Skip Trace Read online

  Skip Trace

  By Jenn Burke and Kelly Jensen

  Book three of Chaos Station

  Zander Anatolius has been revived from the fatal effects of the super-soldier program, but now he has to face his estranged family and tell a story few would believe. With his lover and the crew of the Chaos at his side, Zander returns home to a media frenzy, threats from the military and pressure to join the family business.

  Felix Ingesson still struggles with the horror of believing Zander dead. And no matter how strong their emotional connection is, Felix feels out of place in the glittery world of Zander’s rich family. His lover would be better off without a broken, low-class ship’s engineer holding him back.

  When the crew receives word that another of Zander’s former teammates needs rescue, Felix travels with the Chaos...setting Zander free. But when Zander is arrested for treason, the men realize they need each other as much as ever—not only to survive, but to make their lives worth living.

  76,000 words

  Dear Reader,

  If you’re in North America, you’re heading in to that time of year when you grab a cup of hot apple cider, bundle up with a warm, fuzzy blanket and grab your phone or e-reader to snuggle down with a good book on your couch. This October, we have a few books that will make you want to do this every day. Go ahead and tell your day-job boss that you have a note from the editor excusing your absence.

  Don’t you just love Lauren Dane’s books and her feisty heroines? We do, too, and we’re excited for the next Goddess with a Blade paranormal romance installment, At Blade’s Edge. Rowan Summerwaite sneaks into London so she can begin to unravel just who and what is behind the rot within Hunter Corp. It’s not so much that someone ordered her assassination—people try to kill her all the time—but it’s the risks faced by those she cares for and the growing instability of relations between humans and Vampires that make her so angry.

  Joining Lauren on her release day is HelenKay Dimon and her next contemporary romance. Those who read Chain of Command (and if you didn’t, why not?) have been clamoring for this story. We fell in love with Jason and Molly as secondary characters and you’re going to adore following along with their love story in Line of Fire. Former special ops marine Jason McAdams spent most of his adult life running from trouble and fighting his attraction to his best friend’s baby sister, Molly Cain, but when she makes it clear she’s tired of games and ready to move on, he has to decide if he can break the curse that has left his personal life in shambles and free them both from the secrets that have kept them apart.

  There have been more than a few emails in our inbox telling us to hurry up and release Skip Trace, after readers consumed Chaos Station and Lonely Shore by Kelly Jensen and Jenn Burke. Now Zander is finally healthy and ready to track down his super soldier teammates, and he’s counting on his lover Felix to be at his side. But Felix, overwhelmed by the events that led them to this point, isn’t sure what he wants—or if he even deserves a chance at happiness with Zed. Pick up this male/male romance today!

  Alyssa Cole’s characters are getting Mixed Signals in her newest stand-alone postapocalyptic romance. Maggie Seong survived the apocalypse, but going off to college—and being torn between her lost love and the man she’s spent years pining for—might just be harder.

  Craving a great romantic suspense to get your heart pounding and nerves racing during these cool fall nights? A dying woman, desperate to live, and a solider, desperate to die, join forces to stop a madman before he can unleash a devastating biological weapon in Julie Rowe’s Lethal Game, book two in her Biological Response Team series. And once you’ve devoured this one, go back and pick up Deadly Strain.

  We welcome Jonathan Watkins to the Carina Press publishing team with his fantastic, previously self-published mystery series. Kicking things off in Motor City Shakedown, unexpected danger and unlikely romance converge on rookie criminal lawyer Issabella Bright when she partners with the reckless and charming Darren Fletcher to unravel an insidious Detroit conspiracy of drugs, lies and murder in book one of the Bright & Fletcher mysteries. Look for the next book, Dying in Detroit, coming next month, with books three and four to release in January and February 2016.

  Coming in November: Three debut authors bring us their fantastic new novels, Josh Lanyon’s new adult male/male romance is finally available and Piper J. Drake busts out her new pen name and her new romantic suspense series. If you love Maya Banks, you’ll want to pick up this series for sure!

  In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the fantastic lineup of books this month and that your boss doesn’t give you too hard of a time for missing work. No one should get in trouble for reading when they should be working!

  Happy reading!

  Angela James

  Editorial Director, Carina Press

  Dedication

  For Felix, our porcupine.

  Our heartfelt gratitude goes out to all soldiers, particularly those who are scarred by war.

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Excerpt from Chaos Station by Jenn Burke and Kelly Jensen

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Jenn Burke and Kelly Jensen

  About the Authors

  Epigraph

  New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.

  ~ Lao Tzu

  Chapter One

  Alpha Station, 2269

  “Does Zander have a large family?”

  “Hmm?” Felix glanced up from the holotext he’d been skimming. Docking protocols were the same at all Anatolius stations. Of course, Alpha being the oldest, and home base to the Anatolius family, there were several hundred extra cautions. But really? He could land a battlecruiser on a comet; he didn’t need to be reminded of the buoyancy of a gravity differential.

  Qek had a blue finger pointed toward the forward holoscreen, which showed a magnified view of their designated pier. “None of the seventy-three people waiting at Beta Twenty-Five bear a familial resemblance to Zander,” she said.

  No one else in Zed’s family had ever worn an Allied Earth Forces uniform, either.

  Felix studied the small crowd depicted in the holo. The front line shone with brass. The AEF had turned out a general to honor Zed’s return home—well, to the station where his family lived. To be reunited with the people he’d avoided after the end of the war, because he hadn’t been able to face them after the AEF had fucked him over so badly.

  “That’s not his family, Qek.” Felix’s ire rose quickly and reliably. He stabbed the holo, bent finger of his crooked left hand sinking through the image. “Turn it
off—”

  “What the fuck?”

  Too late. Zed had arrived on the bridge and stood openmouthed in the entry. The panel beside the open doorway flashed in irritation as his bulk prevented the hatch from sliding closed. Resisting the urge to chew on his lips, Felix studied his lover’s face, looking for clues on how to handle this particular situation. Swear? Throw out an off-color joke? Blame the alien? No, Qek had done nothing wrong—except indulge in her habit of using the forward-view screens when they could rely on sensor data to dock.

  “Is this what you would call a welcome wagon?” Qek asked. “There appear to be no wagons attached to the contingent, but human idioms often account for factors not present.”

  A muscle jerked along the tight line of Zed’s jaw, and that damned crease teased the middle of his dark brows. Felix hated the crease. Back when Zed had been on a sharp decline to oblivion, that line between his brows had been a permanent furrow.

  “Only my family knows we’re arriving today.” Zed stepped forward and the door slid closed with a sigh of relief.

  Felix turned back to the copilot’s console. “I’ll contact Docking Control, request a new berth.”

  “Don’t bother. We’re obviously on approach. If we change course, they’ll follow. And it’s likely someone in Docking Control leaked the information in the first place, because my family sure as hell wouldn’t give me up.”

  “Y’all need a private dock or something.” Felix reached over to kill the display.

  Zed arrested his hand halfway. “We have one. But with the whole family here to meet me, the private dock is full, and I thought we’d draw less attention this way. The Chaos isn’t registered to me or anyone related to me.”

  No, it wasn’t. Despite having thrown enough credits at the small corvette to replace every system—and she still looked as if she’d flown through a debris field backward—Zed did not own the Chaos. Felix did...half of it, anyway. The other half belonged to his business partner, Elias Idowu, who captained the vessel. Felix kept engineering humming. Qek was their pilot, which was awesome as the Chaos had an ashushk star drive and no one handled jump-space like the little blue aliens who’d figured out the best way to traverse it. They also had a doctor on staff, and Zed served as their security officer.

  Given the events of the past few months, however, it would be reasonable to assume that Zed had become linked with the Chaos. The AEF had followed them to Ashushk Prime when they were trying to save Zed from the effects of the experimental training he’d undergone during the war with the stin. Other aliens. Not blue, not friendly.

  The AEF also must have followed them to Alpha. Or made the assumption they would stop here before resuming business as usual—shipping shit from one end of the galaxy to the other, tracing the occasional skip or bounty, or—

  “You don’t think this has to do with the project Marnie’s working on for us, do you?” Felix grabbed the water bottle he had stashed next to his console. The flexible plastic crunched as he sucked on it. Man, his throat was dry. Recycled air, fear...pissedoffedness.

  “If it is, we’re up shit creek without a paddle.”

  Qek turned away from the pilot’s console, unblinking gaze flicking between them. “Do you mean we are in trouble?”

  “If the AEF suspects we’re tracking down the last members of Project Dreamweaver, then, yes, we’re in trouble. Deep trouble,” Felix said.

  Zed huffed. “Marnie is covert ops. This didn’t come from her. Let’s just assume someone in Docking Control sold me out.” He waved at the holo. They were a couple hundred meters out from their pier, and the small sea of faces had come into sharper focus. “They scrambled to put this unit together. Check out the uniforms. Ground ops, station ops. No special forces, no MPs. It’s an honor guard or some shit.”

  He sounded confident, but Felix caught the more cautious undertone. Zed was worried, and if he was worried, then it was time to hit the panic button.

  Or come up with a plan.

  “What does the bright green uniform signify?” Qek asked.

  Felix glanced at the holo again. Behind the AEF and spilling around the sides were a number of men and women dressed in the ubiquitous green skin suits of the media. News was entertainment, so reporters on assignment dressed in suits that could be programmed at a whim to resemble anything from military armor to ashushk formal wear.

  “The media. Scum suckers.”

  “Tell us how you really feel,” Zed said.

  “That would take too long.” Felix smacked Qek’s console, killing the display. “Okay, I’ve seen enough. D’you think if we just docked and sat there, they’d eventually go away?”

  “Not likely. Get us locked in. I’ll go call my brother.” Zed delivered a quick squeeze to Felix’s shoulder before ducking back through the hatch, leaving the bridge feeling empty.

  Felix twitched his display toward Qek. “Can you lock us in?” They’d been coasting through the docks with minimal input from him, anyway. Just as well Alpha Docking Control ran a tight operation—Felix had been so distracted by the view of their pier that he might have hit anything that wandered off course, or similarly disregarded the hundred or so extra cautions.

  “Certainly, Fixer.”

  The crew of the Chaos called him Fixer, a nickname he’d acquired in service aboard an AEF battlecruiser. It suited him. He fixed stuff. Zed, on the other hand, called him Flick, and had done since they were boys. So often lately, though, neither name fit properly. He’d been confronted with stuff he couldn’t fix. Or flick aside.

  Qek took over operations, initializing the sequence that would guide the Chaos into position, equalizing conflicting fields and activating the virtual tethers. Shaking off his moment of introspection, Felix reached for a more useful mental exercise. What he could fix or flick, otherwise known as “reviewing the mission.”

  One, get Zed home and all cozy with his family. Two, track down his other family, the members of Project Dreamweaver. His teammates, the ones who hadn’t been fixed. How they’d help those men and women hadn’t been decided, so three was vague. None of them knew who they’d find or what state they’d be in. Three was a rolling point. Four...four was even more nebulous. Four was trying to be what Zed needed him to be. Friend, lover...could he ever be considered family? Could families consist of only two people?

  Wondering about that was not useful.

  He activated an external feed. The Alpha Station docks were typically Anatolius. Beautiful and functional. Strung in an arc around the vast bay, ships hung from their platforms like bristled jewels. The gravitational differential between the docking cradles and the access piers caused each “jewel” to bob slightly, giving the illusion of a current moving beneath them. Running lights flickered and flared against the black oval of space behind the stasis field. Felix had seen pictures of ocean-going ships in harbor at night, and the scene was eerily similar, even the backdrop of stars. The AEF contingent lining their pier stripped any romanticism from the vista, however.

  “Are you searching for something in particular?”

  Felix switched the view to the approaching pier, specifically the lower portion. “That.” He pointed to the end of their berth. “Ladders down. There will be an under dock. Maybe we can duck down there. Avoid the welcome wagon altogether.”

  “My experience of the AEF has not been particularly welcoming to date. You and Zander being the notable exceptions, of course.”

  “Amen.” Felix had enough of the AEF to last several lifetimes. So had Zed. Was it too much to ask that they could have a couple of quiet days on Alpha—let Zed do the family thing—before disappearing into the black to do stupidly unremarkable things for the rest of their lives?

  Not that Zed would ever be unremarkable. Zander Damianos Anatolius would always be the third son of the richest man in the galaxy. He would always be a hero, the
AEF’s prize, the man whose actions might have ended the eight-year war with the stin. He would always be the man who had died—no matter how hard Felix had wished him to live—and been resurrected by the mysterious gatekeepers of the galaxy, the Guardians, for a purpose which none of them could divine.

  “We are locked.”

  Felix deactivated his console and pushed out of the copilot’s chair. “Thanks. I’m gonna go see if Zed and his brother have worked out a Plan B.” Being an Anatolius, Brennan would have Plans C through Z already laid out as well.

  Felix found Zed in conference with Elias and their doctor, the redheaded Nessa O’Brien. Nessa and Qek were a package deal. Best friends for over a decade, they always crewed together. Nessa and Elias were something else entirely. Felix had given up keeping track of their on-again, off-again relationship.

  “We throwing Zed to the wolves or what?” Felix put on a smile that felt a bit too tight.

  Elias’s return grin flashed white in his dark face. “I thought I might go out there and announce I tossed him out of an airlock somewhere around Zilos.”

  “The media would rip you apart,” Nessa said.

  If the media knew who was on board, and it would be stupid to assume they didn’t.

  “Plan, ah...F?” Felix surveyed faces for clues.

  “Fuck ’em all?” Elias’s brows formed two high arches.

  “Yeah, that’s always my go-to.”

  “We’re going to go with Plan A,” Zed said. “Get out there and see what they want. Could just be a ‘we know you’re here’ kinda thing. The AEF throwing their weight around and making sure everyone hears the thump.”

  Felix swallowed for about the thirtieth time in the last half hour. His fingers curled into his palm and he wished he’d brought the water bottle with him. He could use a soft object to squeeze and break. “That better be all they’re about.”

  “Bren’s on his way with the entire Anatolius legal department. If they want more, they’ll get it.”