Blood Will Tell (20 page)

All the while she found herself wishing she could think of some clever retort, but her cheek hurt too much. Instead, she stood there silently, praying that he was tired of her for now and would toss her back in her cell for some much-needed rest.

As it turned out, that appeared to be his plan. The Stacian gestured toward the two tall humans who had stood behind him all this time, and they stepped forward and each grasped one of Miala’s arms.

“Perhaps a few hours of contemplation will persuade you to tell me more about Mast’s treasure,” Murgan said. He reached out and touched her bruised cheek. Even that light contact was enough to make her wince. “You have a pretty face, my dear. Think about whether it’s worth preserving or not.” And with that he nodded toward the two guards, who pulled her through the watching ranks of Murgan’s henchmen and back down the corridor, pushing her roughly when she stumbled. Her boots slipped on the steps once or twice, and she was certain she would fall, but their bruising grasp on her arms kept her upright.

Once they were back on the prison level, they shoved her back inside her cell and watched with satisfaction as the bars clanged shut. Miala stumbled to the bench and sat down, thankful for even the harsh comfort it provided.

One of the guards, the taller of the two, whose face was marked by a wicked burn on one cheek, gave her a leering smile. “Better tell him what he wants,” he said. “He’s promised us that we’ll be able to borrow you for a while before he kills you. You might want to think about that.” Then he blew her a kiss and laughed, with the other guard joining in and grinning.

In answer Miala only huddled herself closer to the wall, turning her burning cheek away from them and up against the cool sandstone. After a moment, apparently disgusted by her lack of response, they left, but not before making a few more choice remarks that made the blood rush to her face.

It’s all right
, she told herself.
Thorn is here. He’ll come down here and break me out as soon as he gets a chance. He won’t let Murgan do anything else to me
.

All she could do now was wait for him to save her.

XV

She must have dozed off, so Miala had no clear idea of how much time had passed before she heard the barred cell doors open with a sudden
whoosh
. Instantly she sat upright, heart beating a sharp staccato in her chest. Had they come for her already?

“Quiet,” came Thorn’s voice.

Straining her eyes against the darkness, she thought she saw him enter, moving slowly. His form looked oddly misshapen, almost hunch-backed.

“Off the bench,” he instructed, and she immediately stood, pulling her satchel out of the way as well.

As soon as she had moved, Thorn stepped forward and then dropped some sort of unwieldy object on the bench.

“What is that?” she whispered.

“
That
,” he replied, his voice also pitched low, “is a ‘friend’ of one of the guards. She’s not a perfect match for height and build, but her hair’s about the same color as yours.”

Mystified, Miala inquired, “Am I missing something?”

Thorn seemed to do something with the girl’s limp form—Miala thought he was turning her toward the wall in roughly the same position Miala had just occupied. “Security’s on a four-minute loop. When the cameras track back on this cell, they’ll think you never moved. So let’s get going.”

He grasped Miala by the arm, and she winced slightly—the guards had left bruises on her bicep. But Thorn appeared not to notice. Or perhaps he just didn’t care.

Then he pulled her out of the cell and closed the doors once again. To the casual observer, such as a guard watching a remote video feed, it would appear all was normal—at least until someone noticed that Miala’s hapless replacement was missing from her normal haunts.

Nor was the comatose girl the only casualty of Thorn’s rescue effort, apparently. Once they were a few steps down the hallway, which was only dimly lit by a few fading sconces, Miala saw the guard who had taunted her earlier. At first she thought he stood at attention outside a cell at the end of the hall, and she couldn’t help giving a frightened little gasp. But then she noticed he looked oddly stiff and suddenly realized that the man was either unconscious or dead and had been neatly attached to the bars of the cell with very fine cord.

“Nice work,” she commented in an undertone.

Thorn swiveled his dark-swathed head toward her. “I try to cover my tracks.”

Miala was silent for a few seconds, then said, “Thank you, Thorn.”

“Thank me later. We’re not out of here yet.”

The hallway branched into two more corridors. Thorn chose the left one, which appeared to be a service passageway of some sort. At any rate, there were no more cells here, just a series of closed doors, most of which had electronic “lock” buttons glowing red in the darkness.

Here Thorn paused for a moment. Miala stood quietly and waited as he typed what looked like a series of complicated commands into some sort of device mounted on his forearm.

“How did you know I would be here?” she asked quietly.

He didn’t look up. “I didn’t. I heard Murgan was having some sort of security consultant come in. Then I saw it was you.”

It was impossible to tell from his inflection whether he had been at all surprised to see her—or whether encountering her again after so many years had affected him in the slightest. Well, what had she expected, anyway? For him to fling his arms around her and declare his undying love right there in the passageway?

“You probably should have done a background check on Murgan before you took the gig,” he went on. “Careless.”

Scowling, Miala snapped, “Of course I did a check! My assistant looked into Murgan’s history before I left Nova Angeles, and it didn’t show anything out of the ordinary or that he was anything more than Dizhan had said he was—the owner of a shipping company who was expanding into mining here on Iradia.”

“Believe everything you read?”

Obviously the intervening years hadn’t made Thorn any less impossible. What really irritated her was that she had been kicking herself over the same issue. Risa had checked out Murgan, however, and as tidy little bits of data on a computer screen, he had seemed perfectly respectable. If someone was bound and determined to cook their files and hide anything unsavory, it would require a lot more effort to dig up that information than the simple investigation Miala always had performed before she took on a contract. Up until now it had never been an issue—but, as was usually the case, this one exception had turned out to be a doozy.

She wanted to argue with Thorn and knew that it was pointless. So instead she just crossed her arms and glared at him, waiting for him to make the next move.

Perhaps he smiled behind the layers of dark fabric. Perhaps not. She would never know.

Instead he gestured upward, as if to indicate the bulk of the compound, located somewhere above their heads. “Funny thing is, Murgan really could use a new security system. Thing hasn’t been replaced since we were here eight years ago. And his guards are a joke. This passage comes out about ten meters in front of the garage, and my ship is on a landing pad about another twenty meters past there. I figure we have a good ten minutes or so before anyone figures out Sleeping Beauty in there isn’t you—”

From his words Miala guessed that the unfortunate young woman was only unconscious. She hadn’t had the courage to ask Thorn whether the victim was alive or dead. “So—she’ll be all right?”

“She’ll wake up with a hell of a headache, and possibly questioning her taste in men.” His head cocked to one side. “That’s immaterial. What concerns us is how many hostiles are between us and my ship.”

“How many?”

He shrugged. “Between five and eight, if they stick to their usual patterns. No reason not to.”

“I suppose you’d know all about it.” Miala lifted an eyebrow. “How long have
you
been here?”

“About two years, off and on. Just contract work.”

It was on her lips to make a sharp comment about Thorn not being overly picky when it came to his own employers, but she knew better. After all, the mercenary had worked for Mast and God knows how many other unsavory types with deep pockets over the years. Why he’d felt the need to take on that kind of work when he could have come and claimed his half of Mast’s treasure at any time boggled her. Was working for slimebags like Murgan so much more preferable to seeing her?

Trust Thorn
, she thought,
to tick me off so much that I almost forgot he just got me out of Murgan’s jail cell!
 

Maybe he got a kick out of working for the dregs of the galaxy. Maybe being at the beck and call of scum such as Murgan held more appeal than having to look her up on Nova Angeles and politely request his half of the treasure. Hell, it had been his idea for her to hang on to it in the first place. At the time she hadn’t argued, but of course she’d hoped, deep down, that he would come back for it one day. Then a year had passed, and another, and his son had gone from infant to toddler to a boy who held in his face and his actions the promise of being almost a carbon copy of his father. And somewhere along the way she’d given up hope of ever seeing Eryk Thorn again. If he never claimed the money, she’d leave it to his son. But never, ever would she touch one unit of it. Not that she’d had any need to.

If Thorn noticed her hesitation, he gave no sign of it. “The way things are set up, Murgan’s not expecting any trouble from within. He’s got most of his security focused on the perimeter and the gates, not on interior surveillance. This corridor doesn’t have a video feed at all. That’s why we came this way.”

No wonder Thorn had chosen this particular spot to stop and discuss the situation with her. Miala nodded, then asked, “But what happens if they do see us?”

“Leave that to me.”

Meaning hit the deck and ask questions later. Still, one thing hadn’t changed. She couldn’t think of a better person to be with in a tight situation, even if there were times she could have cheerfully throttled him.

Then he held up a hand in front of his face, as if to forestall any further questions, and gestured for her to follow him.

The corridor began to slope upward and Miala moved quietly behind him, wishing she’d worn something a little more practical. Her suit had been chosen to create an impression of authority and style, not for ease of movement, and her boots had only been worn once before and had now begun to rub on the back of her heels. After all, she’d thought she’d be sitting behind a computer terminal, not running around in the bowels of Mast’s compound. Still, it couldn’t be helped now, and she knew better than to ask Thorn to slow down. If her feet started to bother her too much, she’d just kick off the damn boots and go barefoot.

They emerged from the underground passageway into the open space behind the speeder garage under the warm golden light of Ixtal, the largest of Iradia’s three moons. All seemed still; Miala could sense no movement in their immediate surroundings. She and Thorn might have been alone in the compound as they once had been.

It was on a night like this
, she thought. Once they had stood on the terrace that edged Mast’s tower in the warm moonlight, and they had spoken of the future until Thorn drew her inside, to the chamber where he had made love to her for the first time. Back then she had thought she could never be closer to another living being, and now the mercenary might as well be a complete stranger for all the regard he had shown her.

But she remained silent as she moved quickly in Thorn’s wake. Perhaps there would be time for recriminations and accusations once they were safely away from here—not that she would probably have the courage to confront him directly about his prolonged absence.

His object appeared to be the wall of the garage. Once there, he flattened himself against the sun-warmed sandstone, and Miala followed suit. His head moved as he appeared to survey their surroundings.

He must have judged it to be safe enough, for he crept cautiously around the corner of the building, still hugging the wall. Miala did the same, wincing once when the heel of her boot knocked against a stone that lay half-buried in the sand. The sound seemed thunderous in the silence, but Thorn appeared not to notice.

Beyond the garage was another open space, and beyond that, half-buried in the sand, lay a series of rough landing pads for those privileged enough to be able to fly directly onto the compound’s grounds. Miala could not see the
Fury
, but directly in front of them was the oval-shaped bulk of an old York-class freighter. Possibly it blocked the
Fury
, which was a much smaller vessel.

“Looks clear,” Thorn murmured. If she hadn’t been standing a scant few centimeters away from him, she wouldn’t have heard him at all.

“So why are we still standing here?”

“I don’t like it.” Shifting slightly, he looked back the way they had just come, then turned his head once more toward the landing pads. “Too empty. There should be at least a few guards patrolling this area.”

Miala wanted to quip,
Maybe they’re all on a break
, but guessed that sort of comment probably would not be very well-received. Besides, Thorn knew his business, and if it felt wrong, then it probably was wrong.

No sooner had she formulated that thought than she heard a hated voice from somewhere behind them, back toward the entrance to the underground corridor they had just left.

“Going somewhere?” asked Murgan.

She whirled, but Thorn was even faster. He spun around and dropped to one knee, pistol out and trained on the Stacian.

Murgan, surrounded by what looked like the entire complement of his household guard, stood behind them, gazing over at Miala and Thorn. An unpleasant smile twisted his features.

He looks even uglier by moonlight
, Miala thought irrelevantly, but she stood frozen, waiting to see what Thorn would do.

“Not a very good idea, mercenary,” continued Murgan. “I have no doubt that you could take me down, but you are grossly outnumbered here.”