Light in Her Darkness

Chapter 4

The Bastard waited exactly two days before doing as he'd threatened. One of Bilba's contacts sent her word of the additional bounty hunters he'd hired to go after Kili Durin.

The new bounty specifically requested the presence of Kili Durin's corpse in order to collect.

It did not specify that the corpse had to be in one piece.

Bilba was startled at the way her stomach dropped when she read it. She felt strangely hot, and a sick feeling settled over her. It was ridiculous, irrational, and deeply annoying.

She did not care that other bounty hunters might be going after Kili Durin. She didn't. She told herself that, over and over as she delivered the man in her cell to the proper authorities, collected the bounty, and left again.

She told herself that for the next three days as she went on other jobs, ignoring the near itching feeling under her skin, the way her mind kept going toward him to wonder if he was all right or if the bounty hunters had caught up to him yet.

She didn't care. Kili Durin was obnoxious, annoying, arrogant, and an all-around pain in the ass and the only reason she started tracking him down after three days was because of the bastard's threat about what would happen if she didn't prove useful to him.

The only reason.

She tracked him to some rural planet she couldn't be bothered to remember the name of (it wasn't as if it mattered, since Kili changed planets the way some changed shoes) with rolling hills and quaint cities built to blend into nature rather than replace it.

Most people would have probably found it quiet and peaceful, but Bilba couldn't stop the way her stomach clenched from the moment she set foot on the surface.

It reminded her far too much of Shire.

In addition to the near constant anxiety that caused, she'd barely slept in days and had found her appetite entirely gone any time she sat down to try and eat.

The sooner she could find her competition, get rid of them, and leave this planet behind the better.

Fortunately, step one was already done. The upside to this sort of planet was that people like bounty hunters were rare and tended to stand out like a sore thumb. That, of course, meant she stood out like a sore thumb as well, but there was little she could do about it.

Her father would have just taken his armor off to blend in. Bilba didn't have that luxury, not when she was the spitting image of her mother. Not when her picture was plastered on bounty posters littered across the known galaxy.

Really, Shire should be ashamed. They always touted their care and concern for the environment but then they went and littered others with paper bounties when they could have done it all digitally. Only one of the many ways the so-called peaceful and quiet planet proved its hypocrisy.

Currently, she was in an alleyway across the street from a building the two bounty hunters she was tracking had entered. Another alleyway. Sometimes it seemed all she did was spend time in alleyways watching people. It did make her wonder, at times, just what it was she was doing wrong. She didn't recall her father having spent quite so much time in alleyways.

"So," a low voice said right over her shoulder, "what are we doing?"

The first time Bilba's father had snuck up behind her, on accident, Bilba had responded, quite reasonably she thought, by screaming and spinning around. Her father had strongly disagreed with that reaction which had led to months of him sneaking up on her and surprising her every chance he got. Until, finally, she'd learned to react offensively instead of defensively.