“Enough—”
Ian talks right over me. “Our main requirements are food and water. Now, it’s not essential, but it would make things easier if we could pay for what we need. So, does anyone have any money on them? Any way to access planeta credits?”
“You were the ones about to get on a prison ship bound for who knows where,” Merrick comments. “You didn’t think to bring any planetas with you?”
“We gave pretty much everything we had to Gage to get this far.” Max looks at him. “Where’s all the money we gave you?”
Gage gives a casual shrug. “Back in my cabin on the Caelestis.”
“You came on board with nothing?” Ian doesn’t sound convinced. But then, he has a suspicious nature.
Gage rolls his eyes. “In case you’ve forgotten, we left in kind of a hurry.”
Ian studies him with narrowed eyes for several seconds, then shrugs and turns to look at the rest of us. But no one speaks up.
“What about you Sisterhood people?” he asks. “Or do they send you out penniless into the world?”
“We had money,” Merrick answers. “But it was on the shuttle.”
This isn’t looking good. Ian must be thinking the same thing, because he looks straight at me. You know he’s scraping the bottom of the barrel if he’s actually looking to me for help. For a second, I actually wish I could—even though I have no desire to go to Rangar. It would be nice not to feel useless. But I’ve never actually carried money. Fuck, I’ve never even been inside a store.
He meanders over and stands looking down at me. I resist the urge to tug at the hem of my dress.
“I don’t have any money,” I say. “I mean, where would I put it in this dress?”
His gaze wanders over me, and a small smile tugs at his full lips. Which irritates the shit out of me. Why is it that when he smiles at me it’s because he needs something? “Tell me, Princess, are those real?” He waves a hand at the row of jeweled buttons that runs down my dress.
Of course they’re real. A princess of Senestris does not go out in public wearing fake jewels.
“They’re real,” Beckett asserts. “Only the best for the princess.”
Ian reaches out and plucks one of the buttons from the dress, and I slap at his hand. “Hey. Stop that.”
He holds up the rare black malinniten, and it glints in the light. “Very pretty,” he comments. “Looks like we’re sorted.”
Except I’m already nearly naked and those buttons are all that’s holding me together. “It may have escaped your notice,” I snap, “but I didn’t exactly pack an extra dress, so you can’t have this one.”
His eyes gleam with amusement and something else. Something that has my skin prickling and my stomach hollowing out as his gaze wanders down the tight dress to my bare legs. “Give me the dress, Princess, and I’ll buy you a new one.”
“With my money, I suppose?”
He shrugs. Merrick gets to his feet. “You can borrow my robe,” he says.
“So you can be naked instead?” I ask. “You don’t have to do that.”
The corners of his lips curl up just the tiniest bit in the closest thing to a smile I’ve seen from him. “I won’t be naked.”
He drags the robe over his head. Beneath it, he’s wearing black body armor—probably part of the reason he looked so big.
My father used to wear something similar. He told me it was because of the lower gravity of Serati, which means their bones aren’t as dense and can break much more easily. The armor is strengthened along the arms and legs to provide extra protection. Apparently, everyone from Serati wears something similar when they’re off-planet.
Once out of the robe, Merrick looks nothing like a priest. Instead, he looks like a warrior. His body is all hard muscle, and I wonder if I’ve misjudged who the biggest threat on this ship is.
“Stop staring, Princess, you’ll embarrass the man.”
I ignore Ian because I’m not the only one staring. Rain is looking at him as well—I assume because she’s never seen Merrick without his robe, either.
He tosses it to me, and I catch it. It’s made of some sort of rough natural fiber, no doubt bleached, the only adornment the emblem of the Dying Sun on the upper left of the chest. It’s grimy and dirty and smells of smoke, but I’ll take it.
“Ten minutes to landfall,” Beckett says. Gage managed to spoof legitimate landing credentials to pass through the Askkandian atmosphere, though in fairness, I don’t know how difficult that is—especially going into Rangar, which, if you believe my mother, lets any space trash in with a hearty welcome. The countdown to landfall is now visible on Beckett’s dash as well as the main console.
“Come on, Princess. Let’s have the dress. We don’t want to stick around this place longer than we have to.”
I heave a huge sigh and give in to the inevitable, but that doesn’t mean I’m changing in front of all of them. Clutching the robe, I head out but hesitate at the door as something occurs to me. I turn back to Ian, who raises a brow.
“Give me your knife,” I tell him.
Now both brows shoot up. “Excuse me?”
“Your knife. Don’t worry, I won’t stab you with it—at least not today. But there’s no way I’m getting out of this dress without that knife.”
He frowns. “How did you get into it?”
“Lara—my companion-in-waiting—dressed me.”
Beckett snorts. “’Cause she can’t dress herself.”
“I probably could if I was wearing a prison jumpsuit,” I shoot back, tired of being her verbal punching bag. “The Imperial Regalia isn’t quite so easy.”
Ian slides the wicked-looking blade from the sheath at the small of his back and hands it to me. I take it without another word and walk off the bridge, down the corridor toward the room I’m sharing with Rain. As I pass the closed-off area in the center of the ship that we haven’t been able to access, I pause and rest my palm against the warm metal. For some reason, it gives me comfort, and doing so has become a habit every time I pass.
Once in the room, I pull the material of the dress away from my skin and slice the knife through the front. I almost sigh with relief as the dress parts and I can breathe freely for the first time in days. I make a few more strategic cuts and then manage to wriggle out of what’s left of my slogg dress.
I want to take a few seconds to relish being free, but we’ll be landing any minute. So I drag the robe over my head and try really hard not to breathe in the stench of smoke and the underlying scent of man. I’ve never worn somebody else’s clothes before. First time for everything, I guess.
I head back to the bridge and toss the dress to Ian. There’s amusement but also something else in his eyes—like he knows that there’s no room for underwear beneath the Imperial Regalia and I’m naked under this loose robe. He doesn’t say anything, though. Just bites on his lower lip as he shakes his head and sinks into the captain’s chair. Then he pulls another knife from who knows where and starts slicing off the buttons and other jewels.