Page 48 of The Captain's Bounty
Bruwes kept walking, the corridor floor grates uncomfortable under his bare feet. With every step, he just got angrier, and when he finally arrived at his quarters, he hit the panel lock on his door before its refusal to open reminded him in yet another way, how badly she’d hobbled them. Having to muscle it open before he could get at her hiked his temper that much higher.
She was sitting on the side of the bed, her hands in her lap, looking like a child playing dress-up in his uniform shirt. It irritated him. He hadn’t given her that permission. It irritated him more that she looked so damned tempting in it. A petulant siren just waiting for him to come rip it off her. His hands itched to do just that.
Right after he strangled her.
One less person to breathe their rapidly dwindling air supply.
“What were you thinking?” he demanded.
She looked up from her hands, her gaze cool though not as cold as right after she’d destroyed their ship… or the Soldri’s. “Does cargo have a right to think?”
She glared at him.
That felt like a trick question, but he wasn’t inclined to inspect it further just now.
“You should be grateful,” she said, not giving him time to answer. “I just saved all of you from becoming cargo too.”
“He was lying. We have done nothing?—”
She looked at him, a spark of anger igniting in her eyes and the corner of her mouth flattening. Both her expression and what he’d just caught himself about to say bothered him.
“Nothing wrong?” she finished for him. “Since when did that mean anything?”
He stared at her. Demin had left her unbound. Not that bindings of any kind had proven effective thus far. Not that she’d tried to escape after Demin left. Not that she had anywhere to go or any feasible way to escape the ship, even if it was working. Perhaps she knew that, perhaps not. Either way, it gave him pause.
Her stomach growled, an empty, angry sound that matched the chill in her eyes. She looked away, one hand pressed to the trimness of her waist, pretty much killing every trace of his anger.
“Come with me.” He turned away too. It was easier to hide his annoyance this way, and he didn’t want her to see it if his face betrayed the discomfort with which he’d just glimpsed her situation. That was the first thing she had said when he’d captured her. That she was innocent. That she hadn’t done anything wrong.
He’d said he didn’t care. Normally, he didn’t. She wasn’t his first bounty and they all protested innocence.
He’d said it himself, point in fact.
And for the most part that was true. Since his banishment for not murdering their cargo of kidnapped Product, he and his crew had done their best to survive on their own within the confines of universal law. But prior to that, he had partaken in how many abductions, from how many alien vessels that he’d then destroyed to cover their tracks?
Why would the Soldri say he and his crew all had bounties on their heads if it wasn’t true? The universe was full of liars, and yet that train of logic wasn’t sitting right with Bruwes.
Had Me’Kava’s treachery been discovered by its interstellar neighbors, or had his homeworld instead risked their own exposure by putting out contracts on the only collectors to turn on them. He supposed he’d been stupid to think his father and the counsellors would simply let them leave.
They were all now loose ends. Risky loose ends that would have to be tied up.
If the Council thought a bunch of hormonally-challenged humans were bad to bring home to the planet, try countless numbers of space pirates who were used to defying anyone who tried to inflict their authority upon them.
Also, he’d called her cargo to the Soldri. She might have found that insulting.
Probably because it was.
He turned back to her. “I am sorry,” he haltingly said. He couldn’t offhand remember the last time he’d apologized to someone. Certainly, it wasn’t while aboard this ship. Quite possibly he never had, apart from childhood pleas said at any given moment to reduce his temperamental father’s many irritations. “What I said on the bridge was not said in any conscious intent on… diminishing you.”
“Just an unconscious one,” she said, not softening.
To be fair,he didn’t think he would soften for such a lame excuse as that.
“Come,” he said instead. “I will feed you.”
He started to walk out, but she didn’t follow.
If she thought he was going to beg…
