Barbarian Pirate. Cecily Royce

      "If you think the captain won't know we took a short break then you're dreaming, Dron," Khar said after a very long moment of staring in silence. "First, we hand her over, and if the captain doesn't want her then we can taste her. On your feet, girl, and don't be dim enough to think you can run. If you do run I won't chase you, I'll shoot you. Now get up."

      Chayara got to her feet slowly, trying to figure out what kind of freighter she'd made the mistake of stowing away on. Armed crewmen using a scanner in the supply hold; men who wore no uniforms and talked about raping her instead of locking her up. She had no idea how it was possible for her luck to turn so bad, but there was no arguing that it had. Whether or not good luck would come back was something she wasn't up to thinking about at the moment.

      When it became clear that she wasn't going to run, Khar holstered his stunner, picked up her pack, and then took Chayara's arm. She was dragged by that arm to and through the airtight door leading into the rest of the ship, then up the corridor outside. Khar's fingers were hurting her but she didn't bother saying so. He wasn't likely to loosen his grip until they got to where they were going.

      And getting to where they were going took a while. The ship was bigger than the average freighter, even bigger than the occasional super freighter. How that could be was another piece of the puzzle that refused to come together for Chayara, most especially since the station designation for this ship had said it was an ordinary freighter. It wasn't supposed to be possible for a ship to broadcast a misleading designation, only this ship obviously had. And that realization began to give Chayara a hint she preferred to ignore.

      But they passed a large number of people as they walked, some clearly on duty, some just lounging around. The ones on duty were armed like the two men escorting Chayara, but the loungers looked no softer, and most of them wore knives on their belts and at their boots. There was a sprinkling of women, but most of the crew seemed to be male. Their eyes touched Chayara in the same way Dron's had, predators looking at a snack. She had to work hard to clamp down on the fear she felt, but somehow she managed it. If you showed weakness to a predator you were as good as dead, and she had to stay alive as long as possible.

      Khar finally stopped at the door of a cabin and knocked, but made no attempt to walk in until a male voice called out permission to enter. Once he had the permission Khar opened the door and dragged her inside, then gave her a little push toward the man seated behind the desk. The man had red hair down to his broad shoulders, a square, rugged face and the coldest gray eyes Chayara had ever seen. His stare said he already knew everything about her from just a single glance, and didn't think much of anything he'd found.

      "We found her in the supply hold," Khar said, moving to the desk to hand over Chayara's pack. "No tracers of any kind, and nothing in the way of electronics."

      "Just what I needed," the man behind the desk growled in a deep voice. "You and Dron go back and finish checking the hold. If you do find a tracer or anything else, I want to know about it immediately."

      The two men who had brought Chayara to the cabin acknowledged the orders without saying anything else, and a moment later they were gone with the cabin door closed behind them. The man seated at the desk was now examining the contents of Chayara's pack, but with as little as the pack contained, the examination didn't take long. Suddenly that cold gray stare was on her again.

      "Two changes of clothes, a comb and brush, a hand torch, and a container of food concentrate about two-thirds full," the man stated, part of his stare faintly accusing. "This can't possibly be all you have with you."

      "Some people like to travel light," Chayara responded, relieved that her voice held perfectly steady. "If you don't happen to like people who travel light, you can just let me off at the nearest planetary station. I promise I won't be offended."

      "That's really good of you," the man said, but the sarcasm did nothing to warm his stare. "Where did you come from, and where did you think you were going?"

      "I came from a freighter that put in at that station for repairs, and where I'm going is to the next freighter that won't be docked for weeks," Chayara answered, beginning to find that stare more than uncomfortable. "Do you mind if I sit down in one of those chairs in front of your desk? It's been a while since I had the chance to use a chair."

      "Yes, I do mind," the man responded at once before she could do more than start a step toward one of the chairs. "We don't have any stowaways' chairs on board this vessel. The only freighter docked at that station was scheduled to have its repairs finished in no more than another three days. But word was the Patrol would arrive before then to do its customary full sweep of the station and any vessel docked there. The sweep would have located you no matter where you tried to hide, and I'm betting you don't have any papers to show them. If I'm wrong, you can prove it by showing me your papers."

      "I'm a free soul who doesn't believe in the custom of using identity papers," Chayara said, folding her arms as she looked at the man with less than friendliness. "There are supposed to be a lot of planetary stations in this sector, so why don't you just throw me into your brig until we reach one of them? After that, my beliefs won't be your concern, and your precious chairs will be safe from contamination."

      "You'd like me to turn you over to the authorities on the nearest station," the man said, the smallest of smiles curving his lips as he leaned back in his chair. "They'd give you a stern lecture about never stowing away again, and then you'd have a station week to find a job. Until the week was up they'd feed you and give you a place to sleep free of charge, but before the week was up you'd be gone from the station on another freighter. Your doing that would make you someone else's problem and they'd be able to forget about you, and it would only have cost them the price of a few meals and the use of a hole in the wall room no one would pay for anyway. Station officials like to take the easy way out, but I don't look at the matter in the same way."

      Chayara was tempted to ask how he did look at the matter, but it was easy to see he'd spell out his preferences without any encouragement. It wasn't anything like a good thing that the man knew how stations handled stowaways, and that tiny smile he now wore was almost more disturbing than his stare.

      "I don't like it when people barge onto my ship uninvited," the man said after all traces of that smile disappeared. "This vessel is mine, and as captain I have the last word about what happens on board. It so happens I could use a cabin girl, someone to look after all my needs, but I've gotten along without one until now so don't feel as if you're being forced to take the job. If you're too good to work off your passage, you can always choose to be put out of an airlock."

      "Out of an airlock!" Chayara blurted, already rattled by his job offer. The man had stressed the word all when he spoke about his needs, which had to mean he expected to have her in his bed, too. How nice that he wasn't trying to hide his intentions. "You can't mean that threat," she finally managed to say, her mind whirling. "If even one person told the Patrol what you'd done—"

      "This ship is the Hawk and I'm Torand Rego," the man said, adding to the chill Chayara already felt. "From the way you just paled, it's obvious you've heard my name and my ship's name before, so you now know how likely it is that one of my crew will be telling the Patrol anything. If I tell any of them to put you out of an airlock, they'll ask nothing but if you're to be alive or dead at the time. I like to think of myself as a generous man, so my answer will be dead. Have you made your decision yet?"

      Torand Rego. Chayara stood with that name ringing in her head, but why her knees hadn't given way she had no idea. Torand Rego was the second most well known pirate in this sector of space, and his cutthroat crew aboard the Hawk was notorious. No wonder they'd pretended to be a freighter when they'd docked at the station for supplies, and no wonder they checked the ship with a scanner afterward. The good luck Chayara had known all her life had finally run out, and it couldn't have happened at a worse time.

      But this couldn't be the end of the road for her, not when others were depending on her. She put a trembling hand to her head, wishing she could tell Rego to kill her and have done with it, but he'd simply nod and have it done. She'd have to agree to his terms no matter how badly he treated her, but pain had an odd effect on her. It made her mad instead of afraid, and being mad would keep her going until