Cuius Testiculos Habes, Habeas Cardia Et Cerebellum

Captain Tray Porthos was pissed. 

Imrhien had a pretty general idea as to the why part. She’d done something risky and the man always seemed to get his knickers in a twist whenever she stuck her neck out. Or when another man bought her a drink, asked her to dance, or looked at her in a less than wholesome way, for that matter. She was fairly certain he wouldn’t have been quite that mad if Mikie had been the one on the table taking her clothes off. 

Anyhow, Mikie couldn’t have done it because Squirrel, a big time job broker and potentially the man who had set them up to take the fall for quite a few murders, had already made a pass at her and she’d sneered at him. The only other member of their crew who qualified in the way of having the proper plumbing was Kiara, and she had been making up for lost time, off servicing a client after her lengthy sojourn on the Eluvian World Ship. The Galisga would have been much better suited for the job, anyhow, given that this was right up her alley, but timing is a fragile thing. So that left Imrhien, who had fallen back on dancing for cash plenty when times got tight, to seduce the bastard. It wasn’t like they could exactly corner him and beat the information out of him – not with his thug squad perched around the bar to ensure nobody gave him any trouble. It had to be subtle. Well, sort of subtle. Okay, so, not subtle, just not obviously menacing.

Somehow, Tray seemed to think playing the jealous lover would help her, stomping around behind the bar like an enraged bull, reaching for his swords every time another piece of her clothing came off. At least squirrel seemed to enjoy igniting the man’s ire, every now and then tossing out an inflammatory and insulting comment for the captain’s edification. She didn’t like that Tray was now linked to her in Squirrel’s mind – she had intended to solo this endeavor so that if things went south, she was the only one getting shot at.

It wasn’t like Tray had a thing for her. He’d scorned every advance she’d made and had been pretty clear that his only interest in her was as a pilot. His obvious possessiveness over her was irritating as hell, given that he didn’t even have a right to be possessive. That, and Imrhien just didn’t like being treated like property.

Despite Tray’s internal struggle across the room as to whether or not he should bring swords to a gun fight to defend some honor that he apparently imagined she still had, things were going well. Nothing loosens lips like bare flesh and the suggestion of sex – except maybe alcohol or whatever truth-inducing drugs were on the market these days – and Squirrel was bragging about some huge job that was going to make everyone involved disgustingly rich. Intuition suggested that this was the very job she was interested in learning more about, so she pressed. Squirrel pushed back.

She ended up all but naked in his lap. Actually touching him hadn’t exactly been part of her plan, but at least being that close to him gave her a second option if the first didn’t pan out. She continued needling him, and he continued to evade her. Once the suggestion of going back to his place came up, though, she was fairly certain that pillow talk wasn’t going to get her what she wanted. That, and she was also fairly certain that Tray was having an apoplectic fit and wasn’t going to stand back watching a whole lot more, even with Mikie’s glares and hissed advice. He certainly wasn’t going to let them leave without getting himself killed. Not that she had any intention of leaving with Squirrel.

Generally when someone is touching your intimate bits intimately, it’s extremely hard to focus on other things… like what their other hand is doing… like having your own sidearm drawn against you. At least not until it’s pressed against your throat and the distracting sensation has ceased. It probably wasn’t her smoothest move ever, but it worked, and that’s what counted. Though, it didn’t have much effect on Squirrel – the bastard apparently still thought he was getting a piece of tail out of this encounter, attempting to intimidate her into giving him his gun back, then returning to his apartment with him. Sometimes, holding a gun to a man’s head just isn’t enough to be taken seriously. Or perhaps bare breasts take something away from one’s credulity.

In order to gain his full attention, as well as cooperation, she utilized that other hand – the one that had so thoroughly been distracting him the moment before – to grip a few essential and rather sensitive bits of him and squeezed, twisting his flesh. The change was immediate, Squirrel’s eyes watering as he suddenly found himself begging her to relinquish his nuts, his voice having jumped to about the same octave as his namesake.

Irritatingly, he still didn’t come clean with the intel she was after, and in an interesting twist, revealed that he knew exactly who she was and what kind of trouble she was in. Aside from that fascinating development, she was fairly certain the bulk of it was lies. He had implicated Xue as the power behind all of this, but it smelled wrong. Especially when, despite doing a fairly good job of hiding behind an infuriating façade of condescending calm, the man’s eyes were full of fear. And it wasn’t fear of her.

She couldn’t kill him. At some point, they were going to need more information from him, and killing him right there would be self-defeating. That, and she had every intention of everyone walking out of the bar with no shots fired, and there was zero chance of that happening if she killed him.

He wasn’t graceful about being released, either, leaving the gun she’d pulled on him on the table as a gift for her. Imrhien decided she was going to mail it back to him along with a can of crushed nuts. But the important thing was that he left and took his thugs with him. The crew of Tsunami now had to face the bleak prospect of contacting Xue, as well as figuring out what exactly they were going to do about Jo Massenberg’s body.

And Imrhien had to either avoid or assuage Tray, because boy, was he pissed.