The Bid (25 page)

“I am afraid for Kell, then. Majum’s nephew. He does not strike me as a stupid boy without a mind of his own, nor does he seem as perverse as his uncle is. Oh, I have no doubt that the Baron can dupe him as he has duped many others in the COM for many years, but it will not last for long with Kell. One day he will catch the Baron in his deceit, and if he is not careful Majum will have him killed as he seeks a more biddable marionette. Unfortunately there is a long, strong line of family on Kell’s branch of the tree. I wouldn’t put it past Majum to cut through every last one of them if that was what it took for him to one day assume the real power of Majum House.”

“Just as he is determined to cut through every one of this House to destroy the power of yours.”

“Well, it will not work. There are ‘cousins’ galore to take up the mantle of this House. When he strikes one of us down, another will always appear.”

“True, but the pain you will all suffer in the meantime.” His hands tightened around her arms. “And regardless of the endless train of brothers and sisters you may have, there is only one Hanna Drakoulous, and I don’t want anything to happen to her.”

The sentiment visibly touched her and he saw her eyes and features soften toward him. It was a look that had a peculiar and powerful effect on him. Jhon reached up to brush a thumb over the rise of her cheek and she turned her face into his entire palm with a kittenish nuzzle. He smiled at the affection, then pulled her to the kiss of his lips.

“Ah, Hanna,” he breathed into her mouth, “you have the most unusual power over me.”

“Really?” She quirked up a brow. “I think I like the idea of that,” she said smugly.

“That’s all right,” Jhon chuckled, reaching around to catch one shapely buttock in his palm, “because I know I have a great deal of power over you as well.”

“Mmm,” she purred. “That you do.”

Ashanna sat in the dark tavern wearing men’s clothing and with her feet propped up on the table before her. It wasn’t that women weren’t allowed in such establishments, it was just that advertising the fact to the kinds of patrons that attended a dark corner place like this was likely to get her into trouble. As it was, the servers were women and they wore very brief and provocative outfits, clearly as a way of luring in customers. But Asha could easily see the bruises they sported at the edges of their clothing from the hard pinches and rude grabs of the rowdy patrons; apparently the owner didn’t care enough about them to do anything about it.

But that was often the way of things in the Low City. Since Asha had spent most of her life in the High City, she had never really been exposed to this level of callousness until about two years ago when she had started hanging out with her new group of friends. They were all highborn like she was, second and third siblings of High Houses, who just happened to find a thrill in walking around the more dangerous streets of the Low City. They would frequent the taverns, gamble in the odds houses, and party with less sterling types down at the docks. It was actually kind of exciting to see the short flyers come in with their cargo, sitting there wondering where they had just come from, and wondering how they might one day sneak aboard one of them and stow away to the coasts where they could pay for passage off that miserable planet of their birth.

Asha was not trapped there by law like her sister was. She was free to come and go as she pleased, actually. By law, anyway. But then there was the law of Hanna to contend with. Even her brother had been allowed to leave the city, but Hanna had put her foot down at leaving the planet. And all because of the nature of who and what they were. Hanna was afraid that somehow, somewhere, their secret would get out. Hanna was always afraid.

Well, maybe it was okay for Hanna to live a life throttled by fear, but Asha refused to do so. One of these days she was going to find a way to get off this miserable planet and away from suffocating family secrets. She was going to explore the vast unknown of space and other planets. She didn’t know how exactly it would all come about, but every step she took was one step closer to the inevitable. She didn’t just come out to the Low City to go slumming and to get herself in trouble. She came out here to gamble. She was going to take her allowances and multiply them again and again until she was certain she had what she needed to get out from under her sister’s thumb. That was why she had needed to get out of the godforsaken country sooner than her sister had planned. She couldn’t earn as much money as quickly as she could here and couldn’t do it with as much anonymity and secrecy.

Hanna’s new lover was a stroke of pure luck and pure danger all wrapped up in one. On the one hand, Hanna was so pre-occupied with her new mate that she was barely paying any attention to Asha. Had he not been there, Hanna probably would have sent her back to the country long ago.

But Jhon was no one to trifle with either. Asha had realized that today when she had faced his full rage. He was far too smart for her own good and he meant what he said when he threatened to keep her in line. She had no doubt about it. So now she was here taking bigger risks to try to earn the jewels she needed to get out of there as soon as possible. She was working on borrowed time and she knew it.

That was why she was taking chances being surrounded by men in a dark corner of this seedy place, playing a card game with them for high stakes. There was always a chance she could lose, she supposed, but she had her keen bellcat senses in her favor. She could smell the ways their bodies told her what kinds of hands they had, when they were winners and when they were bluffing. Their adrenaline would spike, the smell of sweat would grow strong on them, or their excitement would be overpowering. Add that to the fact that she was a hell of a card-player, and she had the edge she needed to walk off a winner almost every time.

“I’ve got six cycles,” the man across from her said triumphantly as he laid out his cards for her to see. It was a damn good hand, she had to admit. But this time that good hand was not going to be good enough. Her luck had been running really high tonight and she had drawn a hand that would be almost unbelievable.

“Seven ropes beats that,” she said, tossing the cards out for him to see. She reached for the huge pot in the middle of the table, keeping an eye on the rage that was working its way through the loser’s body.

“That’s impossible,” he ground out. “No one has that kind of luck.”

“I was just as surprised as you are,” she drawled. “Besides, I didn’t deal. Your friend to the left did. Are you saying he’s a cheater, too?”

Her logic was hard to beat. The two men were, indeed, really good friends. It would take a two-person team to cheat at the game they were playing. Still, the man was not happy to see his jewels sliding away from him and into her significant pile. Asha knew right then that it was time for her to go. She was drawing too much attention to herself and she could see her friends were getting nervous.

“Well, that’s enough for me,” she said. She reached up a hand and snapped her fingers for the attention of one of the serving girls. The server came up to her quickly, knowing a good tip when she saw one.

“Yes, miss?”

“Bank these for me, will you, sweetie? And take two for yourself. I know exactly how much is there, so don’t try to cheat me,” she warned the girl as she dumped the pile of jewels on the girl’s tray. There was a banking machine behind the bar. It was standard equipment when it came to places like this. No one wanted to walk the dark streets of the Low City with jewels streaming out of their pockets. It was asking for trouble. Especially when there were pissed-off losers at your back. Asha dropped a single-use deposit card on top of the tray as well so they would go straight into her account. “Then I want you to bring these boys each a bottle of whatever they are drinking.” She looked at the men she had been playing. “Consider it a peace offering. I’ll be back in a day or two and you’ll have your chance to break even with me if you think you can.”

That seemed to mollify them a little and the tension began to ease away from the group. Asha stood up and shrugged into her jacket. She wore clothes made of lower-grade fabrics, clean and neat but not too rich looking. Nothing like what she wore at home. She didn’t want these people knowing who she was and where she came from. It just made for too many risks. Anyone who knew she was the highborn daughter of one of the most powerful houses in the High City wouldn’t hesitate to try to find a way to take advantage of it, and the last thing she wanted to do was draw attention to herself any more than she already did with her gambling skill.

Soon. She was almost there. Soon she would be out from under her sister’s thumb forever. She would finally be able to come and go as freely as the wind. No one’s rules but her own to be followed.

Asha left the bar with Gyro and Hex in tow. As usual, they barely waited until the door of the place shut behind them before they started to crow with laughter.

“Asha, I love how you do that! You fleece these lowborns as easily as you snap your fingers and then leave them wanting more of it!” Hex chuckled as they walked out onto the street.

“Hush up, Hex. Don’t gloat too loudly. You never show any sense,” she grumbled at him, shoving her hands in her pockets. “One day someone is going to hear you. Just like that last time. And I’m the one who ended up getting into trouble. I’d like to see how funny you would think it is if you got banished out of the cities. You’d just about die from boredom, believe me.”

“Yes, that was very bad of your sister to do that. I never understood why she reacted so strongly. It wasn’t as though you got hurt or lost the fight. My family would be mad if I got beat down, not if I managed to come out safe and alive and clearly on top,” Gyro said.

“The problem was that I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be, doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing. Hanna almost found out about everything that night. If you two want off this rock with me then you better keep it quiet. I need a team that’s going to help me, not hurt me. I have to do this my way or she’ll have me called back before we even make it out of dock. I just can’t do it. I can’t stay here anymore being the little sister of the most powerful woman on the damn planet. It makes me sick.”

“We know. We’ll keep it cool. Promise,” Gyro said, giving Hex a dirty look. “We want out of here just as much as you do. You know that.”

“I know. I just want—”

Asha was cut off with a loud grunt as big and powerful bodies came hurtling out of the darkness. She didn’t have breath to react as she was taken straight to the ground. Her head smacked into the hard pavement and she saw brilliant stars as pain blossomed across her head and face. Through the sparkling curtain of her daze she saw other men hitting her friends. Hex was thrown against a nearby building and with a muffled blast was shot right in the chest. Gyro was struck in rapid, fierce blows and it wasn’t until moonlight glinted off of it that she saw the knife that was stabbing into him. He dropped just as someone stabbed something into her.

She reacted instinctively, throwing the person off of her with a snarl. She rounded up onto her feet in a swift, lithe movement…

…and dropped right back down to her knees again as her head hazed over with numbing confusion. The bellcat inside of her screamed with a savage sound raging to come free of the Otherside, but the drug that had been injected into her trapped it inside of her and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. She struggled to remain upright, trying to see the faces of the men who were attacking her, trying to see if it was the men she had just left in the bar.

But why and how would they have a paralytic drug on them? It was much too sophisticated a method of incapacitation for the likes of those who had been at the bar.

That was when she finally saw a face she thought she recognized. Because of the drug, it took a full minute for her to put a name to the face, and by then she had rolled onto the ground on her back.

“Ah,” he said. “I see the light of recognition in your eyes.” Hyde Sozo bent over her with a half-cocked grin. “I bet you are just now beginning to think, with no little amount of fear, that you are finding yourself in a great deal of trouble. I bet you are lying there hoping that your bitch of a sister can get you out of this mess. In fact, that is what my friend and I are hoping as well.”

He didn’t need to mention the friend’s name. They both knew very well whom he meant.

And Asha was suddenly very afraid for her sister.

H
anna woke up to find herself wrapped in Jhon’s embrace. It made her smile to know he held on to her so tightly in his sleep. She reached to give his cheek a kiss, but stopped just before touching his face when she realized someone was standing over them.

Staring at them.

“Lukan, what are you doing?” she demanded in a heated whisper. She and Jhon were both naked beneath their covers and she was barely covered herself. Lukan was also just as naked.

“I was watching you sleep,” he said simply. “He is most possessive of you.”

“And I believe he is also not going to be happy to find his privacy invaded,” she warned him.

“Privacy?” Lukan tested the word out on his tongue, almost as if he were tasting it. “What is privacy?”

“It’s…well, people like to keep things to themselves. Not share it with others. Jhon is not going to be happy to find you here like this. And Lukan, you really have to wear clothes.”

“I don’t like them,” he said with a shrug. “They are tight and itchy. They are most confining.” Lukan stepped up onto the bed and, without so much as shaking the mattress, walked over to her side, lowering himself into a crouch until he was balanced with a single hand on the bedding and his knees spread wide. He took a moment to groom back the cowlick at the front of his hair. “You shift so easily between our worlds, Hanna. I do not see how. The freedom is appealing, but the food and smells are strange and confusing. The clothes are unnecessary. There seems to be a lot of work involved in maintaining oneself in this form. Even speech is peculiar. If I had not heard you speak to us so much over the years, I would not know how.”

“This is why we were so often tutored in the enclosure, so you would learn with us.” Hanna eased herself from Jhon’s embrace, but before she could sit up, Lukan turned around and lay down, resting his head and shoulders in her lap. He was so used to sleeping among a pile of big cats, she realized. She wondered if he’d been able to sleep at all.

“Sleep was difficult so I went downstairs and slept with the family,” he answered her unspoken question. “You should do that more often. The family misses you a great deal and you have neglected us too often.”

Hanna felt instantly guilty, knowing immediately that it was the truth. The older she had gotten the less she had treated them as family and the more she had treated them like big pets. Not that she felt differently for them, because she loved them just as any sibling would, but she would let herself get caught up in her life outside of the enclosure and spending time with them had earned a lower level of importance on her list of many things to manage. It had been wrong of her, and hearing Lukan state his discontent made her feel that extraordinarily so.

“Lukan, I have a mate now. I need to spend my time with him. Alone,” she added pointedly.

But the stressor in her voice was lost on him…or at least he pretended that it was. “We like your mate. You chose well. Now that he can travel to the Otherside you ought to have him spend more time with the family as well.”

“I will do that,” she assured him, reaching down to stroke her fingers through his hair, petting him until he smiled and began to purr low in his throat.

“Hanna, do you want to explain why your brother is in our bed? And without his clothes on?” Jhon asked, making her suddenly aware that he had woken up, most likely because of their discussion.

“Jhon, be patient,” she begged him softly. “He has been a cat all of his life. He doesn’t understand.”

Jhon seemed to take that in for a moment, and then he nodded. He sat up and peered at Lukan and his relaxed state in Hanna’s lap. The brother and sister made a matched set, both of them having strong and athletic bodies, the same even blue skin except in those darker cobalt areas of intimacy. They both had full dark lips and hair the exact same color. But Lukan’s rosette pattern down his spine was far more pronounced and more thickly populated. Jhon wondered if the difference was normal or if it was somehow indicative of the amount of time Lukan had spent in his catlike existence.

“You can’t let Lukan go out into the city until he’s had time to learn some of the basics,” he told her sagely. “The first and most important being the issue of clothing.”

“Why are you both so obsessed with all of that fabric? It is most uncomfortable.”

“It is also the social norm. If you want to fit in as a normal humanoid, you are going to have to get used to it.” Jhon wasn’t being harsh when he said it, merely matter of fact.

“I know.” He sighed and nudged his sister’s hand, which had gone absently still, reminding her to pet him. “We often talk about how we long to be able to leave the Otherside, but I don’t think the family realizes just how difficult this is. I am going to have to tell them. Perhaps it will help them to be more content.” He paused and looked up at Hanna. “They see you come and go and I think what they want most is freedom. It can be boring to be stuck in the enclosure all of the time.” He yawned and his thick lashes began to drift closed.

“You look very tired, Lukan. Why don’t you go downstairs and sleep with the family?”

He immediately perked up, liking the idea. He got up off the bed, his big body unfolding into long, lithe limbs much like his sister’s. At the edge of the bed he paused a moment, then looked back at Jhon.

“May I ask you a question?”

Jhon was leery, but said, “Of course.”

“Do you not find it inconvenient to have your sexual organs hanging out in so vulnerable a place?” Lukan picked up his penis between two fingers and held it in askance, turning it to and fro to view it from all sides.

“Uh…yes, sometimes it is very inconvenient,” Jhon said as seriously as he could manage when Hanna was biting her lip in an attempt at not giggling. “However, it is also very convenient when it comes to mating.”

“I see.” Lukan thought about it for a moment.

“Sex was very different for me before I was changed,” Jhon said candidly. “It was still pleasurable and intense,” he said, “but normal humanoids don’t have that sense of smell that your family does. Nor do they give off that distinctly powerful aroma of arousal.”

Clearly Jhon was thinking of the last time he had experienced all of those things with Hanna because his tone roughened up and his eyes went dark when he turned them to her.

“I would not know. I have never mated. This, perhaps, is one of the other reasons why we wish to come out from the Otherside. We are all lonely adults with only our brothers and sisters nearby and available to us, and that, of course, is not an acceptable outlet. Because of the level of inbreeding we must even refrain from our cousins.”

“Well, Lukan,” Jhon said with a grin spreading across his features. “I can tell you right now that clothing is going to seem well worth its weight in discomfort as soon as you manage to get a girl to take hers off.”

“Jhon!” Hanna gasped with a laugh.

“Well, it’s the truth,” he said unrepentantly, chuckling as he dodged her swipe at his head.

“I look forward to that, then,” Lukan said eagerly. “Thank you, Jhon.”

“You’re both terrible.” Hanna said, throwing off her covers and getting out of bed. She grabbed her gown up from off the floor where it had ended up at some point last night while Jhon was making love to her. Dropping it over her head with a wriggle to get it into place, she heard the sound of the front door chime being sounded. “Hmm. It’s a bit early for visitors. Boys, I am going to bathe and get ready for my session in the COM. Behave yourselves.”

Some time later, Jhon and Hanna emerged from their bedroom. Lukan had still been quite tired, so he had gone down to the enclosure to take a nap with the family. Jhon saw Najir at the foot of the stairs as he held Hanna’s hand and guided her down. It was their usual routine for them to all go to the COM together. But just as they reached the landing, Najir held out a folded white note card with a blue ribbon wound around it.

“This arrived for you a little while ago. There’s no House seal on it and no outside marking as to who sent it. The messenger was most unforthcoming. I am sorry I could not make him tell me who sent it. I don’t think he really knew.”

“Perhaps the answer lies within the message,” Hanna mused, pulling at the ribbon and flipping open the card. If a blue-skinned beauty could go pale, that was exactly what Hanna looked like she was doing. All but the lightest of color drained out of her face, her lips even draining to a fair lavender color.

“Hanna, what is it?” Jhon demanded.

Clearly she couldn’t speak, so she just handed over the note with trembling fingers, her hand shaking so hard she nearly dropped it to the floor. Jhon snatched it up and read the lines within.

“It’s him. It’s Majum,” Hanna whispered hoarsely. She reached out to steady herself against Jhon’s arm. “He has Ashanna. Oh…” She clutched her stomach as if she were going to be sick, and indeed she looked deathly ill. And deathly afraid. “How long?” she wondered. “How long has that sick bastard had hold of her?”

“She went out late last night. After you had already retired, my Lady,” Najir said gently. “The message came in the breaking of dawn. He hasn’t wasted time to play with her. He’s not interested in her.”

“It’s you he wants. You and me,” Jhon pointed out.

“Then let’s give him what he wants,” she said with sudden ferocity, her fist coming up to scrub furiously at the tears skimming down her cheeks. “Let’s give him so much of us he will choke on it!”

“That’s my girl,” Jhon said with fierce pride as he drew her in for the tightest embrace he dared. He meant it as a show of strength and support, and she took it as such. By the time he had stepped back away from her the color had returned to her face and was rising high in her cheeks.

“We cannot go after him in a full frontal assault and he will be expecting us to try and sneak in. What should we do? Why can we not go to the COM with this proof?” Najir asked.

“What proof? The note isn’t signed and there is nothing to say it is from Majum.”

“The accusation could be enough to get city guards to search his holdings,” Najir said.

“She’d be dead and disappeared long before they got to where he’s keeping her,” Hanna said. She frowned. “There’s only one way to do this. I have to go in alone.”

“What? No!” Jhon barked. “I won’t let you face him alone!”

“I have no intention of facing him alone. I don’t have a death wish. What I also do not have is any idea as to where they are holding Ashanna. Majum not only has his main residence but he has a country residence. He could also have many more that I don’t even know of. Perhaps somewhere secret where he carries out all his perverse little games. What I do have is two fine warriors on my side, and one of them can track my scent with all ease and be able to find me relatively quickly.”

“So you mean to go ahead of us, let him lead you to Ashanna and then have us follow and surprise him. But what if he doesn’t bring you to Asha? What if he is lying to you? You know you cannot trust him.”

“I know. But I can trust my knowledge of him. Majum thrives on the pain and anguish of others. He knows he will get no reaction out of me by having me alone. The best way to hurt me is by hurting my family…and doing so right before my eyes is the only way to make it effective enough for him. He will bring me to her because I will see to it he has no choice. Then, once we are in the same room together, you can come and find me, you and Najir…and I think one other person.”

“Who else?”

“Lukan. With all of us trapped in a room with him, Majum will have nowhere to go. He will be very surprised to find himself host to four spitting-mad bellcats.”

“I don’t like it,” Jhon said, his anxiety clearly written on his features. “It leaves you alone with him and vulnerable to him for much too long.”

Hanna turned to rest comforting hands over his chest. She leaned in to give him a small kiss on his chin. “We don’t have any other choice. I know that you see that. You are a tactician, Jhon. If you can see some way of doing this that I am not thinking of, some way that will spare my sister pain and humiliation, please let me know what it is. Believe me when I tell you I loathe the idea of letting him have the opportunity to put so much as a finger on me, but I will do anything to rescue Asha and see that she is safe. Please. Tell me how else I am supposed to do that. And tell me quickly, because every minute we waste is a minute more she is in his power.”

Jhon tried to think, wanting so badly to come up with another plan, but he could hardly see straight because of the fear he felt as he looked down into her frank and expectant gaze. The idea of that monster having her in his power was too much for him to bear. He knew men like Majum all too well. He wouldn’t be alone, would use his borrowed power to make certain no one could get close to his captive. He would be expecting something like what they were planning.

“Can’t we at least do some recon at his home here in the High City and see if we can scent any traces of Asha?” he asked. But he already knew what her answer was going to be.

“It’s probably been much too long for us to find and trace a trail of her. And I can’t take the chance, the risk of us skulking around his property and possibly being caught. You know he is going to have his guard on high alert, and his security system is every bit as complex as mine. The only way we are going to be able to defeat it is that it’s set up to keep people out, not cats. Even so, there’s no guarantee you won’t be shot or somehow wounded.” Her hands clutched tightly around his biceps. “I should be more worried for you than you for me. I can keep him off of us long enough for you to get to us, but there’s no telling what you and Lukan are going to run into as you clear the way for Najir.”