Page 19 of Red Scale Daddy
No one speaks immediately. From the main room, glass clinks, someone laughs too loudly, and the music grinds into a new verse about betrayal and black-market saints. The ordinary ugliness of the bar flows around us as if I have not just placed the last living piece of my father on a sticky table between strangers.
Dux releases the chair.
“You’re still wrong about one thing,” he says.
I brace myself, already tired of him.
“What?”
“You don’t need bravery,” he says. “You need someone who knows what to do when bravery gets its throat cut.”
I study him: the scarred red scales, the golden eyes, the easy violence held barely behind his skin. He is not offering comfort. He is not offering belief. He is not even offering help, not exactly.
He is offering chaos and calling it expertise.
My mind begins building a column of liabilities. Impulsive. Combative. Publicly indiscreet. Poor respect for command structure. Probable trauma history. High physical utility. Strong situational awareness. Effective intimidation factor. Unclear motives. Dangerous ego. Worse, dangerous insight.
The final assessment arrives cold and clear.
Dux is a liability.
Unfortunately, liabilities are not always useless.
CHAPTER 4
DUX
Roma Larson leaves the alcove like she intends to walk straight through the room, the station, and any inconvenient celestial body foolish enough to drift into her path.
I let her get three steps.
Not because I am polite. Politeness and I parted ways years ago over a misunderstanding involving a fleet commander, three broken ribs, and a chair I maintain was asking for it. I let her get three steps because I want to watch how the room reacts to her now that it knows her name, her money, and just enough of her grief to start sharpening knives around it.
The bar has changed flavors. Before, it smelled like cheap liquor, hot metal, wet scales, old frying oil, and the everyday desperation of travelers who come to places like mine because respectable doors have locks. Now there is something else underneath it. Calculation. Not a smell, exactly, but I have lived long enough around predators to know when appetites change direction. Voices stay loose, but eyes track her coat. Hands linger near belts. A few patrons pretend not to look at the compad hidden inside her jacket and do such a bad job of it they ought to charge themselves embarrassment tax.
Loklo notices too. His mouth stays crooked, but his shoulders lose some of their lazy slant.
“She lit the room on fire,” he murmurs beside me. “And not in the fun way where we can bill people for damages.”
“You think there’s a fun way?”
“Yes. The version where no one bleeds on the upholstery.”
“We do not have upholstery.”
“That is because people keep bleeding on it.”
Roma reaches the edge of the bar and pauses to adjust the torn collar of her hood. She does not look back at me. That should be satisfying. A woman like that refusing to look back is usually an invitation to go be irritating where she can see me.
I accept.
I cross the floor after her, slow enough not to spook the room and fast enough that anyone considering a sudden grab remembers I am still in a working relationship with violence. The music overhead grinds through another verse, bass thudding in the floor under my boots. Somewhere near the card table, the Pi’Rell with the painted eyelids whispers something to his companion and folds a hand he could probably have won. Smart. The immortal types know when the air has teeth.
Roma reaches for the compad inside her coat.
“Not leaving already, are you?” I ask.
Her hand stills. Then she turns, and the look she gives me could sterilize medical equipment.
