Page 13 of The Captain's Bounty
She raised her hand, taking aim, and he just reacted.
He punched her the instant he reached her, his knuckles clocking her jaw, snapping her head back on her shoulders. Just as quickly, he caught her in his arms as she fell, crumpling unconscious. Panicked heartbeats counted out the nanoseconds as he basked in the wonder of just having won.
He couldn’t believe he was still standing. He couldn’t believe the power housed in the tiny body draped over his arm. He couldn’t believe he’d just captured her, either. She was his now.
From the rubble of broken crates, a slaver groaned.
If he didn’t get her secured on his ship somewhere, he wasn’t going to have her for very long. Not if they came to, and definitely not if she did.
“Ow,” Vullum groaned, holding his head as he pushed himself slowly to his knees.
Bruwes checked to make sure all three of his crew were moving, and then, picking the woman up, tossed her over his shoulder.
It kind of felt like old times, hauling her unconscious aboard his ship. Unlike old times, however, they no longer had the stasis chambers in Medibay. Necessity had transformed the once infamous collector’s ship into a vessel with every square inch now converted into a hold for non-living cargo, with the only exception being the single-man cell in Techbay for bounty prisoners.
Given what he’d just seen in the docking compound, he had no doubt she could blast her way out of that hold, and continue blasting right through his hull, for that matter. How was he going to keep her—or rather, himself and his crew—safe until he got her to the nearest Corporate payout station?
Striding aimlessly through the corridors of his ship as he sought out a good place to house her, he ended up in his quarters. Taking the linkcuffs from his belt, he dropped her face down on his bed and cuffed her hands securely behind her back.
“Sedative,” he ordered through the comm, while ransacking his few belongings for a shirt he could tear into strips. He promptly blindfolded her.
His hand planted between her shoulders, his knee in the small of her very slender back, he had a moment to again marvel at the power so small a human body could hold before Doc Demin arrived with a sedative. He didn’t breathe until it was in her.
How hard could it be, indeed, and it wasn’t over yet. He had her, yes. Now he just had to keep her long enough to get paid.
CHAPTER THREE
Lissa awoketo pounding in her head, a knife stab of pain in her empty stomach, and the grumbling of the alien being in her head.
Don’t kill him, it scoffed.I’m trying to save you, you idiot. Now look where we are.
She couldn’t see anything. Not even when she finally managed to peel her eyes open. It took rolling her head sideways before she felt the brush of cloth on her cheeks and knew she’d been blindfolded.
She groaned, wilting back into the softness of what felt like a mattress and blankets beneath her. “Can you see anything?”
Instead of the being in her head, a heavily accented male voice rumbled in answer, “I see fine. You, however, are blindfolded.”
She tensed, every muscle ready to run–
I don’t run.
She strained to hear where in the room the owner of that gruff voice was. “Who are you?”
“Bruwes, son of Mayzon, son of Ahbel, once prince in line to my father’s crown, now turned bounty hunter,” came the growling response. “And you are Lissa Blackwood of Earth,wanted criminal and my newest bounty. Now that we are all caught up on who we are–”
She tensed that much tighter. “Criminal?”
“With a hell of a price tag attached to you,” the unseen Bruwes confirmed, and tried again. “As I was saying, now that we know who we are, let me tell you where we are. In space. Which means that if you attempt to re-enact your little stunt with the slavers, you’d better be prepared to go floating in the void with the rest of us. And I warn you, if you’ve got any other mischief in mind, I’ve got a decent right hook and a crate-load of sedatives. I get paid whether you’re conscious or not.”
If she tensed any tighter, her muscles were going to snap her bones in half. “Slavers? Little Stunt?”
His heavily indrawn breath, turned into a barely smothered sigh. “The dossier said you were human, not mimic monkey. Why are you repeating everything I say?”
“Why aren’t you making sense?” she snapped back. “What slavers? What crime? What price tag? What are youtalkingabout?!”
“If you think pleading innocence will help you, know there isn’t a person on this ship that I wouldn’t sell for six thousand chits. Including myself. I don’t care if you did it or not.”
“Didwhat? What did I do?”
