The Collapsing Empire (The Interdependency #1)(44)

“I’m touched, Ghreni. Really, I am.”

“This is why I’m telling you now that you have no idea what’s coming, and why in the end it wouldn’t be a bad thing to stay on my good side.”

“I’m perfectly happy to stay on your good side, Ghreni. What I’m not perfectly happy to do is give you back three fucking million marks because you didn’t think through the terms of the deal. Or to pretend to be intimidated by you huffing and puffing at me about how you’ll make me regret crossing you. Grow the fuck up, Ghreni.”

“I’d like you to tell me if the Claremonts contact you. And by ‘you,’ I mean any member of your crew.”

“I’ll be happy to do that for another half million marks.”

“Kiva.”

“‘Kiva’ what, Ghreni? We’re doing business here. You want information. You were willing to pay for that information before. I’m letting you have more information. At a substantial discount from before.”

“You know I’ll still have people at Imperial Station looking for him to board your ship.”

“Of course. I would too, in your shoes. But I don’t think you’re going to find him. If he has any brains at all he’ll find someone else to get him off this fucking rock. Which I will note is fine with me. I already have his half million marks for passage, nonrefundable. Which I will note was the amount that finally pushed this whole fucking shitbag of a trip into the black. Well, that and your three million marks.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

“Where are you now? On the station or on the planet?”

“I’m on the planet having meetings with our people here before we head out. Tell your fucking duke we’ll expect our money back with interest. That is, if he manages to keep his head for the next week, which I’m officially doubting and which would not bother me at all.”

“Would you like to have dinner?”

“What?” Kiva said.

“Would you like to have dinner before you go?”

“You know of a restaurant that’s open during a civil war?”

“We could have it at my place.”

Kiva laughed. “You’re actually literally still trying to fuck me.”

“I’m not going to lie. I wouldn’t mind. We did it pretty well, before everything.”

“Yes, we did,” Kiva admitted. “The actual fucking was good, Ghreni. It’s the metaphorical fucking I’m not in the mood to forgive. Now or ever.”

“Fair enough. Let me know if the Claremonts contact you.”

“You know the fee.”

“Fine.”

“Good doing business with you, Ghreni.”

Ghreni snorted and broke the connection.

“You know that he would have tried to kill you if you went to dinner with him,” Vrenna Claremont said. She and Marce were sitting with Kiva in a conference room at the House of Lagos’s local offices.

“I would have broken his goddamned spine,” Kiva said. Vrenna smiled at this.

“I’d like to go back to the part where you told Ghreni Nohamapetan that I booked passage from you,” Marce said.

“What about it?”

“You told him?”

“You already know I did.”

“Why?”

“Because I needed the three million marks he offered for the information.”

“Yeah, but then he grabbed me and held me hostage and planned to torture and maybe kill me.”

Kiva shrugged. “We told your sister immediately after they grabbed you, because I had people watching you. And then we gave her all the information she needed to find you and get you. Hell, we even gave her your rucksack with the adorable little stuffed pig in it as proof we weren’t fucking around.”

“I still could have been hurt. Or I could have died.”

“You weren’t and didn’t.”

“But—”

Kiva held up a hand. “Can I just wrap up this whole line of conversation by saying I really don’t give a shit whether you’re upset? If you were actually hurt, or dead, then I’d say sorry. But you’re not, so suck it up. The way I see it, if Ghreni wanted you bad enough to give me three million fucking marks for you, then sooner or later he would have just tried to grab you anyway, whether or not I told him anything. Since that was the case, I decided to get paid. This trip was in the red, now it’s not. And we did give your sister information to save your ass. Stop whining about it, for fuck’s sake.”

“I … I literally don’t know what to say to that,” Marce said.

“You could say ‘thank you,’” Kiva said, and noticed Vrenna smiling.

“I don’t think I will,” Marce said.

“Okay. But either way, let’s table this and move on, shall we?”

Marce lapsed into silence, next to his still grinning sister, and Kiva noted that both of them were attractive, Marce in a nerdy, probably attentive and considerate way, and Vrenna in a way that suggested that it was fifty/fifty whether your bedframe would be a pile of kindling at the end of a fuck date. Whether Kiva had wanted to admit it or not, Ghreni’s totally insincere attempt at a rendezvous had reminded her it’d been a week since her last attempt at an orgasm, with that assistant purser, and in the time since she was either too busy or too pissed off even to rock herself off.