Blood Will Tell by Christine Pope Page A

expecting Miala to follow him.
    Which of course she did, her pulse still racing and breath coming to her with difficulty. As she trailed after Thorn, she wondered if she would ever begin to understand him—whether he was just toying with her, or whether he felt for her even a little.
    What frightened her was that she found she didn’t care. As long as she could be with him, nothing else mattered.

VIII

    The forty-five crates of silk turned out to be hidden in the third and final vault, just as Miala had suspected. She paused in her exertions for a moment as Thorn stood and looked at the neatly stacked crates, his eyebrows creasing slightly. Probably he was trying to decide whether it would all fit in the already overloaded cargo hold of the Fury .
    “We’re leaving it,” he said finally, and Miala stared up at him in shock.
    “ Leaving it?” she demanded. “Do you have any idea how much that stuff is worth?”
    “Probably more than you,” he replied, fixing her with a quelling dark gaze. “But I’m not a smuggler or a silk dealer. I’ve got no use for it.”
    Miala opened her mouth again, took a closer look at Thorn, then decided it was better not to argue. He was right—of course she had no idea what the street value of that much silk could be. However, she was fairly sure it was quite a bit, probably as much as the treasure they’d already loaded. Still, he must know what he was doing. She thought for a moment of the difficulties involved in trying to move that much silk around, realizing that without connections they’d have a very tough time unloading the stuff. While she didn’t know all the ins and outs of the silk trade, she did know that if you weren’t on file with the silk merchants’ guild, you could be in big trouble if you tried to sell it as an indie.
    “Besides,” he added, pushing the button to close the doors to the vault, “if the bones aren’t picked completely clean when the next scavengers show up, there’s less of a chance they’ll start wondering where the rest of the treasure went.”
    It took a few seconds for the full import of his words to sink in, but once it did, Miala cast a worried look up at Thorn. “So you think there’ll be more?”
    “Of course. The universe has an unending supply of scum.” He must have noticed the concern on her face, for he went on, “But don’t worry—we’ll be long gone before the next one shows up.”
    That did reassure her, as well as the fact that he had said “we.” The fear had still been there, buried but not forgotten, the worry that he would just go off and leave her here once the treasure was loaded. Even as she watched Eryk swoop down on Darlester’s ore processor, one small part of her mind had wondered whether he would just keep going once he finished his attack run. After all, he was on board a ship already loaded with the bulk of Mast’s treasure. There had been nothing to stop him from heading on out into space.
    Nothing, except...except what? He had kissed her, but even Miala knew she wasn’t naïve enough to think that necessarily meant anything. People left all the time. Her mother had run off, and she’d abandoned a husband and baby. All Eryk Thorn would have left behind was a silly girl who’d been foolish enough to think he owed her some kind of debt.
    But he didn’t leave, she thought fiercely. He came back, and he’s still here now. That’s got to count for something.
    “When are we going?” she asked. Best to confront the source of her worry at once—not that she would necessarily know whether he was lying to her or not.
    His reply was immediate. “Tomorrow morning. I’ve been monitoring the local transmissions and just hearing the usual chatter, nothing to indicate anyone is planning on coming here any time soon. We’ve bought some breathing room. And the ship’s ready to go if any more trouble crops up sooner than that.”
    “Good,” she said, perhaps with a bit more depth of emotion than she