Page 34 of Smuggler's Beauty

“Well,” he said as he clapped his hands together. “That went well.”

She snorted into the cold desert air.

Fucking peachy.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Aiden wantedto slip out to the patio to sit next to Evelyn. He wanted to distract her from her pain, coax out one of her breathtaking smiles and enjoy the night sky together. But he knew better than to intrude on her privacy when she’d just found out her agency had, once again, been ripped away from her.

Besides, answers lay inside this living room.

“I get why you wanted the princess off ice,” Veselko said, pretending to remove dirt from under his nails with the tip of his knife. He never had dirty fingernails. “And to an extent I get why you hired us. But there have to be better-equipped teams out there.”

“I don’t get it,” Nannette said. “You know where there are other blood relations. Presumably, they were easier to get to if you have an existing network on the ground.”

“Two reasons,” Corvinia said, raising fingers in the air as she ticked off her points. “One — everyone on the ground has completely compromised their credibility. If I want the public to get pissed enough to rise up and support a change in power, the person in the seat can’t be one who’s been participating as Emil’s willing puppet. Two — we get enough eyes on the reality of howbadly Emil has violated the terms of the treaty he signed with Evelyn, the GPC will have to get off their asses and intervene.”

Aiden snorted at this. He had never seen the GPC do a damn thing to help in any ongoing planetary conflict that didn’t involve strongly worded letters and a new shipment of medical equipment to stave off criticism.

Vinnie turned back to Veselko “I agree, there are more. . . efficient crews. I could have hired the Witch. The Twins.” Aiden wasn’t sure the woman picked up the nearly imperceptible twitch of Veselko’s eye at the name, but she had to see him automatically shift to rub his shoulder. “They’re pricier, but they get results.”

“At the cost of whomever they have to kill or crush on the way,” Lillian said. “Ruthless efficiency tends to be just that.”

“Your crew understands subtlety,” Corvinia said with a nod, before she took another sip from her mug.

“Subtlety can’t be the only reason you picked us,” Aiden said. He had the distinct impression that Corvinia was debating how much of her plan to unveil to them. “You can lay your cards on the table, and we can try to help you, or you can pay up, and we’ll be out of your hair.” He hoped he delivered the lie well. There was no way he’d let Evelyn deal with this alone. He’d have to be dragged out of the house kicking and screaming.

She sighed and put the mug back on the coffee table. “Since Emil took control, I’ve been slowly forming a team of people with a wide array of extrasensory talents. One of them is . . .” She cleared her throat. Clearly uncomfortable, her next words were close to a whisper. “A precognitive.”

Aiden’s stomach dropped. He’d known from the beginning that things had been off with this stars-forsaken gig, but he’d ignored his gut in favor of the big payday. Of all the possible motivating factors Vinnie had been operating under, aprecognitive spy feeding her information had not made the top ten.

My mistake for trying to stay grounded in reality.

“You hired us because a fortune teller told you to?” Aiden asked, disbelief tinging his every word.

“Precogs aren’t fortune tellers,” Corvinia said, a bit defensively. “They don’t use parlor tricks or run cons. They can’t get blanket predictions about the future.”

“Sounds like a lonely talent to have,” Nannette said. “No one likes a know-it-all.”

“It can be extremely isolating. If one cannot control it, flashes of the future can be extremely random and upsetting, especially for children.”

“And your precognitive asset saw us rescuing Evelyn?” Aiden wanted to be clear on this point.

Corvinia nodded. “He did. He didn’t know who you were but he gave me a picture-perfect description of you, Aiden. He described you to me a week after our first meeting. Once I knew it was really possible and not just a pipe dream, I activated my agents on Bauder to get the plans for the station.”

“Why all the secrecy?” Lillian asked.

“I’m a creature of habit,” Corvinia said with a shrug, “and obscurity is a hard one to break. I was told that messing about with foreknowledge of the future can sometimes skew the results. You may wind up in the same place but with a worse path to the outcome than you could have had. I wanted Evelyn safe.”

“If she doesn’t want to be a part of your revolution, are you really going to let her go?” Veselko asked.

“She was always my favorite niece, you know. She was so deeply unhappy on Tanalia. Never got the chance to embrace her talent. Just wanted to be lost in a book.” Corvinia went to run her hand through her hair, then seemed to remember it was ina fancy updo and adjusted her tie instead. “She’ll be in danger if she comes to fight or if she decides to take off. If she comes back, I think we can plan to keep her reasonably safe, if not completely happy. I don’t know how happy she will be on the run for the rest of her life. Or Emil’s.”

Aiden noted that she had managed to completely avoid answering the question.

“Reasonably safe?” Elenor asked. “Define reasonably? The girl’s going to have a huge target on her back.”

“They’ll want her alive,” Tariel said. “Alive and well enough to Amplify.”