Free No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three by Loren Rhoads Page B

to wait to see what she’d be charged with. Had they reconsidered her defense of Mykah on the beach yesterday? Had one of the attackers died? Or was she being charged with beating up the bounty hunter? That used to be considered self-defense.
    Jail guards escorted her to a holding cell. It seemed surprisingly full. Maybe Lautan was having a crime wave as things got tough—or maybe the government had decided to raise funds by increasing arrests. As much as she’d been enjoying her vacation, Raena wondered if it had been worth getting off the ship.
    While she looked over her cellmates, she entertained herself by assigning crimes to them: shoplifting, grifting, brawling. She had the big simian girl down for belligerency, if that was a crime here. Poor thing had a seriously pouty expression.
    Raena walked over to the three Chameleon girls sprawled on the lone sleeping bench. “Shift,” she told them nicely.
    They appraised her with narrowed eyes.
    Raena smiled. “Ladies, they took my boots because I sent a bounty hunter to the hospital this morning with them.” Not entirely cause and effect, but both parts of the sentence were true. “I don’t want to stand around barefoot. Shift.”
    They turned pointedly away.
    Raena snatched hold of the closest girl, flung her to the floor, and held her down with one dirty bare foot across her neck.
    The other two launched themselves off the bench together.
    Careful not to injure the girl beneath her foot, Raena struck out hard enough that the skull of one girl cracked into the skull of the other. They collapsed to the less than sanitary floor in a tangle of limbs.
    Raena let the third girl up, but the fight had gone out of her now that her sisters were down. The confrontation ended so quickly that the jailers didn’t notice. Raena smiled again.
    She climbed up onto the bench and folded her legs under her. When she looked up, the one she’d labeled belligerent stood over her.
    “Want a seat?” Raena asked. “There’s plenty of room.”
    The simian girl sat down. “What happened to you?”
    “They made me lay in a puddle in the spaceport.” Raena rubbed her hand over her head, but her hair was still too damp to stand up. “How about you?”
    “They locked me up for not paying my hotel bill. I thought my boyfriend had gotten it. Instead, he got my sister and left me behind.”
    Raena shook her head in sympathy. “How long have you been waiting to get out?”
    “Three days. The consulate was supposed to have contacted my parents to bail me out.”
    “Three days?” Raena echoed.
    “Yeah. We may be in here for a while.”
    “Good thing we’ve got a place to sit.”
    *   *   *
    Haoun sat under an umbrella on the beach, gazing out at the steely waves. The temperature was more pleasant now that the storm had passed. He wished Raena was with him, then laughed. She probably wished it, too, wherever they were holding her.
    He remembered the first time she came out of her cabin on the Veracity , six months ago. She’d worn a short, bright blue dress that revealed her thighs. The human girls he’d dated before had been curvier, softer, and certainly taller. He’d been put off by her size and configuration.
    For a while, Raena seemed to avoid him, preferring to spend her time with Jain Thallian and Mykah. Once Haoun learned more about her, about how long she had been imprisoned alone, her aloofness seemed more like shyness. It wasn’t that Raena disliked nonhumans; she’d had so little interaction with them that she was afraid of misreading them, of offending them. Most of all, of frightening them.
    Only after he’d seen her working to befriend Coni did Haoun realize that Raena was as hungry for companionship as he was himself. While she struggled to unravel Sloane’s attack on her with the Messiah drug, Haoun went out of his way to keep her company.
    She made him feel protective. He’d thought at first that was because of her size. Now that he really thought about