She stared at the image. At the grin and the way he stood, like the whole universe was watching. It was clear to see he was lapping it up, loving every minute of the adoration of however many hundreds of thousands of sports fans there.
Statistics: eight championship titles. Four hundred and twelve career goals. Named Most Valuable Player six times. Fred’s voice had gone flat in the way it did when he was processing faster than he could speak. He was famous, Cait. Like really famous. His face was on billboards all over the Latharian Empire.
The image shifted. There were more photos and videos. Raaze on talk shows and signing autographs. Raaze surrounded by women of half a dozen species, all of them leaning into him like flowers toward the sun. He looked… happy. Arrogant as hell, sure, but happy underneath it. Like he’d found exactly where he belonged and never planned to leave.
“What happened?”
The records drop off about six weeks ago. There is a brief mention of a medical assessment, then nothing. His name was scrubbed from active rosters. His sponsorship deals were terminated. And then?—
“Parac’Norr.”
Yes.
She looked back at the camera feed. Raaze had stopped moving. He stood in the center of the cleared space with his chest heaving, and his head down, hands braced on his knees. He looked absolutely exhausted.
Straightening up, he scrubbed a hand over his face. Then he turned and sat down on one of the crates, elbows on his knees. The swagger and charm were all gone, his expression empty as he stared at the opposite wall.
She rubbed her hand over the centre of her chest.
Cait.
She didn’t answer.
I made an error in my initial assessment.
“Yeah, I think we both did.”
Fred went quiet. It was a particular quiet—the one where he cut himself off from the feed entirely, retreating into whatever passed for embarrassment in his code. He did it when he’d been wrong about something, and he hated being wrong almost as much as he hated being told he was wrong.
She didn’t push. There wasn’t anything she could say.
On screen, Raaze lifted his head and looked at the far wall. Not at the camera—he didn’t know it was there—but past it, at something she couldn’t see. His face was slack, unguarded, and there was a bleakness in his red eyes that hit her somewhere under her ribs.
He wasn’t a soldier with a rage disorder at all.
Instead, he was an athlete… a man who had lost everything.
She reached for the console. Her finger hovered over the kill switch.
You could keep watching, some small, treacherous part of her brain suggested. He doesn’t know. He won’t know.
But she’d seen something she wasn’t meant to see. Something private that had cracked open all her neat assumptions. He’d walked onto her ship with a con and a smile and nothing else, and she’d slotted him into the box marked dangerous and untrustworthy and exactly like every other man who’d ever used her.
Maybe he was still dangerous, and no doubt she couldn’t trust him, but he wasn’t what she’d thought.
Not at all.
8
Chapter 7
On screen, Raaze pushed off the crate.
She should close the feed. She knew that. Fred was still sulking in whatever digital corner AI units retreated to when they’d been proven wrong, and she was alone with a camera feed she had absolutely no business watching.
Raaze rolled his shoulders as he walked. Loose, easy, like he hadn’t just been sitting there with that bleakness carved into his face. The swagger was coming back, piece by piece, and she watched him rebuild the mask in real time.
Then he changed direction and headed toward the decontamination shower. Her eyes widened.
