Chapter 7
The cleaning rag in Mercy's hand had seen better days. The synthetic fibers had broken down into something that smeared grime around more than removed it, but she kept scrubbing anyway.
Playing the broken captive meant accepting whatever degrading task they threw at her.
Her knees ached from kneeling on the deck. Her fingers had gone numb from the industrial cleaner that burned through skin as efficiently as it ate through carbon scoring. Every joint in her body protested the repetitive motion, but she kept her head down and worked.
Better this than sitting in that cage with Zane. Better this than thinking about how he'd hidden his true nature while she'd fed him wine and played card games with him.
A dragon.
An actual fire-breathing, shape-shifting dragon who'd played helpless while pirates destroyed her ship.
She attacked a particularly stubborn burn mark with renewed vigor.
The longer she spent replaying their time together, the more obvious his act became.
The way he'd moved through her galley with supernatural grace.
The casual strength when he'd helped secure cargo that should have strained someone of his athletic build. The way he hadn’t seemed to get cold, even that night when the ship's heating had been on the fritz and she'd been bundled in three layers.
Not little, her traitorous mind supplied. Nothing about him was little. Not his hands that had covered hers so easily. Not his shoulders that had pressed against hers in that closet. Not the heat that had radiated from his body when they'd been forced together in the dark.
She scrubbed harder.
"You missed a spot."
Horris's voice made her entire body lock up. She forced herself to flinch, to cower back against the wall like a frightened animal. The movement sent pain shooting through her bruised face, reminding her that the fear wasn't entirely an act.
He stood over her, arms crossed, studying her with the same dispassionate interest he might show cargo. She kept her eyes on the deck, counting her breaths. Don't look up. Don't give him a reason.
"Are you ready to talk?"
She wanted to tell him to take his questions and shove them out an airlock.
Wanted to spit in his scarred face and accept whatever punishment followed.
Her pride demanded it, screaming at her to stand up, to fight, to go down swinging if she was going to go down at all.
But Zane's voice echoed in her memory, calm and infuriatingly reasonable.
Make yourself useful. Give them something.
"What do you think I know?" The words came out almost too quietly. Good. Let him think her beaten down, ready to break.
"More than you're telling."
She let silence stretch between them while she scrambled for a story. Something believable. Something that would buy her and Zane time without getting her killed immediately. The trick was making it good enough to be useful but vague enough that they couldn't immediately prove it was bullshit.
"My dad contacted me once a few years ago."
Horris made a sound she couldn't interpret. Not quite interest, but not a dismissal either. "Did he?"
The lie flowed easier than she expected. She let her voice shake, just a little. Let him hear the confusion of a daughter abandoned and suddenly remembered.
"I didn't even realize it was him at first. He didn't look like I remembered him." She almost added details about gray hair or new scars, then caught herself. Horris might know exactly what Rayden Webb looked like now. Might have met him or studied holos, memorized features. Better to stay vague.
"Is he … did you kill him?" She was surprised to realize she actually wanted to know, that somewhere under twenty years of carefully maintained indifference, she'd actually be mad if he had.
Horris snorted. "Never met the man, but I heard he bit it while trying to extract some statuary near ungrateful aliens. They didn't appreciate his work."
Dead. Her father was dead.
The knowledge settled into her chest like a stone. She waited for grief, for anger, for anything beyond the hollow acknowledgment of fact. But twenty years of abandonment had scoured away whatever feelings might have existed. He'd been a stranger who shared her DNA. Nothing more.
She pushed the non-feelings down deep and focused on the lie. "He didn't give me a map or anything. But he said he was going to the Vacithea Quadrant. That's all he told me."
The place was perfect. Remote enough to be plausible, weird enough to attract treasure hunters, dangerous enough to explain why no one had found anything yet.
Stories filtered out of that region regularly.
Ghost ships, impossible planets, reality that bent in ways that made navigation computers cry.
Her third year as a pilot, she'd met a woman who swore she'd flown through the Vacithea Quadrant and come out three days before she'd entered. Mercy hadn't believed her, but the woman's ship logs had been convincing enough to buy her drinks for a week.
Horris studied her for a long moment. She kept her eyes down, shoulders hunched, playing the role of defeated prisoner finally breaking under pressure. "That wasn't so hard. Krix, go get our friend some food. I think she's earned it."
The protein ration Krix brought looked marginally better than the one from yesterday. She wanted to hide half for Zane, but there was no way to conceal it without being caught. The guards watched her too closely, waiting for any excuse to mete out punishment.
She forced herself to eat it all, hating every bite that didn't go to the man locked in the brig. Hating more that she cared whether a lying dragon lord got fed.
Back to scrubbing. Back to aching knees and burned fingers. She worked her way along the corridor, following the trail of carbon scoring from whatever battle had raged here before they'd arrived. The marks led behind a maintenance partition where ancient life-support equipment hummed and clicked.
She'd just wedged herself into the narrow space when voices approached. Krix and Stevn. She froze, rag still pressed against the wall, suddenly very aware that they couldn't see her behind the machinery.
"I can't believe Mooney's crew caught up to us." Stevn sounded nervous. He always sounded nervous. The man had the constitution of a spooked rabbit. "You think they heard about the girl?"
"Who hasn't these days?"
How? Why? She was nobody—a cargo pilot scraping by on the edges of civilized space, deliberately keeping her head down and her name off any lists that mattered. But apparently, she'd become someone worth hunting.
"But the boss says he's got the biolock from Webb. Her blood's just as good as his."
Krix snorted. "If she's really his kid."
"We tested it. It's a match."
He whistled, low and appreciative. "No shit. Nice."
Her hands started shaking. They'd tested her blood. Really? The thought of them taking samples while she was unconscious, analyzing her DNA without her knowledge, cataloging her genetic markers like she was livestock made bile rise in her throat.
"And she squealed. We're going to unlock the biolock when we get back to base. Three more days until we're millionaires."
"Isn't it a dead-man's lock?" Stevn asked.
"Do you care?"
The cruelty in Krix's voice made her blood run cold. Everyone knew exactly what extracting a dead-man's biolock meant. It wasn't called that because you needed to be dead to set it up.
It was called that because you had to be dead to open it.
Every drop of blood in her body would be used as a key, drained out slowly while machines analyzed each cell for the genetic markers hidden inside. The process took hours. Sometimes days, if the biolock was particularly complex. You were alive for most of it.
They were going to kill her to try and find her father's treasure.
Someone called their names from farther down the corridor. Their footsteps faded, leaving her alone with the terrible knowledge that she had three days to live.
The rag fell from nerveless fingers. She pressed her back against the wall, legs suddenly unable to hold her weight. Her vision tunneled, black spots dancing at the edges.
Rage replaced fear. Pure, incandescent fury at the universe for this cosmic joke. At her father for making her useful in death when he'd never bothered to make her useful in life. At Horris and his crew for their greed, for treating murder like a minor inconvenience on the path to profit.
But most of all at Zane and his tactical training and his patient waiting for the perfect moment.
She'd followed his plan, all right. She'd been good and obedient and played the broken prisoner. She'd waited for her moment.
And when they were draining her blood out drop by drop, when she was dying slowly on some filthy med table in a pirate base, she'd make sure he knew exactly how brilliant his advice had been.