Too quick for her to have detected, her target's gaze had snapped directly in her direction, his eyes locking with her scope and narrowing dangerously. The shock of it was enough to make her snap back from the gun, a tremor rocking through her body at the feeling of that icy pink gaze.
"What in the worlds." Her hand flew to her chest as she tried to calm her racing heart.
She hissed out a breath between her teeth, frustrated with herself at the overreaction.
She knew there was no way the barbarian could have spotted her, especially not through the thick of the trees with his bare eye, so why was it she jumped like this was her first job? She shout have laughed and taken the shot, not hop back from a clear kill.
Ten years of training and she managed to fuck up an easy shot. Way to go Jessabelle.
Gritting her teeth and returning to the gun, she attempted refocusing on the spot where she had spotted the men last, only to see nothing in its place. They had vanished. Not even the ship could be seen looming in the background.
They were simply gone.
She tried swerving her sights across the trees once more, testing to see if she had simply knocked the gun out of place, but saw nothing. It was as if they were never there at all.
That odd feeling that crawled through her veins multiplied into something icy and cold, mingling with the doom clouding her mind. She didn't know whether the feeling was from the feeling of losing her lead or the fear she had been caught.
"There's no way they could have seen her," she muttered to herself in disbelief.
She was two miles up into the trees. Even the most attuned predators couldn't see from that distance. They had to have been spooked by something else and run onto their ship in order to find shelter. Perhaps she had missed someone or something else in her haste to spy out her targets. It was the only logical conclusion.
After all she wasn't the only predator on the planet.
Still, she couldn't take the chance. She had to be sure she wasn't compromised.
She had seen firsthand the things targets tended to do to assassins out in the middle of space. There was a reason why she solely traveled alone these days.
Cursing, she speedily packed away her supplies, using the rope she had secured herself with to descend to her ship below. The contract was officially canceled until further notice, and she was getting as far from this planet as she physically could before those things found her.
The ship was the same as it ever was, shiny and tiny like she liked it. The entire thing was only big enough for the command center and the cot in the back, probably the size of an average living area on the inside. It wasn't the most luxurious thing, but it got the job done well enough. She could upsize if she wanted to, but never really saw the purpose when the whole point of the job was to fly under the radar.
You couldn't exactly fly under the radar in a luxury ship with all the furnishings, now could you? Too many of her kind had made that mistake after getting eviscerated by a warship's laser cannons upon sight on the radar.
Now, a tiny little thing like this? It showed up as little more than a meteor on even the newest and most upgraded ship sensors.
An assassin's wet dream.
As per usual, upon entering the ship the entire thing lit up brightly as if welcoming her home. One deep breath of that stale recycled ship air and she was right back where she started all over again. At least this place didn't smell like wet moss and scales like back home on the swamp planet.
She'd take anything over that.
"Heya, Handsome," she called to the ship affectionately, smoothing her hands over the smooth metal walls as was customary to her return.
The ship, ever silent, was silent. One of the things she wished she hadn't cut costs on was the ship AI she could have gotten upon buying this bad boy. She could have had any number of hot masculine voices narrating her flying experience out here in the emptiness of space, and instead, she chose to go silent for a couple of thousand units less on the price tag.
Times like this it was her only regret. Now she would have to fly her sick ass home in silence because running the radio too long risked completely eating away at what was left of her fuel she had gotten a couple of stars ago.
Making her way to the front, she slid down in the cushiony pilot chair, quickly releasing the gravity seal, and did the work required to prepare to leave. The entire process was as natural to her as breathing air. In mere seconds the ship was already humming with life.
"Alright then. It's que for takeoff."
As smooth as the day she bought him, the ship lifted off the ground with ease. It took only a couple of minutes for her to easily slide back into orbit, and half that to enter warp drive headed back home. If she had her calculations right, it would only take forty-eight hours to return to Breen's homeworld and deliver the bad news.
Forty-eight hours of shame.
With a heavy sigh, she pushed away from the command board and threw herself into her cot, allowing the embarrassment of the day to wash over her.
Never before had she messed up an assignment that bad. Not even during her first missions did she entirely lost a target. The repercussions were minimal, being as she was flying away from the scene at warp speed and not dead or captured by her target, but the mistake just couldn't be overlooked.
Breen would never let her hear the end of it.
To make it worse, the feeling she got from that planet had yet to fully leave her. Even in the cool cabin of her ship she felt hot and heavy. Her stomach had begun to flutter tightly, making her entire body feel antsy. Something about it made her feel trapped like her clothing had grown too tight and was suffocating her.
Trying to ignore it, she slipped off her suit and laid back down to turn on the ship's music function. The calming music played softly over the hum of the ship, masking the hiss of the release of anesthetic gas she only used during emergencies.
Typically she didn't knock herself out, especially after leaving a mission, but with the painful cramping in her belly, she knew the next couple of hours would not go easy for her. Cramps were nothing to her, after all, she was a woman, but the pain from these was enough to make her lightheaded and woozy.
Hopefully, a nice nap under the cold embrace of the sleeping gas would make it all go away.
It was barely an hour before she woke to the feeling of wetness on her thighs. Shooting up from her sleep, she quickly threw the covers off and looked down at her bed, thinking the worst. Upon seeing nothing but the dampness in the sheets, she wavered between being relieved and horrified by the sight.
She could deal with sweat, but anything else would have to sit until she docked back on Breen's homeworld.
She was just about to tuck herself back into the bed when a sharp pulse at the apex of her thighs made them clench tight as a wave of wetness spilled forth from her, accompanied by a feeling so strong and intense it couldn't have been mistaken for anything other than pure untethered lust.
Confused, she tried to straighten and pull herself up off the bed, only to be wracked by another round of flutters that made her too weak to stand. Her now-weak knees instead fell to the cold floor below. The cool padded floor felt oddly nice against her now overheated skin, and she leaned into it with a moan, searching for any kind of relief against the lust raging within her.
She had never felt anything like this in her life, this deep aching yearning burning brightly in the pit of her stomach. Even at her sickest, she hadn't been as taken over like this. It left her almost incapacitated by the sudden spike of her libido.
If it wasn't obvious before, she had almost certain she had contracted something now. Nothing else would explain the creeping pain and sudden overabundance of unwanted bodily fluids.
Her eyes found the soft light of her control panel, and only one thought filled her mind.
She had to comm Breen, and she had to do it before she couldn't stand to move anymore. She wasn't going to risk letting herself die on a ship hurtling towards the homeworld without trying to reach out to her one lifeline.
Heaving out a shuddering breath, she tried her best to crawl between the spasms in her stomach. Slowly but surely, she made her way across the small interior of the ship, eventually coming to pull herself up over the dark panel with a pained moan.
The com took what seemed like eons to connect to Breen, and upon seeing his dark figure splayed out across her screen she let out a relieved whimper. He appeared to be lounging in a lavish bed, scrolling through a tabled absentmindedly.
"I trust you contacted me because you finished that contract."