They rarely bothered him as long as he ate fast. They kept the insect population under control, so he did his best to ignore them. If they came into his space, he tossed them back out. He hadn’t been hungry enough to think about eating them.
Not yet, anyway.
Lying still with his muscles relaxed, he feigned sleep.
****
Delphi eased the metal grate aside and listened. It was quiet, but the silence was alive. Definitely someone in here.
But was it her target?
The enclosed space was narrow, barely big enough for a child, but she managed to wiggle her way down. The air was humid and still. Not a breeze reached her. Her clothes stuck to her skin. She was chaffing in places she didn’t want to think about.
Better than the alternative.
The sultry weather meant there were no flames shooting up in the fireplace whose chimney she was currently shimmying through. And since it was night, the guard had taken to his bunk with a flask in hand.
There should be no problem from him.
All she had to do was get out of this damn chimney. The people who ran the jail owed her. Her clothes and body were cleaning away years of soot and grime.
“Remind me why I volunteered for this again,” she soundlessly muttered.
But she knew why. Delphi was an assassin, not by choice but by an act of fate. Taken in as a child by a power-hungry woman, she and her twin brother, Zaxe, had been forced to train, to become killers. They’d also bonded with another girl—Sass. The three of them were tighter than any siblings.
Sass had found the man of her dreams. Not surprisingly, another assassin. But Spear el Gravaso was more than an assassin. He was also a prince of Gravas, a very secretive, very powerful world.
Now that all three of them were free—thanks to Spear and the military might of Gravas—she owed them. Not just for her life, but that of her twin and her sister-by-choice.
Which was why she was squeezing into yet another small space in search of Spear’s missing brother. Ivar had gone off the radar over two standard lunar cycles ago. Every resource was being utilized to find him.
And that now included her and her skills.
Gripping the edges of the base of the chimney, she slowly poked her head out and scanned the area. Once assured it was clear, she lowered her hands to the floor, grimacing at the soot covering them, and then eased her body the rest of the way out.
Hunkered down in the hearth, she rotated her neck to work the kinks out.
She’d been on Tortuga a week now, and it didn’t get any better with familiarity. To put it bluntly, the place was a cesspool of criminals and degenerates of the worst kind. The planet was aptly named after a place on old Terra that had been a haven for pirates. Plenty of those here. Just the space variety.
It was shocking how many locations in the settlement held prisoners of one kind or another. At least there wasn’t much high tech about their jails. All technology—from communicators to blasters and everything in between—was kept locked on their ships at the secured docking bay. That was the one rule everyone followed if they wanted to be allowed to stay.
Smuggling any devices into the settlement resulted in immediate death.
That worked in her favor. No tricky security systems to break in to. No high-tech prison. It should have been an easy enough task.
But the low tech did a surprisingly good job. Thick stones, quarried from the nearby hills, had been used to erect sturdy buildings. The foundations of some had been dug deep, creating impenetrable prisons unless one got creative.
Delphi silently slipped through the shadows. She was Zaxian by birth, which meant her dark skin blended with the night. It had also blessed her with better than average vision, allowing her to make out enough to move around without a light.
This space was where the guard would stay during the daytime if someone was visiting a prisoner. At night, he retreated through the heavy door to the right and bolted it shut. Large dogs slept just beyond, deterring anyone from venturing too close.
It had taken her three days and copious amounts of fresh meat to befriend the animals. The latest meat had been laced with a mild sedative. Nothing that would hurt them but enough that they’d sleep soundly.
No way she’d hurt the dogs unless absolutely necessary. They’d been trained to be mean. It