Shade wanted to call her scrappy, but it didn’t quite fit. For the spirit maybe, but not for the physical part. She’d been tall and strong and fit. Her eyes had looked older than the rest of her, though, like she’d already been to hell and back and made choices most people never had to face.
Determined. That was it.
She’d looked like she could take care of herself. So why did he have this itch under his skin, like he wanted to make sure she wasn’t in trouble too deep?
When the tablet was ready, he typed in the pass code to the secure database only he and about a hundred other people in the galaxy had access to. This was where shit went down. This was where he made his money.
He scrolled through the latest entries first to get them out of the way, but his mind wasn’t really in the right place to check them out. Rebel. Rebel. Rebel. Escaped convict. Kidnapped scientist. Rebel. Priest.
Priest? His eyes stopped for a moment. That was unusual. Not many people fucked with the Powers, just in case they were real.
“Not interested,” Shade muttered.
Going to the search bar, he typed in Tess Bailey.
No matches came up for a current job. No bounty. No info.
Adjusting the search criteria, he typed in just Bailey.
Again, nothing.
He tried Baylee, Bayleigh, Bailee, and Baileigh, all without a hit.
Good. She wasn’t anywhere on the up-to-date Wanted or Retrieve lists. That brought a little relief to the tension in his gut.
Shade switched databases and widened the hunt to birth records, telling the search engine to ignore any hit from more than forty years ago and to eliminate all males from the results. There was no way she was forty—more like twenty-five—but he was working large out of caution.
After an interminable wait, about five kabillion Baileys popped up.
He sat back in his chair and scrubbed his hands down his face. He’d need a year to sort through all that.
He narrowed the search to birth records for women under thirty. Still too many. He used the same criteria for just Sector 12 and got Baileys under a number of different spellings, but no Tess to go with them. Same thing for Sector 8.
He groaned. She’d probably given him a false name anyway, and this was a wild-goose chase.
“Well, shit. Who the hell are you, starshine?”
Shade hadn’t expected his tablet to answer, but all of a sudden, there she was, filling his screen as a new message came through from the first window he’d opened to the restricted-access database. His eyes widened, and adrenaline ripped through his blood.
He stared at the enormous WANTED above her head and felt his stomach twist.
The sum below her picture of two hundred million in universal currency made his jaw drop.
Shade stood up, thunking both hands down on his desk and glaring at the tablet. He leaned over for a better look—and to make sure he was reading this right.
He’d never seen that much money offered for anyone. Ever. If he was seeing this new post, other people were, too. There wasn’t a bounty hunter with access to this list that wasn’t pissing his or her pants right now with excitement, but Shade felt like he was about to throw up.
His shoulders tensed as he pushed away from his desk to pace. Those others, though, they didn’t know where she was. The exact platform where her severely disabled ship was currently docked. They had no idea where to start looking for Captain T. Bailey in the whole fucking galaxy, but he could walk right up to her, and she wouldn’t even wonder why he was there.
Shade swallowed the bad taste in his mouth. Two hundred million. He could buy back his birthright and live like a king forever on that. Never compete for another job in his life.
Stopping, he studied the picture again, impatient for the rest of the job info to pop up. There had to be more than this, something to go on.
The image filling his tablet wasn’t an exact likeness. He’d seen ones like it before often enough. Someone had taken a picture of a kid—less than ten years old, if he had to guess—and then used algorithms to transform it into an adult woman. The computer program had gotten the blue eyes, straight brown hair, and almost heart-shaped face right, but it had erased her freckles, like they’d never even been.
He scowled at the screen. The pinkish, uniform skin looked all wrong on her.
More text finally appeared.
Names may be false.
He snorted. Always a good place to start.
Shade glanced at the bottom of the screen to see who’d sent out the post. Captain Nathaniel Bridgebane, Galactic General, Dark Watch 12.
For fuck’s sake, this just kept getting worse. They’d brought out the big guns. Bridgebane was the Overseer’s right hand. His brother-in-law. And he either had no idea who Tess was, or he knew, and he didn’t want to tell anyone.
Captain T. Bailey.
Cargo Cruiser model 419—Endeavor.
Subject presumed dead.
Shade frowned. “Then why are you sending this out?”
Last seen in Sector 14 in possession of highly sensitive government materials.
His eyebrows nearly flew off his head. He’d seen hints of fragility in Tess, but she must have had balls of steel if she’d been zooming around Sector 14 with the Dark Watch on her heels.
The bounty will be doubled for recovery of the stolen goods. Live capture preferred—substantial bonus.
Shade’s heart stuttered to a stop. He reread. Holy Sky Mother, the galactic government wanted Tess and whatever she’d taken more than it had ever wanted anything since its inception, as far as he knew.
And they preferred her alive.
Some of the sick feeling inside him eased.
Unless they just wanted to torture her for answers?
The sick feeling grew again.
What had she taken? Bridgebane didn’t want to say outright; that much was clear. He was dangling bait, and the hunters had to figure it out for themselves. If they found her, they probably found it.
Tess’s coolly spoken “I’m not a petty thief” came back to him, and he almost choked. He’d teased her about stealing a box of bullets? When she stole, she obviously stole big.
The photo and information disappeared, and Shade lunged for the tablet, picking it up again. Bridgebane couldn’t have been taking down the job already. No one could have found her that fast.
A sort of rage-filled panic started drumming beneath his ribs, but then another window opened with a new image to take the first one’s place. Same text underneath. The photo was a mug shot from Hourglass Mile, one of the most severe and secure places in the galaxy. They’d traced her to where she’d been—he looked at the date on the prison photo—seven years ago.
Tess Bailey. It might not have been her real name, but she’d been using it for a while now.
He looked at her birth date, too. A quick calculation told him she was twenty-six.
He cursed and started pacing again.
Fucking nineteen years old and sent to Hourglass Mile. What had she done to get herself locked up in that place? He knew what they did to the inmates there. The mines. The whips. The pairings.
The lunch he’d eaten earlier turned to lead in his stomach. Who had they forced on her? What had he been like?
How the hell had she gotten out?
The sentence stamped in red across her mug shot said Life.
Then he remembered the explosion about five years back. A bunch of prisoners had died. In the confusion, some had managed to run away, making it to the docks and stealing supply ships. No bounty had ever been offered for any of them, no names given—not on the regular channels and not on his. The galactic government had probably been too embarrassed by the massive amounts of chaos at one of their maximum-security prisons to post.
Beautiful. Ballsy. And brave.
A wanted criminal.
Fuck!
He worked on the fringes of the law, dipping his toes into the murky side of the system, but he was still part of the galactic machine of all-encompassing order. He knew who signed the checks. One big job like this, and he could leave it all behind.
Indecision clawed at Shade’s chest. He’d never agreed to help someone before only to screw them over. He didn’t get to know his targets. They were just prize money, a means to an end.
But Tess Bailey with her little freckles and her mile-long legs was everything he needed and more to finally buy his life back from that scumbag Scarabin White.