Rystani Warrior 04 - The Quest Read Free Page B

they want you? How do they know your name?”
    Kirek rubbed his square jaw. “My calculations seem to have gone awry. I’ll have to think about … ”
    He seemed genuinely puzzled, but she wasn’t buying his innocent act. Yet she didn’t have time to interrogate him, nor did she bother using privacy mode, allowing Kirek to hear her conversation. “Petroy, is the other ship in weapons range?”
    “Not yet.”
    “Do we have time to return to the Raven before they can shoot us?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Stall negotiations until I return. Tell them I haven’t found anyone named Kirek. Yet.”
    “And then?”
    “Ask what they’re willing to pay for this Kirek, if I find him.”
    “Aye, Captain.”
    Kirek’s eyes flared with a heat that burned hotter than a solar flare. “You trade in slaves?”
    Her instruction to Petroy had been automatic. But she’d obviously touched a sore point, and maybe it would make Kirek more agreeable to answering her questions. While she’d never deal in the slave trade, he needn’t know that right away.
    She intended to drop the Rystani off on the nearest habitable planet—but she also wanted to know how he’d avoided her sensors and how he’d learned her destination. She told herself she would have made the same decision not to turn him over to her competition if she’d found a slimy, eight-tentacled Osarian aboard, instead of the finest male specimen she’d seen this side of a holovid screen.
    “You.” She waved her blaster at Kirek. “Come with me.”
    He planted his feet, crossed his arms over his massive chest, and spoke with calm contempt. “I will never again be a slave.”
    Kirek presented one awesome picture of Rystani stubbornness, and she realized he’d called her bluff. This proud warrior would clearly rather die than give up his freedom. She couldn’t imagine him ever having been anyone’s slave.
    From the rock-hard tension in his muscles to the angry heat in his glaring eyes, she knew he was a man bent on dying before he yielded his will to anyone. Oddly, she didn’t feel threatened, but sympathetic. “I do not buy, sell, or keep slaves. Not ever.” She cocked her head to one side. “But if you want to live, I suggest you answer my questions. Who’s after you?”
     

Chapter Two
    “IF YOU DON’T SELL slaves, why did you ask what price I’d bring?” Kirek didn’t budge from his stance or his determination to remain free.
    Some issues weren’t debatable and slavery was one of them. Seven years ago, at the mention of anyone selling him, he wouldn’t have been able to restrain his seething temper. But after a good part of a decade spent traveling through the galaxy, he’d healed from his time spent on Endeki, where he’d been a hostage and suffered at the hands of a woman with an unusual taste for cruelty.
    While Captain Angel Taylor might be space-hardened, she didn’t emit a cruel psi, at least from what his own blast-damaged one could pick up. Kirek found his new handicap tiresome and limiting but reminded himself that until the last century, most of humanity never had more to go on than he did right now—his instincts.
    Angel stared hard at him, and while her tone had an edge, it was cut with understanding. “I asked what they would pay for you to learn your value to them. And,” she continued, grinning, “to see if my threat would make you answer my question.”
    He couldn’t help admiring the way she thought. A good brain always attracted him as much as a pleasing face and a toned body. Angel seemed to have both. Taller than Tessa, a Terran woman who lived with his family on Mystique, their new home world, Angel’s slender frame still showed enough curves in her dark green suit to make him appreciate that he was back in his body, even if he was damaged.
    Eight years ago, while astral projecting, Kirek had been caught in a wormhole explosion. His mind had been blasted out the far end of the wormhole, all the way into the Zin Galaxy. It had