DEX
NEVER AGAIN, DEX THOUGHT.
Never again would he allow one of his clients to outsmart him and land him in a situation like the present one.
Rescue missions.
They were not his idea of fun.
After this Dex would go to one of the warm moons of Adhira. He’d lie by the golden water’s edge with a beautiful, soft-skinned woman by his side, preferably one who spoke sweet nothings into his ears. One whose favorite type of makeup was rouged lips instead of blood-splattered cheeks. One who didn’t separate limbs from bodies, or stomp through piles of corpses in the middle of some dark, dank prison moon in the most miserable system in Mirabel.
That woman stood beside Dex now in the darkness, brushing her purple-streaked hair back from her face. Splatters of red had mixed in with the other strands.
Dex hadn’t even seen the guards appear from the black before Andi cursed and was on them, tackling the first so that his head slammed into the stones with a sickening crack.
“Help me finish him!” she’d ordered, and by the time Dex stole the electric short-whip from the guard and shocked him into unconsciousness, Andi had stolen a key ring off the other’s belt loop. Her arm had coiled back like a spring, and then she’d stabbed the guard in the eye with the largest, longest key.
“Godstars, Andi,” Dex said now as he leaned over to inspect the corpse.
The key looked strangely at home in his eye socket, perfectly positioned in the center, as if Andi had placed it there with an artist’s flair. The river of blood was already slowing to a trickle, pooling in a small puddle on the stone floor beside his gaping mouth.
Dex shuddered, then looked back up at her. The light from her cuffs made her look like a ghost, pale and speckled with the proof of more deaths.
“If you haven’t noticed,” Andi said, leaning down and plucking the guard’s whip from his belt, “we’re short on weapons and time. I don’t have a lot of options here, Dextro.”
“You shoved a key through his eye,” Dex said. He looked down at the corpse again, then back at Andi.
She ignored him, a skill she’d always possessed, and pressed a button on the whip. There was a crackle, and an arc of blue spiraled out, bathing the hall in flickering light. The drying blood on her face looked dark as oil as her eyes met his. “If I didn’t take care of him, he would have sounded the alarm. Then we would have been facing fifty guards instead of two. Those aren’t odds I’m willing to bet on today.”
As Dex stared at her, he suddenly understood the bare truth.
There was no remorse in her eyes for the kills. Not even a flicker. There was nothing but the promise of the mission pulling her forward.
Once, Andi felt things to the point that they nearly broke her, and she’d allowed her feelings to control every action. She’d cared deeply for him, and he’d felt the same feelings resonating inside.
For years he’d wondered if the rumors about her weren’t entirely correct. If maybe the Bloody Baroness was just a show, a persona Andi had created to keep herself and her crew safe. He figured that when the metal shields covered up the Marauder, she mourned with her crew for the lives lost, the dark things she’d had to do in order to get the job done.
Dex had been wrong.
The Bloody Baroness didn’t feel remorse for these kills, nor had she mourned for the members of Dex’s crew she’d taken out when he’d captured her.
“It’s not just a reputation, is it?” Dex asked.
Andi raised a brow at him.
“The Bloody Baroness,” he said, stepping past the fallen guards, wondering about who they were, what they would have done with their lives had they not ended up in this pile at his feet. The Bloody Baroness was Andi, through and through, and probably had been since the day she stole his ship. Now she turned to the darkness, standing tall and strong as she stared ahead, not a hint of fear on her beautiful face.
She dealt out death like a deck of cards. How many more would die before they got Valen Cortas out of here alive?
“Two,” Andi said quietly, as she turned off the electric whip and doused them in shadow once more.
“Two?” Dex echoed.
“Two deaths. Two tallies on my swords.” She looked down at the dead guards, then back up at him. A flicker of pain flashed through her eyes. “I have a code, you know. Lines that I don’t cross.”
“And today?” Dex asked, as he looked down at the bodies. “Have you crossed a line?”
“I remember them, Dex,” she said. “Every last one.”
For a moment, he did see the Andi he’d once known. He saw the same haunted look in her eyes that she’d had as she stood above him, her knife in his chest. Her trust shattered because of him.
Maybe his original instincts had been correct. Maybe somewhere, hidden deep within...a fragment of her compassion remained.
“Cell 306,” Andi said, reminding Dex of their mission. “We still have twelve levels to climb down, and the clock is ticking.”
Dex nodded, then followed her into the darkness.
It wasn’t until they reached the next set of guards, when they slipped into soundless action side by side, that Dex realized something frightening.
He loved this. Fighting beside her in perfect sync, as a fluid team.
For the first time in a long time, he felt fully alive.