Assassin's Hunger (25 page)

She slammed open the hopper hatch.

And found herself facing him.

Her fist lashed out before she consciously thought about it, just as she’d shown Torash and Alolis. His eyes widened but he had no time to evade, and the strike sent him tumbling backward. He’d been standing on the top step up to the hatch, so the fall was enough to knock the breath from him.

Or maybe he caught his breath at the speed with which her hazer was in her hand, aimed at his head.

“Order me not to do it,” she hissed. “Just try.”

“Shaxi—”

“You can
scream
my name to the stars, and you still won’t command me!”

Sprawled in the sand, he held up both empty hands, dust streaming from the sleeves of his sand-robe. “I know. The codejacking failed.”

“You failed,” she snapped.

“Yes.” He shifted up onto one elbow. At the small movement, the edge of his robe slithered aside, revealing the distinctive hazer she’d first seen in the cantina. An assassin’s tool, she realized, silent, focused, and deadly. Like he was.

But it hadn’t been in his hand when he knocked at her door.

The hazer wavered in her hand, almost imperceptibly, but she knew he’d see it and she cursed herself. “And did you fail to kill the twins? Or are you still hoping to order me to do it?”

“It’s over. I told the captain and Benedetta.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “You lie. They would’ve killed you for threatening the girls.”

“They should have.” His gray eyes were shadowed. “But they didn’t.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said flatly.

A hint of a smile curved his lips. “Well, I’m still alive to come find you, aren’t I?”

She fired the hazer into the swirling earth beside his head, fusing the sand into glass. “I can fix that.”

He coughed. “Can you wait until we get back to the
Asphodel
?”

She hesitated, wondering if he was telling the truth. This time. “They’d take you back?”

“How do you think I got the second runabout?” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder.

She flicked a quick glance at the vehicle. Its six wheels were already half buried in sand. If she kept Eril on the ground much longer, he’d be buried too.

Oh, how she wanted that.

But she still had her last mission, to see the twins safely off-planet.

“Maybe you killed them all,” she said suspiciously, “and stole the runabout.”

“I’m delighted that you think so highly of me, but I didn’t kill anyone. They are waiting for us. For you.”

Someone was waiting for her. His words trickled through her like sand, like water, filling up parts of her she thought were unreachable.

“They don’t need me,” she said. “Once I kill you, they’ll be safe and they can go.”

“They won’t be safe,” he said. “There will be others. Like me. Like the shipkiller.”

The hazer wavered again. “Why are you on their side now?”

He pushed himself slowly to his feet, letting her see his hands. “My parents wanted a place where people could live by the rule of their heart. They died for that belief.” His shoulders slumped and his hands fell slack to his sides. “Everything I’ve done since then has run counter to what they would have wished.” He raised his shadowed eyes to her. “They would have loved you.”

She scoffed, angry at the way him saying the word made her pulse race. “Tranquilists love a machine?”

“Half machine,” he said. “And all heart. I wonder…” He took a step toward her where she was still perched on the top step of the hatch. “I wonder if there is a place in your heart for me.”

She recoiled, the muzzle of the hazer listing upward. “You can’t say anything to change me.”

“I don’t want to change you,” he said.

But she raged over him. “You couldn’t control my programming, so you think to control my…my love?”

He shook his head. “Control it? No. Never. Ask for it? Beg for it? Yes. As I would my life.”

She felt herself wavering, and she stiffened her spine against it. “This is just another codejacking.”

“There was no code,” he said. “Why do you think it failed? The tuner should have given me access, but it didn’t. Because you’d already broken free.” He was close enough to put a hand on her boot as he stared up at her. “Whatever you wanted to become, Shaxi, you were already that, before the fight in the cantina, before the storm, before me.”

She stared at him.

She’d wanted him, as she’d wanted to be part of the
Asphodel
. What did she want now?

“I should kill you still,” she whispered.

The storm swept away her words, but he nodded anyway.

“Let’s finish this.”

They raced for the runabout.

He had to gun the engine to break out of the sucking grip of the sand—she let him drive since she wanted to be able to shoot him if necessary—and the wind rocked the vehicle hard. There was no canyon to hide them, no oasis where they might pretend to be nothing more than lovers.

She blanked that thought.

Then she reached down into herself. She knew the Hermitaj programming was still there, just as the paths he’d left still burned a betrayal in her mind.

But with his words echoing, she saw now that the paths were breaking down. They’d been so clear to her for so long, that she’d followed them by rote, as if they still existed.

But they were vanishing, scoured to nothingness and gone.

Fear gripped her. Now she was truly alone.

The shriek of hazer fire interrupted, igniting the sky around them, and she flicked on her screens. “The shipkiller is rising, but one thruster is half power at best.”

Eril pressed the comm which crackled and spat. “
Asphodel
, go. Do you read? Go now.”

“Not without you two,” came the reply. “The phase tuner is almost through their secondary firewall. We just need another moment to take them. Thanks for the toy, auxo.”

He glanced over at her with his eyebrows raised in vindication.

She ignored him, hailing the ship. “
Asphodel
, Benedetta, where are the twins?”

“Locked in and waiting for their next lesson in fighting. Which I’m thinking you could demonstrate on the auxo.”

Eril coughed. “Runabout out.”

They bounced over the sand, the wind snarling, and another burst of the black ship’s hazer fire turning the sand to glass around them. They skidded sideways on the glass and almost tipped.

Shaxi gripped the roll bar overhead. “If you have renounced your mission, why did you come for me?”

Eril glanced at her, a silver light glinting in his eyes. “Because I love you.”

She blinked. “Love me.”

“I wanted to tell you when I could be more poetic about it—probably the captain would have some suggestions—but I’m trying to get us not killed.”

The black ship rose up on their rear cams. The fireworks of ion flares breaking over its prow only intensified its hulking menace.

“I’m told love is the most powerful force in the universe,” he said conversationally as the
Asphodel
loomed ahead of them, thrusters bright as suns. “I’m willing to believe that, maybe, but all I know for certain is that it changed me. I was a killer because I was told that’s what the universe needed, that was all I had left. But you were the key that opened my eyes, Shaxi. Everything was taken from you, but given the first chance, you reclaimed yourself. As if you had never once stopped believing in what you could be. For that, for
you
, I would love.”

Before she could answer, the storm struck in all its fury.

The wind slammed into the runabout, flipping it end over end and slamming it against the hull of the
Asphodel
.

Shaxi hung upside down in her restraints, stunned again. Her whole world was upended, she thought.

But Eril’s hand at the center of her breasts, where the restraints locked, freed her, and she fell into his arms.

He dragged her from the runabout and they stumbled toward the
Asphodel
. The hatch hydraulics were already compressing, closing the portal. He shoved her up to the gangplank and then grabbed her hand to pull himself up behind her.

The black ship fired, striking the place where they’d been, and they both tumbled backward into the cargo bay.

The hatch clanged shut, and the
Asphodel
tilted alarmingly. Shaxi cried out as she tumbled into Eril.

He braced her, anchoring himself to the nearest strut as G forces pulled at them.

He looked down at her. “If we die…” He hauled her closer and kissed her.

She reveled in the perfect closeness for a heartbeat before she drew back. “I almost killed you.”

“I would’ve forgiven you,” he murmured. “After what I did to you—”

She put one fingertip—from the hand with the cyber-embeds that were now all hers—over his lips. “We were both controlled, me by my programming, you by your past. What we do next is on us.” She curled her fingers into a fist that she rested above his heart. “Except I don’t even know your real name.”

“You do. I never lied about that. It’s the name I was given after my first father banished me and the underwriters took me in, trained me to do the things they wouldn’t, taught me so well, no one ever knew what I was. Until you.” He brushed the backs of his knuckles across her cheek, his gray eyes soft. “You never believed me.”

She hesitated, then she clamped her hand behind his head and slanted her mouth over his. She broke the kiss just long enough to whisper, “I do now.”

She kissed him again as she’d wanted to kill him, with fury and need and everything in her. Their tongues tangled, in an instant taking them further than any thread of the sheerways.

The ship canted sideway, engines screaming, the bulkhead glowing even on the inside with the ionization of the storm.

They would fall, Shaxi thought hazily, but her last breath would be his, and at least they’d fall together.

And then they were free.

The cool blackness of space bloomed on the comm panels. Silence reigned, except for the pulse of Eril’s heart below her ear where she lay on his chest, spent.

“Free,” she murmured.

“Both of us. Finally.” He smoothed his fingers through her hair and kissed her temple. “But if you are taking applications for an ex-assassin love slave…”

She looked up at him. “I don’t need a slave. But a friend, a lover… That’s what I want. Just what every woman wants.”

“I don’t know about what every woman wants, but I’ll be what you need. Always.”

She
felt
the ragged edges of her existence aligning with his, the lost links forging a new connection. “You could change your name back to what it was, before, as I did.”

A hint of old shadows crossed behind his half-closed lashes. “I can’t forget what I’ve done. I’ll spend the rest of my days atoning. But it brought me to you.”

The tremor in his voice seemed to catch in her own throat. “It’s like a dream I’d forgotten.” She reached up to mirror his touch and her fingers came away from his dark locks speckled with sand. “But dirtier.”

He gave her a wicked smile that banished the darkness in his eyes and left only shimmering silver. “That’s the best kind of dream.”

She threaded her hands behind his head. “I have a place. I have a purpose. I have you. What more could I ask for?”

“A bath.”

She kissed him. “Is that a command?”

“Only if you want it to be.”

Epilogue

They’d been told the shower never ran dry, but they tested it, and when they found their way back to his bunk, they reveled in their scoured cleansing.

“This is as close to innocence as I get,” he told her.

She kissed her way down his body, lingering a moment on the ragged edges of his unfinished tattoo. In the bath, he’d shown her what a love slave might do, if she’d been inclined to have one. Now she completed her path and took his thickening flesh in her mouth just as he’d suckled her little nub, softly at first, teasing like a meteor skipping across the atmosphere, then plunging in and setting his world aflame.

He gripped her hair, the short white spikes sticking up between his fingers, and let his head fall back. She reached up to pinch his nipples and he bucked his hips against her taut tongue.

When he was one laving stroke from finishing, he flipped her to her back and plunged between her thighs.

She was ready, so ready, her body slick from their earlier joining, a hot link that would burn between them forever, he knew.

She cried out his name as she came and the sound of her gasping sent him over his own edge. They fell together, entangled.

As their bodies cooled, he pulled the sheet around her.

But her breath didn’t slow and he knew her eyes were still open; he could catch a little gleam of gold when he glanced down.