Page 100 of Smuggler's Beauty

Anika Kahn had approached him with a proposition the night before. She was deceptively jolly looking when her image filled the screen. The glowing brown skin of her face was lined with smile marks and deeply grooved crow’s feet. Her black curls were shot through with silver at the temples, and her plump lips always looked a moment away from a smile. Her eyes ruined the illusion, if you knew what to look for. The sparkle in them could disappear in an instant, leaving only steely intensity.

The Witch, indeed.

“Why keep up the pretense of secrecy?” she’d asked. “Come out swinging. Have the Twins take her in public. No one would be able to question your authority, then.”

Emil found this distasteful, not only because the idea seemed to be throwing good credits after bad. He had spent years cultivating the Tanalian population behind the scenes. Manipulating a population took time. If you wanted them to buy what you were selling, brute force wasn’t the way to go. Shows of strength? Absolutely. But beating the spirit out of people was how you spurred revolutions. Draining it slowly over time, that was how you got compliance.

Still, the proposition was tempting. Tanalia was taking longer to subdue than he had budgeted for. He had started the project as a much younger man. While spurts spent in stasis and advances in medical science would expand his lifespan for decades to come, he was starting to feel the years more and more. A swift show of force might be the right move after all. Emil groped in his pocket for his communicator and pulled up the contact information for Ms. Kahn. This had gone far enough.

Expand the contract.

Mathias rubbedat the temporary tattoos that peeked out from under his shirtsleeves. Not a bad look, but he’d probably go with something a little bolder if he ever decided to actually mark up his body. He couldn’t afford to have distinguishing marks in his line of work. Spies weren’t supposed to be noticeable. Nothing about him could linger longer than the job needed it to.

For this job, the tattoos had been perfect. The look of disdain on Emil Bellica’s face when Mathias had picked him up from the spaceport proved his disguise was perfect.

It was tempting to just take the PM out while he was distracted in the transport, end Tanalia’s suffering now, but Mathias had seen the man’s death. It wasn’t at his hand. Forcing the issue would only end in disaster. So he kept both hands on the wheel and languidly drove toward the base, maintaining his character. He’d told Lillian to schedule the transmission for the approximate time he’d have the PM in the car. He’d walked at a snail’s pace to make sure they didn’t get into the car before the video started playing. Annoying Emil was just a side benefit.

He’d wished he’d worn a pair of those special glasses Aiden was so fond of instead of the contacts that changed his brown eyes to a blue that reminded him of Nannette’s. A recording of the look he’d caught on Emil’s face from the rearview mirror would have been priceless. The man’s eyes had been about to bug out of his head. Corvinia would have relished the sight.

Their plan to get under his skin was going to work. Annoyed leaders were reactive leaders, and reactive leaders made mistakes.

Mathias could feel the tide starting to turn on the ground. Emil’s grip on Tanalia was starting to slip. He could feel thesituation coming to a head. As soon as it did, he was out. He was finished living for the job, making no lasting memories.

No lingering touches that weren’t designed to loosen lips.

No real relationships.

Corvinia would have to find another stooge to help her with phase two of the plan. Mathias wasn’t going to live like a ghost anymore.

He’d seen it.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Pearl could not recalla time in her professional life when she had struck out so consistently.

They had completely lost theRising Dawn’strail. Once they had regrouped on the space station and had the ship assessed, they’d started hunting the crew in earnest. Every contact she’d tapped had come up empty.

That, or Pearl had lost more than a relationship in the breakup, and her contacts were now useless.

Emil had sent Anika Kahn several increasingly frantic transmissions. He was now convinced that the responsible party behind the breakout on the medivessel was staging a coup. The princess was a key part of their strategy, and a number of transmissions had been hacked into broadcasts across Tanalia. Anika, sensing weakness, had managed to separate him from an additional fee, citing planetary political interference as a luxury service.

Pearl was continually impressed by her business acumen.

They had tracked the transmissions broadcasting across Tanalia to a tech outfit near Proxima Centauri. The staff had been terrified when Ivan had walked through the door,flipping around his butterfly knife. The Twins had earned their reputation for a reason. Either of them walking in uninvited was the thing of nightmares for most law-abiding citizens in this sector of the galaxy.

Pearl and Ivan had planned on muscling their way through to the chief technician’s office, but the receptionist had recognized their faces from a security memo that had gone out six months ago. She’d hit the button for the door buzzer so fast Pearl had initially thought she was going for the silent alarm.

Employees had darted into their cubicles with the rapidity of an avalanche, eyes on their data terminals. If they could have crawled into their own shoes to avoid the infamous Twins’ notice, Pearl was sure they would have. The level of avoidance stung her in a way she wouldn’t have imagined it could have. When they were kids, she and Ivan would have done anything for this level of respect. Fear was some of the best armor in the galaxy, credit for credit. It didn’t make it any less isolating.

They made their way through the cube farm, a style of office layout that continued to pop up throughout space and time. The back wall of the office was lined with doors, employees high enough in the organization to warrant their own space, divided up in small, cramped offices.

The door of the chief technician was open. Tobias Nista, the nameplate read. She gestured to Ivan to take the lead. She knew he was likely disappointed he hadn’t had the chance to exercise his lethal glare on anyone but the receptionist on their walk back.

“Mr. Nista,” Ivan said. “Your office is transmitting banned video across the galaxy.”

Tobias Nista was a thin man with a pale complexion that spoke of too little time under sunlight. Pearl gauged him to be in his early forties, though who could tell these days with cosmetic procedures and stays in stasis. His brown hair was starting tothin, and he had a truly unfortunate attempt at a mustache on his upper lip.

“Excuse me?” he squeaked. Pearl saw him tremble in his seat and lost a little respect for the man. Honestly, Ivan had just said one sentence, and he was already falling to pieces. Granted, Ivan was flipping around his butterfly knife in a menacing manner, but that was just a tick at this point.