He was headed to the door almost before she’d finished the sentence. “Thanks, boss. See you tomorrow!”
Cradling her purloined drink, she settled herself behind the desk. When she looked up, she caught Allen grinning at her from his cell. “What are you grinning at?”
He was sitting up, leaning against the wall with one forearm against a raised knee. “The foolishness of youth. That kid never had a chance with you, but fair play to him for trying.”
Her hackles rose a little. “How do you know he didn’t have a chance?”
Allen’s lips quirked. “He’s a kid. You’d eat him for breakfast.”
“Oh, so I’m a maneater now. Am I?”
Before Allen could reply, the double doors slid open and Mills walked back through, face like thunder as he pushed a cuffed man ahead of him.
Zero.
She was out of her seat before she knew it and halfway across the space between them. Mills was sporting a livid bruise around one eye.
“What the hell happened?”
“This asshole,” Mills snarled, shoving Zero forward and slapping a gun-belt with some heavy-duty hardware in it on the booking desk. Zero’s weaponry. He’d been wearing it buckled around his hips in the bar earlier. “Decided to just randomly clock me as soon as I walked out the door. No idea why. Just walked up to me and wham! Almost landed me on my ass!”
Eris raised an eyebrow. “Left or right hook?”
“Right. Why?”
“Uh-huh, no reason.” She motioned Zero forward. “I’ll book him. Don’t worry. Go get that seen to. Okay?”
Mills stood for a moment, anger written in every line of his frame. Then he nodded. “You sure you don’t need me here, boss? He’s dangerous.”
“I’ll be fine. Don’t worry. I’ll arm the auto-defenses if necessary.”
He didn’t look convinced, but she shooed him toward the door anyway. “Head to medical and get that checked out. You could have cracked your orbital socket or have a concussion or something.”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine. I think I should st—”
“Go!” she ordered, pointing at the door while grabbing Zero by the arm. The sound of the door opening and closing behind them told her the officer had left.
“Alone at last,” Zero’s lips quirked as he looked down at her. Gods above, he was tall… and broad.
“Is that why you decked my officer?” she demanded. “To get me alone in here? And don’t think I don’t realize what you did…” She grabbed his right arm, the metal hard under her fingers. “If you’d wanted to hurt him, you would have. So you didn’t want to hurt him… Well, I have news for you. Your plan failed.”
“Oh?” He leaned in. The scent of his cologne, warmed by his skin, made her weak at the knees. “I dunno. I think it worked pretty well.”
“Apart from the fact we’re not alone.” She leaned around him and nodded toward Allen.
Zero turned and nodded. “Hey, Sparky. How’s it hanging?”
The ex-con grinned. “Oh, you know, to the left as usual.”
She almost groaned. They knew each other. Of course they knew each other.
“Since you two are on such good terms, I’ll stick you in together. You can keep each other company.”
Allen unfolded himself from the bunk and sauntered toward the energy field at the front. “Yeah… sorry, doll, but I do believe my time is up.”
“Of course it is.”
There weren’t enough curse words in existence to adequately express her frustration at the current situation. All she could do was go with it.
“Computer, release prisoner Allen, J.”
“Yes, Chief Archer,” the security computer replied, its feminine voice all sex worker breathiness. It had grated on her nerves since she’d arrived but never more so than today. She’d get it recoded tomorrow. First thing.
“Later, ‘gators!” Allen quipped as he sauntered out of the cell when the forcefield snapped off. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Winking at them, he disappeared through the main doors.
“Seems to know his way around,” Zero commented.
“You could say he’s a regular guest. In,” she ordered, nodding toward the cell.
He inclined his head and stepped into the cell. Sensing an occupant without a security identity tag, the forcefield snapped back on, throwing up a shimmering blue wall between them. At the same moment, the nano-bonds on his plasti-cuffs gave, dropping to the floor in little more than dust.
“Would you like to tell me why you wanted to get locked up?” she asked, sliding her flexi out of her thigh pocket to book him in.
“What makes you say that?”
He stood in the middle of the cell, studying his surroundings. They weren’t much—three bare walls, the fourth made up of the barrier between them, and one bunk bolted to the wall. The facilities were the same, bolted to the wall behind a half-height privacy screen. Somehow though, despite the fact he and Allen were of a similar height, he managed to make the cell seem tiny.
“You only gave officer Mills a black eye,” she said, nodding toward his metal arm. “Yet if you’d wanted to, you could have put his head through a bulkhead. So… you hit him, but not hard. Just hard enough to get arrested. Why?”
He turned and sat on the narrow bunk recently vacated by Allen.
“I would have thought that was obvious,” he looked at her meaningfully.
She barked a laugh in surprise. “You really don’t take rejection well. Do you?”
Looking up, an undignified squeak escaped her, and she almost dropped her pad. He was right on the other side of the barrier, looking at her intently. She hadn’t heard him move, nor had she ever seen anyone move that quickly or silently before.
“Name?” Her voice was sharp as she tried to cover the fact that he’d startled her. Well, ignore it anyway and if he had any instinct of self-preservation, he would totally let her and not say a thing.
“I told you… Zero.”
Her fingers paused over the screen. “That’s not a name. It’s a number.”
He folded massive arms over his equally massive chest. “It’s the only one I got,
