into Samantha’s bedroom that morning. He bristled at the man’s presence.