Free Blood & Steel by Angela Knight Page B

know she wasn’t that stupid. But there were six of the passages scattered around the enormous hold, and he had no way of knowing which one she’d pick. He’d have to guess, then somehow determine her approach to it. Not being an idiot, she’d chosen a circuitous route.
    Open it , Elyn thought, and dove, buctor-like for burrow again.
    Stars exploded in her skull, and she went down in a hard skid, so stunned she barely even felt the pain. A massive weight landed on her back, smashing her into the deck. “Got some bad news,” a deep voice rumbled in her ear. “Your stealth field is not as good as you think it is.”
    Fucking Tekker sensors.
    Elyn twisted, slammed an elbow back, connected with something hard, heard a grunt. Tried to eel free, but he’d hooked a thigh over her right hip and an arm under her left shoulder. Going for a headlock , she realized, and slammed her head back. Another grunt as she connected with his jaw, which was apparently solid tritanium, because the blow didn’t even rock him.
    “Dammit, I’m not going to kill you!” he snarled.
    She didn’t dignify that with an answer. She was too busy writhing in his hold, bucking hard against his strength. Anybody but a nanotekker would have had a hell of a time holding on to a desperate, pissed-off vampire, but Blade controlled her furious struggles with ease.
    “Elyn, if you’d just—”
    Rage popped her fangs, and she turned her head and sank them into the palm of his hand.
    “Gaah! Bitch!” His right arm released its python grip on her shoulder. She barely had time to realize that was a very bad sign before blackness exploded in her skull.  
    * * * *
    The little vamp went limp. Blade shook his stinging hand and ordered a scan. Unconscious but uninjured , his nanoplant told him.
    How long will she be out?
    Estimated three-point-two minutes.
    He jerked field restraints out of a belt pouch, and went to work twisting them around her wrists. A nanoplant-transmitted order activated the flexible coils, and they snapped rigid, tightening barely enough to dimple the skin. He dug out a thigh set and wrapped them around her upper legs above the knees, then followed that up with an ankle pair. Sedation field , he ordered them.
    Sedation field activated, they chorused.
    There. That would keep her out until he told the restraints to allow her to regain consciousness.
    His captive safely trussed, he got to his feet and considered her, rubbing his jaw. Between the head-butt and that elbow strike, tomorrow he’d have a set of impressive bruises. A human would be dead.
    Vampy could hit.
    He surveyed her grimly as she splayed face-down on the floor, reluctantly noticing her very nice ass. Actually, the whole package was gorgeous, which was how she’d seduced him and gotten his team killed. He stuck his foot under her body and flipped her over on her back.
    She wore a gleaming dark blue skinsuit piped in crimson, with red and blue armored boots. The snug armor hugged Elyn’s long, delicious body, with its high, full breasts. Her waist was smaller than the spread of his big hands, and her legs went into next week. She had an oval face and not much in the way of cheekbones, dewy, unlined skin, and a delicately long nose above a full mouth. Her eyes were huge and green when they’d been open, lashes long and feathery as a doll’s, with a tumble of bright golden curls to match.
    She looked at most twenty-four, a pretty neat trick for a woman pushing seventy. She’d been just nineteen when that bastard Kruz had assassinated her mother and enslaved her. That was fifty years ago. Fifty years as a slave to one of the nastiest assassins in human space, a fate Blade himself had escaped only because she’d warned him Kruz was hunting him.
    He owed her for that. But by playing sexual bait for him, she’d gotten both his team and his protectee killed, and he owed her for that too.
    So he’d killed Kruz, who had murdered all of Blade’s people so bloodily and spread