Adiron (Corsair Brothers 1)

If I ever find out who that male—or female—is, I'm going to destroy them.

"Sleep?" Straik shakes his head. "No. I'm not sleeping. There's too much to think about."

"So you came over here to think?" I look around. "Do the girls know you're here?"

He shakes his head. "I needed to see for myself. No need to wake them."

I'm pretty sure Jade isn't going to be thrilled that Straik's hanging out on what she considers “her” ship, but the male just seems so depressed that I don't have the heart to go and wake her just yet. "You all right?"

Straik stares out that window so hard that I'm surprised his eyes don't burn holes through the glass. "Ask me that question again tomorrow."

I get it. He wants to mope tonight. I cross my arms over my chest and stare out the glass myself. That…really is a lot of stasis pods. "I was kinda hoping that the big cargo would be dark-matter cores or untraceable credits. I mean, this definitely counts as a big score, but…it's slaves. I guess we're lucky that we found them instead of someone else who'd actually sell them."

"Slaves," Straik repeats, and he sounds utterly melancholy. "I don't know how they got here."

I frown at that. "You mean how they loaded the pods onto the ship? There's bots for that sort of thing—"

He turns and glares at me. "My family is not in the business of running slaves! We are a proud lineage! The house of Rin is an old, respected name. We are a proud family!" He gestures angrily at the window. "This is not what we do!"

"How do you know that? ’Cause it kinda looks like it is what you do."

Straik looks as if he wants to rip my face off. His response comes out in an angry hiss. "We do not need the credits—"

"Now," I point out. "You don't need the credits now. Where did the credits you have come from if not this?"

His face falls. He turns back toward the window again. "We made our fortune in trade. I was told it was silks." He stares out at the stasis pods as if he's a man betrayed. "These…are not silks."

"You think they lied to you, then?" It's entirely possible that someone took over the ship, dumped all the silks into deep space and loaded the humans on but…that seems awfully stupid. It'd be far easier to just sell the silks somewhere, and with this big of a cargo hold, someone would have had word of a massive shipment of illegal silks sold somewhere. Either the silks were dumped, or they never existed in the first place.

"I don't know." Straik puts his hands on his hips, staring out the window. "It bothers me that I don't know. Here all this time, I thought I was the one in the family that broke the rules, the one that was shaming our good name. Now I see this…" He gestures at the window. "I don't know what to think."

"Hey, cheer up. Your uncle was a rebel before you were, right? The one that married a human and gave away a bunch of the family lands to them on Risda? You probably look pretty good compared to him."

Straik blinks. "Yes. You're right."

"I am?"

"I need to talk to my uncle." His look of melancholy disappears, replaced by one of determination. "He will know the truth of things. He will tell me if everything the Rin house stands for is a lie."

"Okay, uh…great?" I'm not sure when he thinks we'll be going. We're in the Slatra system, and there's no way we can get a comm out to Risda III, which is all the way on the other side of the galaxy. "I suppose we can all head that way after we bring in the Star, since we'll need to figure out a place for all these humans. I guess we can't wake them up yet. And I guess someone's going to have to stay on the Star here and fly it, since there's no crew."

"Yes," Straik says thoughtfully. "There are a lot of moving pieces that need to be considered."

"It's a pain in the keffing ass," I admit. "Might have been easier for everyone if this ship was never found."

"Mmm." Straik stares out the window. "Indeed."

Of course, that would mean I never met Jade, so I'm personally glad we found the Star. I can see how it bothers Straik, though. For all his pretentious black clothing and lofty way of speaking, he's got a good streak and tries to do the right thing, even as a pirate. There's no faking how horrified he is about the flesh trade we've discovered. I don't envy him trying to make sense of things.

I'm too tired to think about any of that anyhow. I yawn, ready to head back to bed. Now that I'm actually tired, I'd like to just rub one out while thinking of Jade and her delightful amber eyes, and then sink into sleep (also hopefully filled with Jade). "What's done is done," I say with a shrug. "I'm heading to bed. You going to sneak back out or do I need to tell Jade and the others that you're here?"