While he searched for her, he had to grudgingly admit that he had completely misread her. She was more than competent. She was just different than he was.
Very different.
Willing to break rules and laws and cross ethical boundaries to get what she wanted.
Whatever Rikki had given him had put him under for six hours, and then he had been interrogated by that stupid security officer for another four. He would have gotten out of there quicker if it weren’t for the fact that the sleeping drug had made his brain work intermittently. If he had had all of his faculties, he would have told the stupid security officer that she was the one who wasn’t thinking clearly—which was what he said after four wasted hours.
He asked her to check Rikki’s DNA, which the woman did. Then he said, quite calmly (even though he was furious), which assassin had spent time with Elio Testrial? Which one had lied from the beginning? And which one was no longer on the ship?
His argument so convinced the security officer that she quit questioning him at that moment, not thinking to ask why he was so involved with Rikki and why she had targeted him in particular.
But that explained why the security officer worked for a cruise line, and not for some private investigative agency.
By the time, he had gotten out of the stupid security office, he was ten hours behind Rikki, and ten hours, at the pace that the cruise ship traveled, was a hell of a distance.
He could have stolen a lifeship on his own and backtracked, but the ship was near its next restocking stop, so he disembarked there—and got no protest at all from the incompetent security officer. In fact, he got free passage on Mariposa Starlines for his next few jobs, in apology.
Which he did find deliciously ironic.
He spent the time waiting on the ship charting the possible courses Rikki had taken and only found one good one.
He avoided the docking rings above Centaar because they were notorious for stripping ships for parts. If he had been Rikki, of course, he would have parked there and let whatever happened happen.
He assumed she did that. And then he went to Oyal, where he spent a few days tracking down all of the ask-no-question ship rental places. He figured when he was done with those, he would go to ask-no-question ship purchasing places.
Only he didn’t have to. He found the rental place on his second day, talked to the owners, and worried when he discovered that he paid more for the information than Rikki had paid for the ship’s deposit.
Which put him in a hell of a dilemma. Did he wait to see if she returned the ship? Or did he try to find out where she went? The rental agency probably had a tracker on its ship, and even if Rikki disabled the tracker, it still would have given him an idea of where she would have gone. Still, he would have to do a lot of digging to find her.
He wasn’t even sure if finding her was worth it.
The woman clearly hated him. She had treated him badly for reasons he didn’t entirely fathom, and she seemed to believe he had done something wrong on the night her father died. He thought his actions had been blameless, so he wasn’t quite sure what that was all about.
But her actions recently weren’t blameless at all, and they did get in the way of his work. Once again, he had to talk himself out of being blamed for one of her jobs—even if, technically, he was the one who had hired her.
Something was going on here, something he didn’t entirely understand. And that sentence could refer to his relationship with Rikki as well as the interactions they had had over work. He simply didn’t understand her or what she wanted or how he had become her target.
Nor did he understand why she had fled when she discovered his real identity.
If that was why she had fled.
He decided to go to a small restaurant across from the ship rental place to consider his options. The restaurant was small, but it had windows on all sides. He could see anyone who came out of the ship rental place. If Rikki came back here, she would have to leave by that door.
He ordered some soup and coffee. Then he checked his network. No one had contacted him about a new job yet, and no one wanted him back at the Guild.
Although he would have to go there if he didn’t get this resolved soon. He might need the help of the Guild’s investigative wing, and he might have to talk with the Guild’s director, Kerani Ammons. Kerani had been a mentor to him from the moment he arrived. She understood his special circumstances, and would give him an honest assessment.
He needed honesty at the moment.
The soup arrived. It had a thick tomato broth, and smelled of garlic and spices. He put a spoon in it, and the spoon stood up by itself.
Maybe he should just go back to the Guild, figure out what was going on with him, and then decide what to do about Rikki. After all, he was in no hurry.
Or rather, part of him was in a hurry. The part who had found her delicious and sexually exciting. The part who had bonded with her in a way he had never bonded with any woman before her.
“Mikael Yurinovich Orlinski.”
For a minute, he thought he was imagining the voice. After all, he had just thought of the women he’d been involved with, and this voice belonged to Liora Olliver, the woman he’d once been serious about.
Then a waft of musky perfume washed over him, and he knew that Liora was there. She bounced into the seat across from him. Her black hair was cropped short, and there were new lines around her eyes. But she was still slight and muscular, as different from Rikki as she could get.
Liora’s dark eyes flashed, and she gave him a grin that didn’t quite seem sincere. “What are you doing here? Chasing your little Rover?”
He frowned at her. Rover? What was she talking about? The Rovers were a loosely affiliated group of assassins who had somehow gotten it into their heads that they wanted to destroy the Guild.
“Are you following me, Liora?” he asked, rather than answer her question directly. He had learned never to answer Liora’s questions exactly, if he could at all avoid it. Liora loved games, and she was good at them—better at them than he was.
He used to find that attractive about her. Which, come to think of it, might be some of the appeal with Rikki.
As soon as he had that thought, though, he dismissed it. He had been attracted to Rikki long before he realized that she had been toying with him. And the toying with him was just confusing him.
Liora smiled. “Following
you
? Don’t flatter yourself.”
She tossed her hair back, then grabbed his coffee as if she was entitled to it. He didn’t protest. It was another game.
“I’m here because I just got done with a job,” she said.
Assassins, even Guild assassins, rarely confided in each other about their work. It wasn’t quite a rule, but it wasn’t done much either.
He really didn’t believe her about the job. So he said before he could stop himself, “You had a job here? In the NetherRealm?”
That was as unusual as an assassin admitting to her work.
She shrugged one shoulder. “I’m not between jobs, like you are. I work a lot.”
How did she know that he was between jobs? What was going on?
“It sounds like you are following me,” he said, wondering if that was admitting to not having work.
“I’m not following you.” She finished his coffee, set the mug down, and pushed it to the edge of the table so that one of the bots would refill it. “Not like you’re following that Rover.”
“What Rover?” As soon as he asked the question, he cursed himself. This was how Liora always sucked him in.
“That hot piece of ass you’ve been following all over the sector. What’s her name? Rikki something?”
How did Liora know about that? He felt a surge of irritation, then bit it back. But from the look of triumph on Liora’s face, he realized he didn’t tamp the irritation down quickly enough.
He could deny that Rikki was a Rover (and he wasn’t sure about that, was he? What did he really know about her?) or he could deny that he was interested in her. Either would please Liora. Both answers meant he was deep in her game.
“What do you want, Liora?” he asked.
She frowned just a little. He had managed to irritate her now, which pleased him.
“Nothing,” she said and stood. “I just figured you’d want to see a face from home.”
“If I wanted to see a face from home,” he said, “it wouldn’t be yours.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I keep forgetting that you hate me because I broke up with you.”
“No, sweetie,” he said, “I don’t hate you. Hating you implies passion, and the passion left our relationship about six months in. At least on my side.”
“We were together for five years,” she said, sounding surprised. He had told her for a long time that he no longer cared about her. Apparently, he had finally gotten through.
“Amazing what inertia will do,” he said.
“You’re mean,” she said.
“No, Liora. I’m not the mean one here.”
Her eyes narrowed, and for a moment, he had a sense of just how dangerous she could be. Then she made a sound of disgust, turned and left without the last word.
There was a first time for everything.
And like so many firsts, this one left him unsettled. He wasn’t sure what had just happened, but he was glad it was over.
It took Rikki another week to get home—not that she had a real home. But she had an apartment, a place for her things, a place where she (kinda) relaxed. Someone else would probably—more accurately—call it a bolt-hole, a hiding place, the equivalent of that space she shoved herself into under Jack’s bed when they were children, a place she could huddle in the dark and ignore the dust bunnies and never ever leave if she never ever wanted to.
The apartment was in Lakota, a small and pretty city in the southern hemisphere of a planet called Unbey. She had discovered this place on one of her early jobs, and she had saved up for the apartment, buying it under a name she never used anywhere other than Lakota.
The apartment covered the top floor of an old complex in a part of the city that was being gentrified. She bought when no one else knew about that part of the city, except that it was crime-ridden and filled with derelict buildings. Over time, the buildings got fixed, the crime moved to another part of the city, and her apartment, once an anomaly, was the centerpiece of the complex. She bought a few of the other apartments below her, under different names, and kept them mostly as a buffer, so that no one could get one and attack her from below.
She didn’t love the Lakota apartment, but she almost did—and that was the most attached she had ever felt to some place she had lived.
She had dropped off the rental on Oyal, gotten her deposit back, which surprised her, and then traveled to Centaar’s other major city, Nety. She had the uncomfortable feeling that she was being followed, but she never saw who was following her, if anyone was at all. For all she knew, she was under surveillance because she had gone to that cheap ship rental place or because she was newly arrived from Krell or (most likely) because she had arrived on Centaar in a stolen lifeship.
The feeling of being followed forced her to take several extra transport trips, and go very far out of her way before coming here. She took all of the trips under different names, and twice she changed her appearance.
On the last flight to Unbey, she returned to her “off” look, her real look, her mousy brown hair, her unspectacular brown eyes. She wore no makeup, and out-of-fashion clothes that made her look ten years older than she really was.
She transformed herself into one of those women who disappeared when people looked at them: too old to be attractive; too young to be interesting. She liked it that way—she liked it when people looked through her. The last thing she wanted was to be noticed.
She let herself into the apartment, closed the door, and then stopped like she always did and looked across the entry at the view. The view was her great risk because it made the public parts of the apartment vulnerable.
Windows on all sides, with the entry smack-dab in the middle. The entry faced the lake that stretched for miles into the distance. The lake views were what had revived this neighborhood, what had inspired the city, if truth be told. Lake Lakota was the largest lake in the hemisphere, so large it was almost a small fresh-water ocean. It colored life in Lakota and relaxed her whenever she saw it.
She let out a small sigh, then set down her rucksack and the one small bag she carried. Most everything she needed was here. The apartment had a layer of dust—she always bought new cleaning robots, destroying the previous bunch before she left. She had new cleaning robots in the bag. She had to assemble them, but it wouldn’t take her long.
She always bought new robots. Robots could be reprogrammed in her absence, and she didn’t want that. She changed a lot of things that could be tampered with whenever she left, which cost her more money than she probably should have spent, but she saw that as the price of having a bolt-hole.
Especially one as beautiful as this.