Bounty for the Bride

She was supposed to bring him in. She brought him home. Amari Okonkwo is twenty-six and the best skip-tracer in the Astral Verge — fast, funny, and chronically underpaid. Brakk is a K'tharr warlord, forty-eight solar cycles, quietly enormous, and the subject of the largest bounty ever posted. She catches him in eleven minutes. He tells her the truth in eleven more. The man who posted the bounty burned her colony and his. So they make a deal: captor and prisoner, all the way across three systems, straight to the man they both want. It works for eleven days. Then it works too well — stakeouts, docking rings, one bad fight in a Verge market, a one-bed cabin they both pretend not to notice. A warrior who has outlived everyone he loved. A bounty hunter who has never stayed anywhere long enough to be loved at all. Some bounties are paid in credits. Some are paid in a life.