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Oh. That was several months ago. “I left you some credits!”
“Not enough!”
“You weren’t using it! You never leave the station!”
“It was promised to another client, you keffing nightmare. Do you have air between those horns of yours? He showed up on my doorstep, furious, and Sophie was scared to death that he’d try something —”
“Softie’s scared of everything,” I say casually, waving a hand in the air as I interrupt. “That should be normal.”
He lets out a sound of animalistic rage and smashes a fist down on the comm controls, terminating the call again.
Whoops. Okay, so Jerrok is a teeny bit sensitive over me stealing a crappy ship. “If it makes you feel any better, I lost it in a sticks game,” I mutter to no one at all. Sophie getting upset over things is a problem, though. My cousin is the most hard-nosed, uncaring keffing bastard in the universe unless his beloved Sophie is involved. Then he turns into an absolute, well, lovesick fool.
I need to play the Sophie angle. My cousin would forgive me eventually, of course. If I show up with enough credits to pay him back and a few more apologies, he’ll eventually ease off. I did give Sophie that kitten she loves, after all. But I need the credits we have for Jamef’s repairs, and I’m already strained to the breaking point.
So I comm again. Part of me expects Jerrok to not pick up. That he’s going to make me sit out here with the nose of the Pleasure Spot pressed to the cargo bay doors until Sophie realizes I’m out here and makes him let me in. But that could take hours. Days. Jerrok doesn’t pick up right away, so I send another comm. And another.
He finally answers, still grumpy as kef. “What, Bethiah?”
I put my hands in the air. “I know you’re mad at me and I probably deserve it,” I say in a rush, words flooding out of me. “And I don’t have the credits to pay you back right now, but my cyborg mate is on the fritz and my other mate is a human female and she won’t stop crying and I want to cry too, except I’ve got a human refugee on my ship and another one in the holding cell—but she’s a nasty piece of work and should probably not be let out—and I can’t go to any stations because there’s a bounty on my head and I really didn’t think this through but here I am and I need help and I might be having a breakdown of my own. So…help?”
Jerrok stares at me through the vid screen. Then he sighs heavily and hits a button.
This time, the cargo bay doors open.
“Sophie’s gonna want to meet your mates,” is all he says, but I know I’m forgiven. In his own way, Jerrok can be as soft as his human mate.
Thank kef.
One Hundred Twenty-Two
DORA
When Bethiah said her cousin handled junk for a living, I didn’t realize we were going to be living on an actual junk station. But there’s so much crap floating in space around the station and tethered to the station itself that it’s incredible. Every other space station I’ve seen looks elegant, smooth, and organized to a certain extent. This place looks like someone plopped a station down in the midst of a trash heap. And because we’re in space and there’s no gravity, it looks like the trash heap exploded and everything’s hanging in midair around it.
We dock in a massive cargo bay, and I pull my nose away from the window in med-bay, glancing over at Jamef. He’s still asleep and hasn’t stirred in days. Bethiah says he won’t until we induce consciousness, but I’ve been lingering at his side anyhow. It feels like one of us should be with him at all times, especially with Rhonda and Simone on board. Simone seems nice and sweet, but she keeps to herself. And Rhonda? Well, I don’t trust Rhonda not to fill Simone’s head with all kinds of nonsense and turn her against us. If Jamef wasn’t in a coma, I’d be at Simone’s side constantly to contradict anything Rhonda might say. But he comes first and I’m not leaving his side.
The ship gives a little jolt as we land, and then the engines shiver as the propulsion systems are turned off. I peer out the window again, and I see a man that—from a distance—looks painfully like our Jamef with the amount of prosthetics he has. Bethiah never said her cousin was a cyborg. Count on her to omit pertinent information. He watches with arms crossed over his chest as the ramp lowers, and then disappears from sight from my window.
A moment later, there’s a knock at the door.
Bethiah pokes her head in, glancing at me. “I’m going to go say hello to my cousin. You want to come say hi? I’m sure he’d like to meet one of my mates.”
