Vin's Rules (Outer Settlement Agency) by Lyn Brittan Read Free Book Online

house?”
    “Must be. Can’t hurt to confirm it.”
    It could, but they had to know.
    Three steps in and the young, flushed faced guardsman rushed their way. “This area’s restricted,” he said, voice cracking.
    “We need to talk to Graham.”
    The man shrugged at him and holstered his weapon. “Then you need to go back to the main house.”
    “This isn’t it? I just thought that with you guarding the place it must be important.”
    Johnny-Wants-To-Be-A-Soldier nodded. “Oh, I understand. Yeah. No, this is Doc’s place.”
    “Do you have two doctors then? I saw that sign on the main thoroughfare and—”
    “Right, right. That’s where you go if you’re sick.” He coughed and cleared his throat. As if remembering this wasn’t a social visit, his voice dropped a few octaves, and he waved them on. “This is restricted. You need to go on now.”
    “No worries. Sorry to bother you. Nice to see a good man doing his duty.”
    The kid brightened and damn near skipped back to his post as they departed. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen.
    Allie looked as though she might gag. Patting her head didn’t improve the arched eyebrow. “Lessons learned, Madam Inspector?”
    “Get your hand off my head first. Thanks. Okay, we need to get into the building before we leave.”
    “No. That’s not the lesson, actually. No. Not even a little. The lesson is, there’s fucked-up shit here. The larger lesson as a whole is that we need to get OSA and—”
    “Like you said, we don’t have immediate transport.”
    “But—”
    “And they’re probably watching us like hawks. They plan on us running. They might even be waiting for it. Why don’t we lay low a little until things settle down?”
    “Because they’re sickos. The only way to help is to get rid of this Graham guy and toss him into the nearest lake.”
    “So we kill him?”
    He’d thought about it. If he saw the asshole with his hands on a woman, there wouldn’t be anything stopping Vin from ripping his throat out. But what would happen next? Good odds said they’d be killed immediately by the men in tan.
    At least he would.
    And leaving Allie alone with these rejects wasn’t on the table.
    “If we have a shot of making it out—and I think we do—we need other people. Folks can’t be going along with this happily.”
    “Every man in tan seems to be.”
    “But who’s to say that’s every man? And don’t make their mistake of ignoring the women. If we stay, we need to prepare to fight. Who cares about the gender of the army we use, Allie? I just gotta get one. We find weapons and put them in the right hands.”
    She turned toward the alley then looked at the main building. “I can think of two places they’d be held. At the big house or at the medical lab. We’re going to have to break into Doc’s after all.”
    She flinched at an ear-splitting ringing bell. Fabrics of all colors caught the wind as folks scurried toward the main building.
    He bent at Allie’s incessant pinching of his arm and upturned face. “How’s this look? Docile enough?”
    “When this is over, I’m going to take you out to dinner.”
    “That sounded very much like an order, Security Agent Dhoma. In the real world, I’d own your career for that.”
    “You’d deserve it. Let me try again. When this is over...”
    “Yes?”
    “I’m going to do whatever it takes to make up for bringing you here.”
    “That sounds better and since you asked, I think I’d like a dinner at the most exclusive restaurant on that space nest everyone’s talking about.”
    “ The Lana ? Pretty sure I can make that happen.”
    The Lana was a space station named after his sister-in-law. The woman brought new joy to his family, and the vision of introducing her to Allie triggered a dampening wave of homesickness. Lana and his brother Cyprus, his parents, his crew. He wouldn’t let this place cheat him out of seeing them again.
    “Are you okay, Vin? You’ve gone