“Not like this. The level of disrespect is terrible, and I just can’t handle it anymore. Josh is no help either!”
Josh is her husband. They’ve been together for over two decades. Ines and I are both thirty-three.
“I don’t know. What do you want from me?” I ask.
“For you to be my sounding board.”
“All right. I’m listening. Sounding board awaying.”
She huffs a sigh but says nothing.”
“Ines, you there?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then?”
“I guess that’s it. I just wanted to gripe a bit.”
“That’s fine, but do you want some advice?”
“Do you have any?”
“Not really, no.”
“When you have kids—”
“I’m two years away from advanced maternal age,” I remind her.
“All you have to do is find a guy in a few months and get pregnant a few months later. So long as you have the first before you turn thirty-five, you’ll be fine. It’s more of an issue if it’s your first over thirty-five.”
“Is that so? I thought you were a beautician, not a doctor.”
“Trust me. I know what I’m talking about, and you would make a great mom.”
“I don’t know about that, but first, I would need a guy, and I don’t know any.”
“You know plenty of guys.”
I groan. “Not any who understand me.”
“You can’t think of one?”
“No.”
But my thoughts stray toward a certain alien mercenary. I'm not mesmerized by him, but I'm sure a lot of women are. He's hot. Even I'll say that. He never wears a shirt, not that establishments care about the whole no shirt policy when it comes to the aliens. For whatever reason, Kurians and Novans don't bother to wear clothes on their upper halves.
He's strong, solid, built like a bull. He could probably bench press three of me. I might be five foot even, but I weight one-hundred and twenty pounds. I'm not fat, though. I'm mostly muscle, more muscular than most. It took me a lot of time in the gym lifting heavy weights to put on this much muscle. It's all natural, so I don't look that muscular. I just weigh more than I look because of the muscle. Even if women lift heavy like I do, we don't bulk up. It's not possible. Not unless you take supplements.
“I’m hoping your silence is because someone has crossed your mind,” Ines says softly.
“Nope,” I lie.
“Why not? You’re too damn picky. You want a guy who gets you, right?”
I wince. Ines knows me a little bit too well. We grew up next-door neighbors, and we actually hated each other in grade school, but then a bully picked on her the first day of high school. I stood up to him, and we became friends ever since.
Well, saying we hated each other isn't quite right. She talked all the time. Never shut up. I was super quiet in grade school, as in I didn't talk unless spoken to. She didn't understand that at all, and I think my quietness unsettled her. It bothered her, so she went her way, and I went mine.
But basically, in high school, she adopted me. That’s what extroverts do. They adopt introverts.
“How can I guy get you unless you let the poor guy in?” Ines asks. “You have to give a guy a chance, Soph! Otherwise, you’re going to be alone all of your life, and you might like being alone at times, but no one, not even you, wants to be alone all of the time.”
“You’re right,” I mumble.
“What was that?” she teases. “I couldn’t quite hear you.”
“You’re—”
Another call comes in.
“I have to go.”
“Sophia, that’s not right,” she scolds. “Don’t you—”
“It’s another call.”
She hangs up for me. Ines is a talker, yes, but she’s good like that. When I do have to go for a job, a client, anything, she’ll let me go immediately, no questions asked, even though I’m sure she would’ve loved to have heard “You’re right” one more time.
Shaking my head, I answer the call. “General Janius Jackson, what can I do for you?”
“I’m not calling with another job, if that’s what you’re hoping for,” she says.
I sit up straight and lower my feet from the coffee table. Something in her voice tells me that this isn’t a pleasant call.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“I learned some troubling news, and I thought you would want to know about it.”
“It doesn’t concern Ali Khan and all of that, does it?”
“I almost wish it does, but no. Although I suppose it could, possibly. I don’t know. We don’t have very many details about this.”
“What is this?”
“Someone’s taken out a hit on you.”
“Ah.”
“You don’t sound surprised.”
The general doesn’t sound surprised that I don’t sound surprised.
I shrug. "I've always known it was a possibility. After all…"
“Yes, I know,” she says softly.
Dan Terry. I used to work with a partner from time to time because some of the bounties were for people that you needed two in order to get close to the target. Sometimes, you have to infiltrate into gangs or office buildings, and you can only pass as a maid or janitor so many times before you have to try another avenue.
But working with a partner can also be more dangerous, and Dan isn’t my partner anymore, not by choice but because our line of work got to him.
There's a reason why you don't see many bounty hunters in their forties, and none in their fifties. They either get out of the profession long before then, or else they're buried six feet under.
“You don’t know who put out the hit?” I ask.
“Unfortunately not. I plan on trying to uncover who unless you don’t want me to.”
“You can. Thanks. I appreciate the head’s up.”
“You’re welcome. Stay vigilant, Sophia. You have a talent for your job, and I think we have many, many more jobs for you in the future.”
“I don’t have dying on my to-do list,” I inform her.
“I didn’t think so. I’ll call back once I know more.”
She hangs up, and I head to the kitchen. Although I consider grabbing the bottle of chilled wine in the fridge, I opt
