Page 17 of Found Treasure Bride

My lips twitched as I entered the wing where the University help desk said Nancy had gone to.

“Do I look dead to you?” she was shouting.

I didn’t even knock. I just turned the knob and opened the door, stepping straight in.

“Please calm down, Professor Cuthbert. We can see the report of your demise was either a misunderstanding or a deliberate subterfuge.”

“Who reported her dead?” I asked the egghead sitting at the conference table who’d spoken. Beside him was an Enforcer in full uniform.

“And just whoa re you?’ the idiot asked me.

Oh, he wanted to play like that, did he? I held up my forearm. “I’m her fucking mate, that’s who!”

The man paled. “Oh, sorry.”

I felt an immense sense of satisfaction at that. Everyone knew to not mess with a Paethian warrior’s mate, and while I might be a small-time freighter pilot and of mixed blood, I was still a fucking Paethian warrior.

She turned wide eyes towards me, her eyes questioning. I gave her a minute nod, noticing that she had been rubbing her forearm this entire time. Oh, ho, so she was feeling the mating bonds starting to take root.

“Your name?” the Enforcer asked me.

“Jakrah Jones.”

“Ah, yes, the freighter pilot.” He sighed. “We’ve had our eyes on Rando Prilraziin for quite some time. He and his syndicate are running quite the scheme there on his station. We’ve suspecting him of fixing the games, but when we went undercover to look into that, we became aware that he had his fingers in other things as well. Untaxed and counterfeit alcohol, indentured servitude, and so on. This antiquities thing is new, and I surmise that he got hold of the information about the site from someone who owed him money or some such thing. Otherwise, he’d have already had a ready delivery service planned as well as a definite client list. H’s boastful, so would have wanted to impress you with who he was dealing with.”

“Nah, he was real coy about it. That’s how I figured out he was hoping I knew somebody who knew somebody else, or that I could find someone. I kinda got the impression he was wanting to send me into Freebooter territory if he had to.”

The Enforcer nodded. “That jibes with what we know of him. Okay, you are all free to go. Don’t breathe a word about any of this. If anyone asks, you arrived here without incident. He can believe his crew suffered an accident.”

“That’s it?’ she cried. “He gets away with it?’

“We can’t afford to blow the op. We’ll make sure our agents aboard the station get this information.”

She slumped down in her seat. “I nearly get killed, and that’s it.”

“If it makes you feel any better, once we move against him, what happened to you will be added to his charges. We need to find out just how large his criminal enterprise has grown and who all the players are.”

“I understand,” she said, getting up out of her chair. “I don’t like it, but I understand. It’s just a puzzle piece in a much bigger picture. Which sucks, but there you have it.”

Egghead spoke up. “I’m sure under the circumstances that we can guarantee you will be named head of the dig once we set up a full-scale operation. There will be guards, of course, so you won’t need to fear for your safety.”

She looked at me. “We’re mates?”

“Yeah. Um, look at your arm.”

She glanced down. “Shit.” The red lines were already appearing and turning purple, the change coming to her faster than mine had. Then she grinned. “If I’m head of the dig, you guys wanna be my official couriers?”

“What, move the antiques about for you?”

“It would be a contracted position, well renumerated,” Egghead said.

“We don’t like being in one place for very long.” I gazed into her eyes.

“There will other places to explore,” she countered.

“Thre would be even more if you didn’t sign on to had a major site,” I pointed out. I winked at her. “Maybe I know some ruins on plants that haven’t been fully explored yet, if at all. Not under domes, so really crumbly and shit, but I might know some. I’ve had to stop off to do repairs and look for water and stuff in some odd places in the back of beyond, so to speak.”

“Really?”