I glared at Raquel, white-hot fury consuming me. How had I ever had a normal conversation with this woman? Sat at her table? Shared meals with her and Solan? “You’re such a bitch. Just wait until you find out that payback is an even bigger one.”
Raquel smirked. “Good luck with that—from life in prison.”
Oh, she had no idea. If the Dark Watch killed me, I’d haunt Solan and Raquel across the galaxy until I had my revenge for this, but I wasn’t thinking about me. I was thinking about Tess and her friends. If Tess asked them to, they’d find the bounty hunters and fuck them up in ways these two couldn’t even imagine. If Fiona had her say in it, it might involve tetrafumic acid.
Raquel took a pen from her utility belt and wrote the cruiser’s ignition numbers on the inside of Tess’s forearm. She scowled at me. “Happy?”
“No. Not ever again in this lifetime.”
Her chin went up, her expression brittle. “Let’s go.” Her eyes flicked to Solan. “We have to get back to Maya.”
My eyes narrowed. They loved their daughter—the little girl was probably the only thing they loved besides each other—but I’d never heard one of them say that before, especially when a hunt had been this fast and easy.
I refused to move, even when Solan pushed me. “What about Maya?” As far as I knew, the five-year-old was home in Sector 6, as usual.
Raquel’s face lost some of its habitual callousness. For the first time in ages, she looked almost human. Actually, she looked like her daughter, with big mahogany eyes, heavy dark lashes, and wavy hair down to her elbows. Maya’s long hair was blacker and springier, which she got from her father.
A visible anxiety I’d never seen before in her crept into Raquel’s features. “Why do you think it took us ten days to come after you?” She shook her head like I was the idiot and the asshole, when they were the ones who’d just ambushed us, captured me, and drugged my girlfriend.
“I don’t know. You tell me,” I ground out.
“Even though we chipped you, we didn’t pursue you ourselves or tell any of the other bounty hunters where you were because we chose not to.” Raquel seemed to regret that decision wholeheartedly in retrospect. “In spite of her two hundred million units being transferred to your head.” She pointed back and forth between Tess and me, as if I needed the visual cues to know exactly who she was talking about.
Did she want me to thank them? Fuck that. “What changed?” I asked.
She clamped her mouth shut, so I glared at Solan.
He scrubbed a hand over his shaved head, grimacing. “Maya got sick.”
“What?” My brow slammed down. “What kind of sick? What happened?”
“Everything was normal at first,” he answered. “After your asinine behavior on the Squirrel Tree, we went home and kept tabs on you. We watched you go to Starway 8 for some reason, then you zigzagged around the Outer Zones with no logical direction, then you disappeared. We thought you’d been blown up or something. There was no trace of you anywhere. Then Maya collapsed the other day.”
Solan took a deep breath. He glanced at his wife. She stared straight ahead at nothing. “She was playing normally. Then she started complaining about feeling dizzy. ‘Spots in my eyes,’ she said. We gave her a snack and thought she was okay again. A few hours later, she just dropped, folded like her strength fell out from under her. She couldn’t get back up. She’s in a clinic now. They say it’s an aggressive new blood disease, and they don’t know how to treat it.” His next words choked him. “They say she won’t make it.”
“Shit. I’m sorry.” I was sorry, despite the rest of this. Then anger reared up. “And you ditched her in a clinic to go hunt down the one person who might actually care about her besides you two?”
They both flinched, which was unprecedented. I’d only seen Maya here and there, a couple of times a year, on average. She wasn’t the easiest kid in the galaxy—hell, look at her parents—but I usually got her to come around to games that didn’t involve setting things on fire or beating the crap out of something. And I knew where Solan and Raquel kept the paperwork. The paperwork that fucking named me as Maya’s guardian if the two of them bit it somewhere.
“We didn’t ditch her,” Raquel said stiffly, not sounding like herself either as she moved closer to me and Solan. “We put out feelers. There’s a black-market dealer who says he’s got a cure-all like nothing anyone’s ever seen before. He swears it’ll fix anything, even this, but he’s only got one. He’ll sell it.”
“Let me guess,” I bit out. “For two hundred million.”
“Three hundred million.” Solan actually looked sorry, like this wasn’t how he wanted things to end between us. “You popped up on Korabon—alive, apparently—so we told him we could get the money for his cure-all. We tracked you here in the meantime.” He shrugged. “The rest is history.”
Black-market dealers were greedy fuckers, but still… “That’s a hell of a lot of currency.”
“It’ll wipe us out,” Solan said. “But at least we’ll have Maya.”
“There’s no guarantee of that.” They’d never acted like they were born yesterday. Why start now? “This guy could be pulling a fast one on you. He could take your money, hand you a useless saline solution, and disappear into the Dark forever.”
“You’re just trying to save yourself,” Raquel spat out, livid—probably because she feared exactly what I just said. She reached out, twisted her hand in the neck of my T-shirt, and pulled. “Our cruiser’s over at the next lodge. Start walking.”
Tess laughed from the ground. Little huffs and giggles leaked from her as she shoved herself up and sat against the wall of the bungalow. She blinked like her vision was fuzzy. I couldn’t believe she was even conscious. Was her A1 blood helping her?
Raquel let go of me and whirled on Tess, practically foaming at the mouth as she stomped back toward her. “You think this is funny?”
Tess laughed again. Raquel pointed the Grayhawk at her. Cocked it. I leaped forward, but Solan jerked me back, growling.
“Don’t!” I shouted, my heart banging in my throat. “You promised.”
Raquel’s lip curled. She lowered the Grayhawk.
“Not funny,” Tess mumbled. She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “Your drug is making me loopy.” She wrinkled her nose and blinked some more, looking owlish. “I can help.”
“Come again?” Raquel stared at her, so hostile I tensed. I’d seen her kick in someone’s teeth when they were down, and I had no doubt she’d do it again.