“Yeah.”
He held her gaze. “That’s the number before sponsorships.”
“What’s the number with sponsorships?”
He told her that, too. It was an obscene number, he knew that. But he was the best at what he did.
She breathed out slowly and set her hands flat on the armrests of her chair.
“So the bet money,” she said. “That was real?”
“That was real.”
“You weren’t bluffing.”
“I don’t bluff about money. I bluff about everything else, but I don’t bluff about money.” He turned his head and gave her a lazy grin. “If this works, Cait, that bet money is less than a rounding error on my accounts.”
The numbers kept circling in her head like debris caught in a gravity well.
She’d known he was famous. Fred had pulled his stats, his accolades, the whole glittering trajectory of his career before it crashed. But knowing someone was a celebrity and understanding what that meant in actual, spendable credits were entirely different things.
The number he’d quoted her was more than her father’s firm made in a decade. Definitely more than the H4-RPY was worth, for sure.
And he’d been sent to a prison planet, forced into exile. Desperate enough to knock out a storage guard and stuff his jacket with scavenged parts on a prison planet. A man who’d probably never had to steal anything in his life.
If the diagnosis was fake.
If they could prove it.
If they didn’t get caught breaking into the most secure medical facility in three sectors.
That was a lot of ifs.
She stared at the star field through the viewport. Fred had the ship on autopilot, running calculations she didn’t need to supervise. There was nothing to do but wait.
Normally, she would hole up in her quarters and read a book or sleep, wrapped in a comfortable blanket with hours between her and anything she needed to do. But she couldn’t sleep, and when she’d tried to read, she’d ended up reading the same page four times before giving up.
The cockpit door hissed open behind her, and she didn’t turn around. She knew who it was. There were only two other people on the ship, and Fred didn’t have feet.
Raaze settled into the co-pilot’s chair without asking. The leather creaked under his weight. She could see him in her peripheral vision… a dark shape, too large for the space, radiating heat like a reactor core.
“Can’t sleep either?” she asked.
“Nope.”
The silence stretched. But it wasn’t the wary silence they’d had between them when he’d first come aboard… the kind that set her teeth on edge, making her jumpy. This was different. Companionable, almost.
And that was way more dangerous.
“Tell me about warball.” She turned to him, the question surprising her. “Not the fame part. The actual game.”
He turned his head to look at her. In the dim light of the cockpit, his eyes caught the glow from the console displays—red and orange, almost luminous.
“Why?”
“Because I can’t sleep and you can’t sleep and we’ve got hours until we reach the station.” She shrugged. “And because you love it. I can tell from when you were coaching those men on the pitch.”
Something shifted in his expression. The lazy arrogance that he wore like armor cracked, just a little, and he smiled. It turned him from merely handsome to absolutely devastating.
