“You haven’t touched it.” He took his plate. “Besides, food this fresh would have freaked me out.”
“Would have?” she asked.
“Does,” he said. “It does freak me out. But I’m too hungry to care.”
Then he nodded at her plate.
“Eat something,” he said.
She wasn’t sure if he was waiting for her to take a bite before he did, but it wouldn’t surprise her. Anyone who had lived among assassins knew that it was better to let the person who prepared the food take the first bite.
Of course, if he were truly paranoid, he would switch plates with her.
She picked up her fork and ate some apple. It crunched. Jack smiled and started to eat as well.
She felt oddly relieved that he hadn’t tried to switch plates. In her circles, that was a mark of trust.
“Whose ship is this?” he asked.
“That was what I was just trying to figure out,” she said. “There are layers and layers and layers here.”
He nodded. “Let me help.”
“I can—”
“I know,” he said, “but this is my specialty, just like it’s yours. With both of us doing the work, we might learn something.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Something we don’t want to know.”
Chapter 24
The ship’s owner had more aliases than most Rovers. Jack didn’t like that at all. Someone with that many aliases had something to hide. He quit working on tracking the man before Skye did, just because somewhere along the way he realized that a guy like this wouldn’t keep his true identity anywhere on this ship, especially not in his own database.
Skye paused to finish the extremely good salad she had prepared for them. Jack couldn’t remember the last time he’d had anything that healthy, nutritious, or fresh. He’d just kept treating himself to gut-busting meals like the burgers on Krell, and he knew that eventually that would catch up to him.
Skye looked at him sideways. Apparently he had done something to attract her attention.
“What?” she asked as she chewed the last of her bread. He even liked that. She burped like a freighter pilot and ate like a soldier. Manners were clearly not her strong suit.
“We’re not going to find him here,” Jack said.
“I know,” she said. “But I may have screwed us royally by taking this ship.”
He grinned. “No, you screwed us royally on that chair, and we enjoyed it.”
She chuckled.
“However,” he said, “we do need a plan. Someone will recognize this ship, so we need to go to a place that will look the other way.”
He didn’t know a lot of places in the Brezev Sector. He had a hunch the ones he knew about were the ones everyone knew about. He never trusted places like that, because that meant they expected their potential clientele to be idiots.
“Most shipyards in the Brezev Sector take hot ships,” she said. “But most of those shipyards are indebted to existing big players, folks we might not even know about. They don’t advertise.”
“I know,” Jack said. He didn’t know much about exchanging hot ships, except that he knew how to track someone who had stolen a ship. He knew how easily some places gave up that information as well, although he’d never tried in the Brezev Sector.
Most people in the Brezev Sector considered the Rovers to be too law-abiding because the Rovers made sure their assassins were licensed and they worked on jobs that were sanctioned.
Or they had until Heller came on board.
Jack shuddered.
“What?” Skye asked. She was picking at her salad now.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Do you want to do something else? Because I’m not sure how long we can use this ship.”
“I know,” he said. “I realized in the shower that I need to figure out what I’m doing.”
“If you play it right,” she said, “you can just stay out here. I doubt anyone could find you.”
He had considered that already. It would be easy enough to disappear. He could vanish entirely and no one would find him.
Until they needed to—and even then he might be able to stay one step ahead of whoever wanted to catch him.
The problems went deeper than that. He’d have to give up his friendships. Most of his life was built on connections. That was how he got information. Of course, he knew that most of those people gave up the information easily, but that didn’t make them any less valuable to him.
And he’d have to abandon Rikki. She was his only family. He couldn’t just leave her behind with no word.
Especially not now. She was involved with a man she didn’t really know, and he was messing with her head.
She had asked Jack to find out about him, and Jack would. In fact, he would ask Skye about him at some point.
Just not right now.
Jack had other pressing matters on his mind.
“I know no one could find me,” he said after a moment. “At least, I know it intellectually.”
“It’s a big universe,” she said, and she wasn’t being fatuous like most people when they mentioned how large the universe was. He could tell. She was trying to be helpful.
He glanced over at her and smiled. “I know that too. I could start a new life.”
She was watching him closely, as if what he said next mattered to her.
He almost said,
But he didn’t. Not because of her. God knows, life with Skye would be interesting, and if they cooled on each other sexually, they could move on, no strings.
Although even that thought disturbed him.
He didn’t examine why. At least not yet. Ever since yesterday, he had been responding to people, not taking action on his own.
He needed to do things for himself first.
“But you don’t want a new life? You’re not willing to start one?” She sounded almost defensive, and he wasn’t sure why that was. Did she want him to start a new life? If so, why?
“Would you?” he asked, realizing that he was just asking his question sideways.
“Start a new life if I were in your shoes? Absolutely,” she said.
He shook his head. He hadn’t been asking that question. “Would you start a new life now? Would you just walk away from everything you know?”
“You realize that’s why most people get assassinated, don’t you?” she asked without answering him. In fact, she hadn’t even looked at him. “They don’t run when they should.”
She picked up the last slice of apple from her plate, but she didn’t eat. She stared at it like something was written on it.
“That’s a fake statistic,” he said. “Most of the people I find have been on the run for years. They lose track, they need to find their families again, they relax, and I locate them. Ninety percent of what I did for the Rovers was finding people who had theoretically vanished.”
“Then they didn’t do it right,” she said.
He sighed. He used to think that too. “Most of them had. Some never had contact with their past again. We
