Drifters' Alliance, Book 2 by Elle Casey Page A

leave behind. What’s happening here can’t be happening, and yet it is. My history is back again to haunt me. Will it never end?
    I reach the airlock and slam my hand onto the keypad to open the door. Rollo is standing there in shock at seeing me, his eyeballs bulging from their sockets and his mouth hanging open.
    “When were you going to tell me?” I ask, folding my arms over my chest to keep myself from punching him in the face. I’m breathing like I’ve run fifty laps around the ship’s interior.
    “Tell you what?” He backs up a step.
    “You know what. When were you going to tell me?” I still can’t believe this is happening. He’s here. He’s really here. Un-fucking-believeable. Now half of me wants to punch him and half of me wants to hug him.
    He shakes his head, aiming for an expression of pity, I think. “Sorry, but you’ve lost Rollo. Rollo is confused. Or maybe you’re confused about something.”
    I uncross my arms. Screw being civil . My hand rests at my thigh, my fingers grazing over the handle of my knife. My fingers tremble with the shock of what I see before me. It’s all becoming clearer … the curve of his chin, the angle of his cheekbones. I didn’t see it before because of the MI, but I see it now.
    Rollo’s eyes drop down and he takes in my movements. As he registers my agitation and aggressive stance, his legs spread apart just the slightest bit.
    I grin at his tell. “You are such a crafty bastard.” I shake my head at him, more of my fear being replaced by warmer feelings evoked from our mutual past. Damn, I’ve missed you, asshole . “Talk about balls … sneaking onto my ship? Selling me out to Captain Bob? Who else knows where I am, huh? Did you signal the OSG too?”
    His face goes blank. “Rollo really doesn’t know what you’re talking about.” He swallows with effort, a dead giveaway that he’s lying. He might be sneaky, but he’s no super spy. If I’d paid closer attention, I probably would have seen him giving himself away a hundred times by now. I’m seriously losing my touch. How did I not see this before?
    I can feel Jeffers at my back, and his presence is comforting, even though I know I can take Rollo down if he even thinks about making a move I don’t like. I’ve done it once before, so I know I can do it again. Not that I want to. Hell, I didn’t want to the first time I did it, but I was given no choice then. That doesn’t stop me from wishing I’d made different decisions, though. We all live and learn, but my lessons were particularly harsh. They still haunt me, and I know they’ll never let me go. This situation is evidence of that.
    “That whole talking-in-the-third-person thing had me fooled,” I say, yanking myself back to the present. Putting that distance between himself and this made-up person Rollo in his head made it possible for him to lie very convincingly. “I thought you were just some kind of droid head, but now I see it for the genius it was. Well done, Macon . Well done.”
    At the sound of that name, his skin takes on a very pale shade of pink. When I slide the knife out of its sheath, the color drops away from his complexion entirely, and he goes white. “Who’s Macon?”
    I point the knife at his face. “You’re Macon.” I wave the blade around slowly, first pointing at his ears and then his nose, finally his neck. “You’ve had a lot of MI, that’s for sure. I didn’t recognize you at all. Not until you messed with your ear, anyway.”
    His hand starts to drift up to his ear, but when he catches himself doing it, he stops and scowls. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Folding his arms across his chest, he looks over my shoulder at Jeffers. “I think your captain is having an episode or something. Maybe that disk thing is making her sick again.”
    Jeffers steps up next to me and stops. “You know him from your time with the OSG.”
    I nod as I smile. “That, I do.”
    “And his name is Macon,