Breakwater: Rick (BBW Bad Boy Space Bear Shifter Romance) (Star Bears Book 2) Read Free Page A

acquainted with my blaster.”

    Rick nodded and pulled out a chair, motioning for Zosha to sit. She did so gingerly and looked up at him, at a loss for where to begin.

    “Alright,” he said, putting his hand back on her shoulder, “the one there with the stick up his ass and an eyepatch is Hyde. The shortie next to him is Dominic. And that’s Captain Ingram accompanied by the lovely Annie. Now, why don’t you tell us how you wound up on the Breakwater .” His voice was as pleasant as ever, but Zosha wasn’t stupid enough to think the last bit was anything but an order.

    Zosha took a shaky breath, trying to decide where to begin. “So… Captain Strathmore,” she said finally.

    Rick’s hand tightened on her shoulder and Hyde choked. Annie’s spine stiffened.  

    “Go on,” the captain said, furrowing his brow and rolling his shoulders back.

    “As I’m sure you’re all aware, he was a megalomaniac with delusions of godhood, a hard on for the Civil War, and a warship that could make a Taldori cruiser look like an escape pod. And then he died, which was both really great and really terrible because…” she trailed off and gestured incomprehensibly, trying to get her thoughts in order. “…okay, so, I’m from Lytos, right? And we don’t have what you’d call a comprehensive police force at the best of times. But when Strathmore kicked it, a lot of people who didn’t have the balls or blasters to stand up to him suddenly didn’t have anything stopping them from taking a piece of his empire for themselves except each other. And just like that, you’ve got rival factions going at it like pit dogs in every corner of the damn galaxy. For Lytos, it was the Rahm brothers against the pocket of the Bleeding Coffins that was holed up there, but the main body of the Coffins is on Delta so they backed off pretty quick. That was almost the end of that, but then the younger Rahm decides that this is as good a chance as any to launch a hostile takeover, and all of a sudden, everyone who declared loyalty to the brothers—which was every mother’s son on the damn asteroid that knew what was good for him—was scrambling to choose a side and fight or get the hell out of the way. Follow?”

    Everyone at the table nodded.

    “Alright. So. Everyone’s got to eat somehow, right? And while I’ve got nothing but respect for the girls working in the red light district, I know I don’t have the right disposition to be one of them, and no one respectable wants to hire a street rat, and I’ve got no love for the gangs. So,” Zosha shrugged, “I got good at stealing things. A friend of mine’s an information broker and every so often he’d set me up with a job, but for the most part it was just pickpocketing to make sure I had a roof over my head and food on the table. It was all working out about as well as you could expect from Lytos, but then I fucked up. See, there’s this man named Lan Doro. Greasy, but ambitious. When Rahm the Younger decided to try and take over, he jumped on board and after a little hard work and a lot of backstabbing he made it into the inner circle. Then he gets put in charge of the U4 shipments—you know, Euphoria? Gold powder? Makes you think you’re flying?-- and that’s where things start going downhill for me. You have to understand, I’d heard of Lan Doro but I’d never seen him before. All I knew was he looked like he had something valuable on him, which I guess he did. Not the good kind of valuable, though.”

    Zosha paused to wet her lips.

    “What did you take?” the captain asked.

    “I’m not sure, entirely, but there’s a lot of numbers and a lot of names,” Zosha said. “It’s the kind of thing that could get someone in trouble with the law, even on Lytos, but the real threat to Lan Doro is that I could give it to the older Rahm. It would help him reduce his brother’s influence, but not enough to unseat him entirely, which means that little brother would still