Winston (BBW Bear Shifter Wedding Romance) (Grizzly Groomsmen Book 3) (6 page)

Delphine couldn’t do anything but glare as he walked up to her and jerked her head roughly to the side. The hiss as the syringe punched through the skin of her neck seemed implausibly loud. She was sure that her genetics would counteract some of the effects of the drug, but she couldn’t be sure how much or how it would combine with the remnants of the sedative still in her system. Clenching her jaw, she looked around the room.

The newcomers were easy to identify. Dominic Banner, 35. Close-cut hair and beard. Neat, quiet, short. Suffered from Rogerson disorder; neutralize pre-shift, do not engage otherwise. Hyde Jones, 36. Skin dark, like hers. Dreadlocks swept back behind a bandanna. Missing right eye due to infection. On the run from a murder charge. Anthony Monroe, 35, currently using the name “Custer.” Hand lost to malfunctioning blaster. Manic and unpredictable.

She knew them better than they knew each other, had spent hours going over the files that contained their whole lives over and over again. It was doing precious little to help her now. Banner was scowling at her quietly, Jones looked as though he would be perfectly content to just kill her and be done with it, and Monroe had a toothy grin stretched across his face.

“We’ll just give that a moment to kick in, shall we?” the captain said.

“I still say we just…” Jones mimed pointing a blaster at his head and firing.

“Hear, hear,” murmured Chapel, wrapping a protective arm around Kane.

“Now, now,” Monroe said. “Where’s the fun in that?”

“Where’s the fun in getting rid of the person who hurt Zosha?” Chapel raised an eyebrow. “Well, honestly, I’d call it more ‘satisfactory’ than ‘fun’ but I’m sure I could dredge up some sense of enjoyment.”

“Not now, Rick,” the captain said. “Answers first, murder second. Ready to talk yet?”

Delphine remained silent. It was somewhat harder to do so than it had been five minutes ago.

“You sure we can’t expedite the process a bit, Captain?” Chapel asked.
 

“Is this going to be a problem?” Ingram furrowed his brow. “Because this sort of sounds like this is going to be a problem.”

“I’m just glad to see the mighty Richard has a temper like the rest of us,” Monroe sighed.
 

“Custer, I swear to God—”

“Aw, come one, Dick, you know I don’t mean anything by it.”

“Can you be serious for five fucking minutes?” Chapel seethed. “She hit Zosha. She could have killed her if Hyde hadn’t tranqed her fast enough.”

“But he did,” Monroe answered breezily, “and thus, your lovely girlfriend is saved from an assassin who, more likely than not, went after you and tripped over her.”

“You—”

“It’s a decent question,” Heathcoat chimed in, her auburn hair spilling over her shoulder as she tilted her head. “Was she aiming for Rick and ran into Zosha? Or was she after Zosha?”

“Both,” Delphine said.

Every head in the room turned towards her as she tensed. She hadn’t meant to speak, hadn’t even known she was going to until she already had.

Sloppy
.

“Good to know,” Heathcoat said slowly, taking a step forward. “And were you targeting anyone in our crew other than them? I assume you were. They aren’t involved in anything that the rest of us aren’t.”

Delphine kept her jaw clenched tight. As long as she focused, she could keep herself from saying anything she shouldn’t. The question was, was it worth it? What were the advantages of remaining silent versus revealing information that wouldn’t help them in the long run? She didn’t think she could lie convincingly with the drugs still in her system.

She considered her options, thinking about the reputation of the people in front of her and of skill of the people they would send to finish her job.

“Kane, Chapel, and Ingram,” she said at last. “As well as any of the other crew members I could kill.”

“That’s a bit ambitious for one person, don’t you think?” the captain asked, apparently unfazed by the knowledge he was a principle target. “Did you really think you could take out three of us, minimum, and then get away unscathed?”

“I didn’t think about it at all,” Delphine responded.

“So, what, you decided to kamikaze us? Now, I don’t mean to be rude, but I have no idea who you are. Just what did we do to you that made you want to go out in a blaze of glory slaughtering us?”

Delphine shifted, stretching as much as she could with the restraints in place. “We have never encountered each other, Captain Ingram.”

“See, I didn’t think so,” he said, shaking a finger at her. “But the thing is, that would mean you’re a hired gun, and I know from experience that they generally don’t take jobs they don’t think they’ll survive to see payment for.”

“I was not hired,” Delphine answered, “but I am doing this on behalf of my employer.”

“Okay, is she actually going to answer our questions?” Jones asked. “Or is she just going to play fucking mind games?”

“I think we should leave her,” Banner said quietly. “She’s not going anywhere, and whether or not someone’s after us, we still need to clear the system. The dock guards’ll blast us out of the sky if they have the chance.”

“I don’t like the idea of leaving her unguarded,” Chapel said.
 

“Where’s she gonna go?” Jones scoffed.
 

“She’s on a suicide mission that involves killing us,” Chapel retorted. “If she gets out of here she could still hurt one of us before we knew she was out.” His arm around Kane tightened.

“Custer,” Ingram said. “You’re on guard duty. With any luck you’ll drive her insane.”

“I’ll do my very best, Captain,” Monroe said with a smile, saluting.
 

“Great. Everyone, back to wherever it is you should be right now. Custer, don’t fuck up.”

The crew began to file out of the room. Kane took Chapel’s hand and squeezed.

“You go ahead,” she said. “I want to talk to her.”

Chapel’s eyebrows shot up. “You want me to leave you alone with the woman who is currently trying to kill you?”

“I’m not alone,” she answered with a slight smile. “Custer’s here.”

“You want me to leave you alone with the woman who is currently trying to kill you
and Custer
?”

“Just go. If I’m not out in five, you have my permission to come in, guns blazing.” Muttering under his breath, Chapel obeyed.

It was just Delphine, the woman she’d failed to kill, and man who would probably not kill her left in the room. She studied them both, fighting off the haze of the drugs to think of what to say, if anything. Zoshanna Kane: abandoned by her mother and raised by the streets of an asteroid colony infamous for vice. Had the misfortune to be involved with Sylas Rahm disposing of his brother. Intelligent but neither aggressive nor physically threatening. Anthony “Custer” Monroe: No record of criminal activity until joining the crew of the ICS
Starstriker
, running weapons. Left due to irreconcilable differences with the crew. Similar incidents while working for the crews of the
Bloodsport
,
Sidewinder
, and
Kingkiller
. Newest core member of the
Breakwater
, serving for three years.

What did all of that add up to? All that information, and what was it for? They would hardly let her go knowing she still intended to kill them. What was the point of all her knowledge, all her strength, tied to a chair?

“Um, hi,” Kane said. She looked more awkward than afraid, like maybe Delphine was someone she ran into on the street that she didn’t know how to talk to and not someone who was responsible for the sizable bruise covering the left side of her face. “I have a few questions before I head up. Why are Rick, the captain, and I targets? A few of the others on the ship have done a lot more than we have, and I’ve only been part of the crew for a few months.”

“Are you talking about the murder charge leveled against Mr. Jones,” Delphine inquired, “or Ms. Heathcoat’s role in the disappearance and presumed death of Captain Strathmore of the
Appomattox
?”

From the sharp inhale, Kane hadn’t been expecting her to know either of those things. Monroe, for his part, just looked interested.

Delphine kept speaking. “My employers have nothing to lose or gain from the frame job your communications officer fell prey to, and any damage that could be done by Strathmore’s death has already been done.”

“Then what?” Kane asked.

“U4, obviously,” Monroe said, mouth curling into a smile far more catlike than Delphine had expected from a bear shifter. “You because it’s your fault we were in the position to enter the business, Rick because he loves you and because he helped you, and Leo because the captain is responsible for his crew. I was wondering when that business was going to come back to bite us in the ass. The only real question is, who do you work for? Remnants of the younger Rahm brother’s empire? The smugglers we replaced?”

Delphine remained silent. The only thing she was sure she could not tell these people was the name of her employers. It was a betrayal, a failure.

Delphine’s record was flawless, despite the setbacks her cluster had experienced in their developmental stage. She did not fail. She would not. Instead, she studied the man in front of her.

Strange that the man with a galaxy-wide reputation for lunacy and drunken violence would be the one shrewd enough to pick apart her motives. She looked over him slowly. His hair, parted to the right, was light gold and seemed to glow under the artificial lights of the cargo bay. His cheekbones were high and sharp, his jaw clean-shaven. His eyes were, of course, gold, but they seemed to be lighter than his crew mates’. She could see nothing marring his pale skin, giving him an illusion of youth only disrupted by the smirk on his full lips. He seemed to Delphine for a drug-addled second to be made of gold and marble. Then he ruined it by talking.

“No, of course it isn’t the smugglers,” he said, his smile morphing into something that assumed victory. “They can find other work. Not as good, of course, but still better than chasing down someone with our collective reputation. The suppliers, on the other hand… we switched to a source our friend recommended when we took over, which means someone suddenly came into the frankly ridiculous money that comes with supplying Lytos with its favorite drug. That means someone suddenly lost all that money, and I’m thinking that just might be enough to kill for. Glare at me silently if I’m right.”

He didn’t need the confirmation; the look in his eyes was full of certain. Delphine drew up all the dignity she could muster tied to a chair and stared at him coolly.
 

“I see it wasn’t a fluke that you scored so highly in your courses, Mr. Monroe,” she said. “Your deductive reasoning skills are impressive.”

The change that came over his was so small that if the person talking to him wasn’t both observant and looking for it they wouldn’t have noticed. Delphine was both of these things. His eyes shuttered, and though neither his facial expression nor his posture changed he suddenly gave off an air of stillness.

“My, my,” he said. “You’re well informed. And here I don’t even know your name.” Delphine didn’t answer, and Monroe clearly wasn’t expecting her to. He turned to Kane. “Zosha, please go ask your spidery friend if he could pretty please find out who the previous U4 supplier to Lytos was.”

Kane looked like she had more to say, but turned and left anyways.

“So. Is there anything else about my past you’d like to tell me?” Monroe asked in a tone that would be perfectly amiable coming from anyone else.

“What would you like to know?” she asked blandly.

“How about your name?” he said. “We’ve been referring to you as ‘the assassin’ and ‘that bitch that punched Zosha.’”

Delphine thought it over. “I’ll tell you my name if you tell me something.”

Monroe raised an eyebrow. None of his expression, Delphine noted, felt real. It was more like he was imitating what a genuine expression would look like. “You’re trying to trade information? Information, by the way, that we don’t actually need for information you probably do? While you’re drugged and tied to a chair in our cargo bay?”

“Yes,” Delphine said. “You knew I was coming. How?”

It had been a niggling feeling of irritation in the back of her mind since she’d woken up. She had been meticulous in her planning and flawless in her execution. And yet, she hadn’t been able to do more than land a blow to the weakest link on the ship before the cold kiss of a tranquilizer dart landed on the side of her neck. The only way it could have gone down like that was if they were tipped off. That meant one of two things: either there was a mole at Mason Corporation or there was someone intelligent and with enough resources to get past Mason Co.’s security. Most likely, the answer was both. The idea stirred something frightened and nervous in the pit of Delphine’s stomach that she thought she’d killed years ago.

“Zosha’s friend is very interested in her continued well-being, which is one of the only reasons we survived meeting her,” Monroe said.

Delphine frowned ever so slightly. It confirmed her suspicions, but didn’t tell her anything new. She never did this sort of investigative work on her targets. Mason Co. was a well-oiled machine, every cog in place. She had never done her own research because she had never been told to. Her job was to learn to neutralize the faces in the files handed to her by a handler and now that she was in a position where she couldn’t fulfill her purpose she found it difficult to find the inner balance her trainers had drilled into her. She chose to blame the drugs.