Bo leaned back in his chair. “Where is this mystical safety, River Sandler? Do tell. Why haven’t you brought us there before now?”
A low throb formed between my eyes. They’d saved me, and although I couldn’t remember it, I’d always be grateful. Now I was going to be a huge burden. “I could earn my keep. I don’t need much. I cook, not as well as you did, Bo, but well enough. I clean. I can manage gold. I can fix just about anything. If I don’t know how, I can learn. I’ll stay out of your way.”
Jordan shook his head. “That’s not how this’ll work. You’ll stay. The rest of it will figure itself out.”
“Why do you suppose that will happen?” River shouted at him. “When does anything work itself out?”
“She’s our wife.” Jordan raised his dark eyebrows.
River stood. “In name only. We married her to save her. Not to have a wife.”
“Well”—Jordan tilted his head to the side—“maybe it’s the wind spirits bringing us to our destiny.”
Bo rose and started clearing the table. I wasn’t quite done, but I wasn’t going to tell him that either. He took the plates and, without a word, stomped off into the kitchen.
“I’m not going to get into the wind spirit thing. I’ve always told you if you want to believe in the spirits from your homeland messing with your destiny you can go ahead and have at it. But in Sandler space, we don’t have destinies; we just have pain. We’re pirates. It’s no place for a woman.”
His chair fell backward as he stood and stormed toward me. I swallowed. What was going to happen? Was he going to yell? Hurt me? Put me out the airlock? Instead, River extended his hand. “Come on, Priscilla. I’ll show you to your room.”
I took his offered hand and let him lead me from the kitchen. He opened the door like I needed him to do it for me, waited till I walked through, then exited without saying a word. I stood, stunned. What had just happened? I was on this strange ship with three men yelling at each other about whether or not they should keep me.
I straightened my shoulders. I would survive this. I would figure out what to do, somehow. Things could only get better. Okay.
The room River left me in was small but clean. A bed that looked more like a cot stood in the corner, made up with a green blanket and what looked like black sheets poking out slightly from underneath. A closet was open with empty hangers swinging slightly from the breeze in the room. I didn’t know much about ships. Was that supposed to happen? Did they have some kind of environmental system? The temperature on the slaver’s vessel had been stifling. There was a table next to the bed with a small light sitting in the center.
I’d never had a room to myself before, and even though I might not have it very long, I was going to appreciate every second of it.
A knock sounded followed by a beep. I walked to the door, opening it to find Jordan on the other side. He smiled at me. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
I stepped out of the way so he could come in. Jordan wanted to keep me as his wife. What would that mean? “I think so.”
He looked around the space. “I haven’t been in here in forever. River set this up for you. I can see his housekeeping skills have not improved in the last twenty years.”
“Oh, it’s more than fine. Thank you.”
He nodded. “You have the softest voice, Priscilla. Do you ever raise it?”
“I’ve never seen a situation that improved by me losing my temper.”
Jordan laughed. It was a hard, sudden sound, and it made me grin. “That’s true. But sometimes it makes us feel better just the same, right? Anyway, that whole scene must not have been comfortable for you. You see, those two men are like my brothers. We came together in a dangerous time and have been watching each other’s backs ever since. We have different backgrounds.”
That much had been obvious. “The winds of your homeland.”
“Right.” He crossed in front of the closet. “I’m from a small planet on the edge of the Dark Planets. It borders Sandler Space. It’s called Beta Delta One. But we call it Bertram. The winds are so loud they blow and blow. Even the local populations can’t really tune out the sound. Sometimes we can hear voices in the winds, and we think of them as spirits of our ancestors helping to shape our destiny. My other two brothers out there don’t have such beliefs.”
“We don’t have them at home, either. At least not in my family. Father shaped our destiny. That was pretty much it.” I tried to picture his life and couldn’t. “What do you do on Bertram? What do your people do to survive? Where I’m from, it’s mostly farming and they have oil that the barons sell to the corporations.”
“I see. One of the oil planets. Yes, I know them well. On Bertram, the winds blow and blow, and in the brief times that they don’t, we all find these.” He pulled a crystal out of his pocket. It was white and purple, every few inches changing in color. I gasped. I’d never seen anything sparkle in quite the same way. “Have you ever seen one?”
“No.” I wanted to put my hands in my pockets to keep from reaching out to touch the beautiful crystal. “It’s lovely.”
Jordan took my hand and opened it. Without a word, he placed the crystal on my palm and closed my fingers. “It’s called vestibulum. All the richest women in the universe wear it around their necks or on their hands. Very rare. Very hard to get. More of our people die finding it—thanks to the winds and the animals or the sand storms and feuding war lords—which makes it even more expensive to have. It can also power a ship for brief periods of time if the fuel cells die. But its main use is jewelry.”
It was hard in my hand, sharp. I imagined it would have to be shaped and smoothed before anyone could wear it. I opened my fingers to hand it back to him. “Thank you for showing me.”
“That’s yours.” He backed up slightly. “For you. From me. I always said I’d give it to my wife.”
“But I thought…”
He shook his head, interrupting me. “Sometimes the winds lead us where we’re supposed to be. I’m going to choose to believe. Welcome to Malice, Priscilla. All of this is going to work out.”
I was stunned by his kindness, my feet practically glued to the ground. He thought we were meant to be? And he was giving me the beautiful purple crystal? And he was so sweet I could barely stand it. I cleared my throat. I hadn’t asked the first time I heard the name because it hadn’t seemed the time. Now, I did. “Malice?”
“That’s the name of this ship. Every smart man and woman in the quadrant fears us.” He winked. “You never will. Get some sleep.”
I wasn’t sure if I would ever sleep again. How could so much have happened in so little time?
2
Three Weeks To Decide
The next morning, I woke feeling more rested than I had in, well, ever.
I didn’t know what time it was or how long I’d rested. The crystal Jordan had given me was on the table next to the bed. It shone slightly, one edge of it seeming to glow then the other. I’d never been around wealthy women, so I’d never seen it used as jewelry. I almost thought it a shame that they got smoothed and shaped at all. Maybe it was better to leave these things as they were when we found them.
But what did I know?
I got out of bed. With no clothes except the ones I’d been in for the auction, I was bound to get pretty smelly in no short amount of time. If I couldn’t find the washer, I’d have to ask someone where to clean my clothes. My attire was awful. Short black skirt, red V-neck sweater that showed off just how round I was everywhere… They’d been picked out by the slavers to make me more attractive to whomever wanted to buy me. The black high-heeled boots completed the look. Everything about my outfit was detestable. I was a simple girl who liked to be outside, not dolled up to attract sexual attention. A solid, steady shoed kind of a person. I’d taken the shoes off when I’d gone to bed, but now I had to put them back on. It wouldn’t do to wander around this ship barefoot.
Sliding the crystal in the pocket of my skirt,
I stepped into the corridor. As much as I was certain I couldn’t keep it, no one had really ever given me anything before. Everything seemed quiet, but farther along the corridor I could hear music.
I followed the sound. The closer I drew, the more overpoweringly loud the beat of the rhythm became. Rounding the corner with my hands over my ears, I nearly collided with Bo. We banged into each other, and I almost went down, but he caught me in his strong arms.
“You okay?” He laughed. “I’m like a wall unto myself. Knock into me, and you’re going down.”
His wording sounded so strange, so foreign, and not at all how anyone on my planet spoke. It was kind of… adorable. Why had I thought he was so scary? “I guess I’m used to being the wall. I’m not small. Usually when people bump into me, they go down.”
He shrugged. “You’re small compared to me. Did you sleep okay?”
“Very well, actually. Surprisingly so.”
“Did you eat?”
I hadn’t yet, but I wasn’t hungry. Food in the morning was not always my best friend. “I’m okay. Actually, I was hoping to find a place I could wash these clothes. Or some soap to do it with in my bathroom.”
His gaze traveled the length of my body as though he was checking out what I wore. It must have been a sight.
Still, as his gaze took me in a heat started in the tips of my toes and traveled up my body, settling in my cheeks. Given my pale complexion, they probably turned bright red. The heat didn’t dissipate then either, but seemed to find a home in my core. My breath quickened and my heart rate sped up. I was…turned on by his perusal.
It was impossible to grow up on a farm and not know the way it worked between men and women from a very young age. My parents constantly rutted, which was why I had so many sisters.
I’d never felt the urge, myself. My mother had sat my sister and me down the night before the slavers came and given us a talk about it. Truth was, I’d been half paying attention, wondering if it was possible to run for my life and determining that it wasn’t. Still, she’d hoped we’d find our husband situation a pleasurable one. She’d been matched to my father without meeting him and had always found him attractive.
I had hoped for kind, not sexy.
Yet… Bo looking at me had turned me on, something I hadn’t expected to happen. I wouldn’t mind, not even a little bit, if he kissed me.
“We have clothes that will fit you. Come on. The last ship we took over had a shipment of it. I don’t move clothing in the Dark Planet section. We go closer to Earth borders for that. The women in that sector can actually afford clothes they don’t make for themselves. I’ll give you a bunch of stuff.”
I blinked rapidly. Oh no, I’d been standing there, blushing, and feeling… things. He’d obviously not been as affected. Squaring my shoulders, I looked for something to say, but my brain didn’t seem to want to work. Okay. So, these things happened, maybe.
Following Bo, who had a very tight rear end displayed nicely in his gray pants, to a storage area gave me a chance to regroup. I stared all around me, having to turn in a complete circle to adequately see the room. The rest of the ship might be out of sorts but there was nothing disorganized about where they stored their goods.
Shelves lined the walls, and everything appeared to have its place. There were labels on the shelves and even what seemed to be color-coding. “Do you upkeep this room?”
“I designed the system. Makes it easier for the machines to get the stuff on and off when we take a ship and when we dock. Simpler than tripping over chaos. Twenty years ago? Yeah, sure. We were a mess. Two decades of doing this, and it’s clear what works and what doesn’t.” He walked forward to the shelf labeled clothes. “Have a look.”
I followed him over. Clear boxes filled with clothing covered the shelf, more than I’d ever seen. “Women are to the left,” Bo explained. “So from this part on. I don’t have them organized by size. We’ll have to dig through.”
An unexpected sadness draped me. “And these belonged to other people? And you took them?”
He side-eyed me. “On your world, the way you were raised, there’s good and bad right? One does not steal, one does not murder?”
I nodded. There were some basic dos and don’ts I believed people should abide by. Stealing was a big no-no.
“No one sets out to be a thief, but I’d be careful to take too many morality and ethics lessons from your family. They sold you to slavers who would have let a man sell you off to his friends over and over until you died from the pain of it or from some kind of infection.” He pointed at the clothes. “Pirating has always been a way of life in the Dark Planets zone. I don’t steal from the poor. This was clothing women on a planet were selling, had already sold in fact, to a corporation. We just took it from the corporation.”
His words slammed into me. I sucked in a breath even as I began to calculate what happened. I’d upset him. My question had apparently brought to the surface some things that probably bothered him. He’d struck back. And he was right. My family had sold me off like they did every few years with our livestock.
Even understanding what happened, I burst into tears. I covered my face with one hand to hide the evidence of my reaction and used my other hand to grab one of the boxes that looked like it had shirts in it.
Crying didn’t mean I suddenly became incoherent or incapable. I had worked hard, accomplished many tasks, around the farm in abject hysterics. My tears were almost a secondary response to pain for me. I couldn’t shut them off until they finished, and I’d never mastered not crying at all.
Bo swore. “Oh, fuck. I mean, I’m sorry. I should not have said that.”
I shook my head, kneeling over the box. “Yes, you should. I was out of line. You’re clothing me, and I got judgmental? No, I am not in a position to lay morals or ethics or even thought on anything you do, Bo. Forgive me.”
I started going through the box. Some of the shirts would be way too small. I had a big bust and…
Bo tugged me into his arms, effectively cutting off my thoughts. “Please stop crying. I’m sorry. It’s been such a long time since I had a real conversation with anyone but River and Jordan. They’re used to me blustering. That’s all it is. You had every right to question, and I should have bit my tongue. It’s my issue, not yours.”
I sniffed. “I’m sorry I cried. I can’t seem to control it.”
Bo smelled like cherries. I loved the taste of them, and it had been a long time since I’d had any. He held the back of my head, keeping me close to his shoulder. I breathed him in. “Well, it’s good to cry. Healthy, even. Particularly when some asshole is yelling at you after you’ve had a huge trauma. That’s too much for one person to handle.”
I laughed and pulled back. “Can we start over? Thanks for the clothes.”
“You’re welcome.” He ran his thumbs below my eyes, wiping away the remnants of my tears. “Sorry I made you cry.”
I sniffed. “I cry a lot.”
“Well, that won’t be because of me.”
I left the storage room with a new wardrobe. As I’d gone through it, I’d ended up sorting a lot of it for Bo then walked away with a box of clothes that fit me. At no time in my life had I actually had so many things to wear before. Somehow, I wouldn’t focus too much about where they’d come from. As Bo had pointed out, I didn’t really understand the ins and outs of this. If the people who made them had been paid, I wasn’t going to obsess.
Who knew what was right and wrong anymore? My parents had sold me, and it wasn’t that strange a practice where I came from.
I set my things on the bed, expecting to hang them up or fold them when a knock sounded. After I swung my legs over the bed, I opened the door to find River standing there. He smiled before he looked past me. “Oh, good. Someone got you some clothes. I was going to suggest it. Did you eat?”
“I don’t in the morning.”
“Boo,” he said, shaking his head. “Hiss. You need food in the morning. Never mind
, I’m not in charge of you. Can we talk? The four of us have to sit down and have a conversation.”
I nodded, glad my tears had long dried. Was River the sort of person it was okay to cry in front of? I couldn’t tell. Not everyone would react as nicely as Bo.
“Sure.”
River was friendlier this morning than he’d been the night before. I’d thought him grumpy and loud—even with his blue-eyed gaze that seemed as though it could melt ice—and now he seemed sort of funny and easy going.
“Should I just come with you?”
He grinned. “Sounds good. Did you sleep okay?”
“I did. Very well.”
River looked down at his feet as he walked, and I wished he wouldn’t. I liked getting a glance at his blue eyes every time he spoke. “That’s good. Has someone showed you around the whole ship yet?”
“I followed Bo to the storage room from down the hall. He was listening to music. I’m not sure what he was doing when I interrupted him. Other than that, I haven’t seen the ship.”
He raised his head slightly. “We’ll fix that. And if Bo was listening to music, he was doing maintenance.”
We came into a small conference room. There were five chairs and a small, broken down table that leaned slightly to the left. Two of the chairs had peeling wood on the side. They must not come in here a lot, or they didn’t care that the place was falling down around them.
Bo and Jordan came through the door right after us, and each took a seat around the broken furniture. Jordan sat in one of the peeling chairs.
I loved furniture and had made some when there was time for such a thing, usually when my father took a nap during the spring and summer months. The humidity in the air always made him knock out for a few hours in the afternoon.