he either had no idea who Tess was, or he knew, and he didn’t want to tell anyone.
Captain T. Bailey.
Cargo Cruiser model 419—Endeavor.
Subject presumed dead.
Shade frowned. “Then why are you sending this out?”
Last seen in Sector 14 in possession of highly sensitive government materials.
His eyebrows nearly flew off his head. He’d seen hints of fragility in Tess, but she must have had balls of steel if she’d been zooming around Sector 14 with the Dark Watch on her heels.
The bounty will be doubled for recovery of the stolen goods. Live capture preferred—substantial bonus.
Shade’s heart stuttered to a stop. He reread. Holy Sky Mother, the galactic government wanted Tess and whatever she’d taken more than it had ever wanted anything since its inception, as far as he knew.
And they preferred her alive.
Some of the sick feeling inside him eased.
Unless they just wanted to torture her for answers?
The sick feeling grew again.
What had she taken? Bridgebane didn’t want to say outright; that much was clear. He was dangling bait, and the hunters had to figure it out for themselves. If they found her, they probably found it.
Tess’s coolly spoken “I’m not a petty thief” came back to him, and he almost choked. He’d teased her about stealing a box of bullets? When she stole, she obviously stole big.
The photo and information disappeared, and Shade lunged for the tablet, picking it up again. Bridgebane couldn’t have been taking down the job already. No one could have found her that fast.
A sort of rage-filled panic started drumming beneath his ribs, but then another window opened with a new image to take the first one’s place. Same text underneath. The photo was a mug shot from Hourglass Mile, one of the most severe and secure places in the galaxy. They’d traced her to where she’d been—he looked at the date on the prison photo—seven years ago.
Tess Bailey. It might not have been her real name, but she’d been using it for a while now.
He looked at her birth date, too. A quick calculation told him she was twenty-six.
He cursed and started pacing again.
Fucking nineteen years old and sent to Hourglass Mile. What had she done to get herself locked up in that place? He knew what they did to the inmates there. The mines. The whips. The pairings.
The lunch he’d eaten earlier turned to lead in his stomach. Who had they forced on her? What had he been like?
How the hell had she gotten out?
The sentence stamped in red across her mug shot said Life.
Then he remembered the explosion about five years back. A bunch of prisoners had died. In the confusion, some had managed to run away, making it to the docks and stealing supply ships. No bounty had ever been offered for any of them, no names given—not on the regular channels and not on his. The galactic government had probably been too embarrassed by the massive amounts of chaos at one of their maximum-security prisons to post.
Beautiful. Ballsy. And brave.
A wanted criminal.
Fuck!
He worked on the fringes of the law, dipping his toes into the murky side of the system, but he was still part of the galactic machine of all-encompassing order. He knew who signed the checks. One big job like this, and he could leave it all behind.
Indecision clawed at Shade’s chest. He’d never agreed to help someone before only to screw them over. He didn’t get to know his targets. They were just prize money, a means to an end.
But Tess Bailey with her little freckles and her mile-long legs was everything he needed and more to finally buy his life back from that scumbag Scarabin White.
His mind worked. He knew where she was.
The easiest nab and grab of his life was waiting for him on the three-hundred-and-fourteenth level of the Squirrel Tree. He could land two hundred million in his account.
Double that if she still had the goods.
Chapter 8
I was surprised to see Shade Ganavan show up the next morning practically with the sun. I hadn’t even had my coffee yet, but there he was on the platform, looking ready to work.
Actually, he was checking out the lab attachment. From the outside, it looked like any other piece of space equipment, most likely an additional cargo hold, and luckily, there were no holes in that part of the ship to give him a view straight inside.
I kept to the shadows of the Endeavor’s open doorway, watching him. He moved on to examining the rest of the ship, and unless