Page 30 of Mongrels United
“I’m not talking about just playing around.” His voice was low. “I think, Grady Read, that you’remyBellish. I’ve had a dose. There’s no going back.”
She shuddered, all her nerves fizzing. All he had to do was lean down a little further and their lips would touch. And she suddenly ached for that touch. But she curled her hands into fists, instead of lifting herself up the little way she would need to, to make the kiss happen. “I know something’s happened that has hurt you, Nash,” she breathed. “That’s why you’re reaching for comfort. But I onlyseemto be the solution. I’m really not. The people you do business with, who you associate with…if they knew you and I had any relationship at all…” She paused to catch her breath. “Bellish is poison. So am I.”
He was breathing as quickly as she. Tension strummed through him. She read it in his eyes, in the play of muscles around his throat and jaw.
“Step away, Nash,” she said softly.
He raised his head. Just a little. Silvery grey glimmered in his eyes. It was a reflection of the self-awareness she’d noticed the first time they’d met. “One day, you will admit you want me.”
“No, I won’t,” she assured him.
He stepped back from her. A deliberate distancing. “Your father’s lessons went deep, didn’t they?”
“Excuse me?”
Bitterness touched his face. “So did mine.” He moved toward the opening to the gate, forcing her to catch up with him once more, leaving her with the feeling that she wasn’t escorting him anywhere. He was merely allowing her to accompany him.
Hyson didn’t say anything else, not even a word in parting. He just nodded at her as the Guards raised the barrier, and strode through the gate without looking back.
Grady would have watched him walk out of sight, while turning over his last bitter statement, only the Guards would have wondered why. She made herself turn around and walk away without looking back, just the way Nash had done.
When she got back to the Guard station, Jackalyn stood at the door of her office with a pad in her hand. She wore a deeply disgusted expression. She had been waiting for Grady to come back, for she hefted the pad. “Something you should see.”
Grady took the pad from her. The screen showed the weekly mortality list. There wasn’t always a list. There were many days when someone didn’t die. Today there were two people on the list.
The second name leapt out at her.
Nason Wheelock.
“Damn,” Grady said, looking at Jackalyn.
Jackalyn nodded. “Want to bet that’s where he found the shit? Wheelock was living in the Fourth Wall. They would have pressured Hyson into clearing out his stuff immediately, so they could rent the apartment again.” She gave a sigh. “And I tried to use the old man as leverage…”
Grady drew in a shaky breath. “This is who’ll get hurt. It’s not business associates at all. Nason Wheelock is a hero, the last Skinwalker. When everyone learns he had Bellish, that he was using it, all that good history will be gone. This is why Hyson wanted time. To bring himself to it.”
Your father’s lessons went deep. So did mine.
Chapter Thirteen
Grady only remembered she was supposed to have dinner with her father when Avan called her.
As soon as she saw him on the screen, looking at her with patient expectation, she remembered. “Stars and suns! Dad, I’m sorry. I’m…I just…something came up. I haven’t even eaten here.” Her belly rumbled emptily, as if it had heard her.
Avan Tesarik steepled his hands, his fingertips together. Calmness filled his dark features. “Didn’t Glennis remind you?”
“Her job is to remind me of appointments related to work. Asking her to keep track of my personal life wouldn’t be right.”
“You really should consider acquiring a personal AI,” he chided her. “They’ve proved themselves useful to nearly everyone on the ship—”
“They’re an indulgence. My personal life is my own.” Grady was still in two minds about AIs. She had one that was technically hers, at the apartment, but only because Kailash didn’t use it. Grady used the house AI mostly as an elaborate alarm clock.
She was especially wary of personal AIs housed in mobile processor units, so the AI trailed around behind the human like…well, she didn’t know what it was like, but the subservience of having to follow someone around, even if you weren’t sentient, seemed like human arrogance to her. She had resisted acquiring her own.
But if she’d had one, even one that could only connect to her through her pad, it might have meant she’d remembered her dinner appointment with her father. “If you can give me twenty minutes, I can be there—”
Her father shook his head. “I’ve already eaten. Only something important would keep you from my table.”
She relaxed and smiled fondly at him. “That is completely true. Thank you, Dad.”
