Assassins & Olympians (Colibri Investigations) by Marie Howalt

Author:Marie Howalt [Howalt, Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spaceboy Books LLC
Published: 2023-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

Alannah had made a batch of black brew and prepared a plate of instant cookies and was waiting for them in the galley when Richard, Eddie and O’Connor returned.

“Just so you know,” she said after the initial greetings, “This is not a thing now. I’m not your cook. I was bored waiting for you and procrastinating proof reading.”

“So noted,” Richard said. Bored as well as worried, he gathered from the nervous energy permeating the air around her.

The snacks had the added bonus of sweetening Eddie’s mood as she grabbed a cookie and bit into it. Good. She had been more than usually snarky because of the long wait and not at all happy about being saddled with O’Connor for hours.

“Please help yourself, Kierran,” Alannah said, smiling at the enhanced soldier.

Eddie almost didn’t scowl.

O’Connor did not take a cookie.

“All right,” Richard said after pouring himself a glass of water. He’d had enough liquid caffeine for one day. “When we arrived on Stonehenge, a group of Terran Defense Force officers had made it ahead of us and were arresting Egis,” he said for Alannah’s benefit. “It turns out my, um, contact there was onto him already.”

“Your contact being the mysterious Colonel, I assume?” Eddie asked.

“Yes, the very same. I had to wait for them to interrogate Egis before I could meet up with you again.”

“When you say interrogate,” Alannah prompted, “what does that entail?”

“Not tearing off anyone’s fingernails,” Richard replied. “The Colonel did a pharmaceutically assisted interrogation. Anyway, they mean to look into and go after anyone who contracted Egis in the past as well as locate and catch his hired killers.”

Richard caught a narrowing of O’Connor’s eyes and a stiffening of his posture, but the young soldier said nothing.

“I honored our agreement,” Richard told him. “As far as anyone not present at this table is concerned, you escaped after failing to kill me on Dwebl.”

“Thank you,” Kierran said.

“Okay, but if your Colonel is going after literally everyone else,” Eddie said, “then what do we do? Call it a day and move on?”

“Not quite,” Richard said, not adding that he wished Eddie would stop calling Dietrich his Colonel. It would only make her do it on purpose to annoy him. “They told me who contracted Egis to contract O’Connor. It turns out to be a woman whose husband hired me to spy on her to confirm or debunk his suspicion that she had an affair with someone else. It turned out he was absolutely correct. There was a messy divorce and apparently, that was enough for her to want revenge on me.”

“When was this?” Eddie asked.

“A month or two before I hired you,” Richard said.

“Ah.” Eddie nodded sagely. “Of course. See, this kind of thing would never have happened with me on board.”

“That,” Richard said, pointing a finger at her, “makes absolutely no sense at all.”

Eddie shrugged. “So this cheating psycho bitch sent a killer after you because you bruised her ego,” she summed it up and flicked a glance at Alannah. She brought up her hands in defense.

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