Overlord: The Fringe, Book 2 (38 page)

“When she absconded with
Whisper
the first time.” Duster sighed long and hard, his laughter abruptly gone. “Best you hear the truth from me and not him, but I tried to pay him to find her and pay her off.”

“Pay her off?” Michael couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“So she wouldn’t come back.” Duster grimaced. “Don’t ask me what I was thinking. I’m not so sure myself. Anyway, Nash turned me down.”

“Money wasn’t good enough?” Michael would gladly pay millions to get Mary back. In the month she’d been gone, he’d been a bastard to be around, and no matter what he did, from brutal workouts in his dojo to brief and bitter showers in the locker room, he couldn’t shake his growing anxiety that he would never see her again.

“No money would be good enough.” Duster sipped his coffee. “Nash is afraid of her. Can’t say I blame him after what she did to his trigger finger, not to mention his nuts.” Duster chuckled. “By the way, don’t mention Nash’s injured nuts to him. Gets him rather—testy.”

Michael laughed at the pun, then sobered. It didn’t surprise him at all that Duster and Nash had a fearsome respect for Mary. Underestimating her was something most people did only once. Michael had to repeat the error until she damn near drilled it into his head with a real drill.

“Do you realize you, Nash and I total a solid eight hundred pounds of hulking male while Mary stands a slender one-thirty?”

“Yeah.” Duster nodded, taking another sip of his coffee. “Thing is, she’s got an arsenal in her skull.”

“You wouldn’t put your blades up against her?”

“No.” Duster checked his boots where he kept his blades ever ready. “If I snuck up on her, I could kill her from a distance, like a coward. Stab her in the back, literally. Face to face, hand to hand? I’d think twice, hell, maybe three or four times about taking her on. She’s slick. Scary Mary does things no one would expect.”

“Too damn smart for her own good.” Michael smiled at the irony of her abilities attracting him yet keeping her from him.

“That’s why I, and anyone with half a brain, think it would be wise to leave Mary alone.”

“You don’t want me to go after her,” Michael said flatly.

“No,” Duster answered, just as flat.

“I love her.”

“I know.”

“She loves me.”

Duster didn’t say anything as he fiddled with his cup.

Michael couldn’t stand the silence, or that scent of cinnamon pastry Duster kept giving off. “Just say it. I can damn near smell you edging up to wanting to say something so bad you’ll explode if you don’t.”

With a deep sigh, Duster set his cup aside. “Whether Mary loves you or not isn’t the point.”

“Why don’t you tell me the point.”

“She doesn’t want to be found,” Duster said, absolute conviction in his words. “A woman with a bright blue cast and dress, barefoot, hobbling on a cane, in a stolen ship that’s missing both shuttles, with a wad of plastimetal and plastimirror on her wrist, with no bonafides, no script—she should stand out like a thumb hammered raw.”

“Not Mary.” Michael fidgeted with the useless stack of reports scattered across his desktop.

“You got it.” Duster refilled his cup from the carafe on the desk. “Somehow—don’t you dare ask me how, because I haven’t a clue—she’s disappeared. We can’t find her. Not because we’re stupid or incompetent, but because she doesn’t want to be found. Mary is so freaking sneaky she could disappear in an empty room.”

Michael rubbed his hand down his exhausted face. “I need to find her.”

“You want to find her.”

Michael gritted his teeth. “Granted.”

“Let—her—go.” Duster enunciated each word with exaggerated patience.

“I can’t.” Michael would never stop looking for her.

“You won’t.” Duster clenched his coffee cup. “It seems to me that she has a damn good reason for disappearing.” He took a sip. “Maybe she doesn’t love you.”

“And maybe she does,” he snapped back without even thinking.

“Maybe is a big slippery slope,” Duster said reflectively. “It’s real easy to get sucked into the promise of maybe.”

“Isn’t it?” Michael stripped Duster with a razor gaze and a deep sniff. “Don’t foist your abandonment issues on to me or Mary.”

“I’m not.” Duster sounded offended and his scent changed from burnt chocolate to fresh baked bread.

“You’re thinking how noble you were for letting Diane go. All these years, all these resources at your fingertips, and you never once looked for her. You want me to make the same noble sacrifice for Mary.”

Duster clenched his jaw. “What I want you to do is wake up and see the obvious. Mary doesn’t want to be found.”

Michael started to respond, but Duster shook his head.

“Okay, look. That point is real clear, but let’s turn to what will happen if—and that’s a big, huge, hulking if—you actually manage to find Mary. What are you gonna do with her if you do find her?”

“I just want to talk to her.”

“You still can’t say it with a straight face.” Duster set his cup on the desk. “What are you really planning to do? Keep her prisoner? Force her to your bed?”

“You know I wouldn’t.” But then again, Michael wasn’t so sure. Something about Mary drove him to want to possess her, yet he wanted her to surrender to his control, and then trade places.

“Dunno. You’ve done some pretty strange things since you met Mary. You acted like a total jackass when you just
thought
you were in love with Kraft. Now that you really are in love, I have no idea what you’re capable of doing.” Duster lifted his hands as if to encompass the vast array of equipment and guards that Michael had at his disposal.

“I wouldn’t hurt her.” He wanted to touch her and watch her eyes fill with passion. He wanted to smell that compelling scent of her arousal again. He wanted to laugh with her. Be with her. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her.

“You already did.”

“I didn’t mean to.” Michael paced again, desperate to dissipate his growing frustration. Anxiety exuded a pungent scent similar to onions from his body.

Duster considered his right hand and the battered platinum band that encircled his ring finger. “Let her go, Michael. If she wants you, she’ll come back.”

“Just because you’re willing to wait for someone doesn’t mean I will follow suit.”

Duster swiveled his gaze. “Diane made a choice. So has Mary. Let her go.”

“No.” Michael would never stop looking for Mary. If he could just talk to her and tell her the truth he’d discovered about his feelings toward Kraft, he knew Mary would understand. She said she loved him and he believed it. He smelled love on her as she leaned over him in the shuttle. She loved him so much she was willing to let him go so he could love someone else.

“You’ll end up hurting her.”

Michael turned away because he feared what Duster said was true.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Mary sank into the plush chair with a sigh. When the scantily clad waitress brought her drink, she tipped high, settled back and looked around like she owned the garish gambling hell called Robber’s Roost.

Hiding in plain sight had been a major pain in the leg. At first, she covered herself in a ragged dress with a huge veil and limped on a wooden cane like an old woman. She’d become a huckster, selling fruit with a shrill voice on Market Street in Borealis. She needed time to heal her foot, then get the cast off.

No one knew she had almost half a Mil in script in a money belt around her waist. She’d found a buyer for
Whisper
right away. Captain Conrad thought he could get the ship without paying. He’d found himself strapped to the pilot seat as she took his script and charged him an extra ten percent for hassling her. If Conrad had been looking for her, he never saw her in her first disguise.

Once the cast went bye-bye and her atrophied leg recovered, Mary dyed her hair vivid purple and dressed herself head to toe in dark purple clothes. Short boots of brushed leather ran to loose pants that gathered at the holster around her waist. Her weapon of choice was an IWOG officer’s pistol. It cost her a damn fortune, but just the deadly appearance of the weapon backed most down. A shirt of Dardinian silk billowed pirate-like around her. On her face, she plastered intense makeup that enlarged her eyes and purple lipstick that enhanced her full lips against pale skin.

Striking, she hid in plain sight. Everyone looked at her, everyone talked about her, but nobody associated her with the Bandit of Taiga or Remarkably Average Mary.

The first time she saw one of the wanted posters, she panicked and almost fled Corona. Quite a good likeness of her face, but the sketch showed the old Mary with the sad eyes and haunted look of one who’d been kicked around too many times. The warrant listed a slew of crimes, most of which she hadn’t committed.

Must be her IWOG father who posted them, because the warrants specified in no uncertain terms that she was wanted alive with a bounty of a Mil to whoever turned her in. That got lots of folks talking and looking, but they never glanced twice at the Purple Lady of Corona.

Rather than blending into the background as befitted one of her ilk, she deliberately drew attention to herself and made the roughest gambling hell, Robber’s Roost, her center of operations. She walked with a no-nonsense strut that put people on notice she wasn’t one to tangle with.

One big drunk, slurring how cute she was as he grasped and fondled her, found himself on the barroom floor in a rapidly expanding puddle of his own blood. After that, no one bothered her.

Right under the nose of the local law, she flaunted herself by demonstrating her fighting ability. They didn’t mess with her. Wasn’t worth the hassle to squabble over such a minor point on the Fringe. Lady alone had a right, even a duty, to protect herself.

Emmet said she’d never fit anywhere, IWOG or WAG. True enough, yet she fit right into the Fringe. Emmet couldn’t have coached her better for life as a Fringe player if he tried.

In a month, she managed to build quite a reputation for banditry as the woman in purple. Purple Lady of Corona. Mary thoroughly enjoyed her new nickname. She took pride in her work, devious as it may be, but she didn’t kill. She geared her tactical analysis
not
to kill.

“No reason to when you can just swipe the goods without them knowing,” she’d told the bartender one slow night. “Less ammo, hardware, and fuel because you don’t have to run away.” She winked. “Also, I like my boots. I’m not about to scuff them up running away when I don’t have to.”

She analyzed jobs in her head, considering every angle. Dealing with the dangerous Michael Parker had only sharpened her skills. Her mind was in hyperdrive. Not a single loophole slipped by her. She trusted no one.

At first, when she’d inquired about jobs, no one wanted to take the risk on her, not until she kicked the ass of a big drunk who’d gotten too handsy for his own good. Men and women both became more respectful, but still no job.

Finally, Captain Morgan, a haggard woman with pale gray eyes, agreed to hire her to run tactics on what she thought was a cakewalk job. For a paltry two percent, Mary pointed out three holes in the job at first glance. As she ran the job through her mind again, she found three more.

“Looks like a cakewalk over a burbling volcano,” Mary told the other woman. “Give me three percent, and I can double the take without a shot fired.”

Dubious, Captain Morgan followed her recommendations, and they’d swiped three times as much as they’d planned on, without a single shot fired.

“Told you I know what I’m doing.” Mary took her small cut and segued into another job on reputation alone. Within a month, she became a hot item. Want to run a sneaky job? Ask that Purple Lady over there.

She turned down more work than she accepted, and her standard rate per job climbed. Life was good. Except for one nagging problem.

Michael Parker.

For not being around, he certainly took up a lot of her mind, mostly at night when darkness filled her gaudy room above the hell. She waited for him to show up on Corona in order to reunite with Kraft, and she knew in her heart he’d never look for her here. Even if he did, he’d never find her.

She kept her eyes wide, looking for Kraft in the crowded streets of Borealis, but Mary never saw a woman six-three of dark and deadly Walkyrie. Never saw a ship named
Prospect
. She didn’t ask around either. Inquiries had a way of coming back on you.

Mary sipped her fancy water and cast her awareness out like a net into the chaotic jumble in the crowded hell. Sharp feelings of elation contrasted by misery caused her to reel in her awareness. Pungent wafts of liquor and greasy food had almost a soothing effect in their familiarity.

Michael might have already whisked Kraft away, or maybe Kraft had never been here at all. Mary kept looking and listening. More than anything, she just wanted to
see
Kraft. Mary wouldn’t dare speak to her. Curious, not stupid, she hid in plain sight and kept her eyes and ears wide. “And he’d never think to look for me here.” No. Not here where, if he came, he would look for Kraft, not her.

Late at night, she thought about Michael. She wondered where he slept and if he slept alone. She missed him. Her body burned for him and she found herself unable to assuage the need with her own hands. She thought time would blunt her desire, but time only sharpened her physical and emotional longing.

She missed his quirky half grin. The way he said, “Indeed” or “Granted” as if he conceded pawns in chess. The way he looked at her with his wicked golden-brown eyes as he said the most incredibly erotic things in the Void. His lips so close to hers until she begged him closer… Nighttime was hell. The more she tried not to think of him, the more she did.

Maybe someday, she’d look him up and see what happened with him and Kraft, but maybe she was better off not knowing. Safer not knowing. He would be safer if she stayed away from him.

Sighing, she kicked back the rest of her drink, slammed the glass to the table, stood and looked around. It was the usual crowd for a weekday. Couple of hard-core rich drunks at the bar arguing sports, couple of hard-core rich gamblers in the back trading fortunes, and the usual mix of WAG citizens, IWOG consumers and Fringe players.