Dryden Vos will see you shortly meant Dryden Vos would see him whenever he damn well felt like it, Beckett would unload his cargo, the two of them would exchange pleasantries and Dryden Vos would cordially, grudgingly pay up.

The flutter of polite laughter in the atrium comes to an abrupt halt — by the time Beckett's turned his head, fumbling for a blaster that isn't there at his belt, he's missed the action. A wet thump, and a woman's scream rattles through the gilded chamber like the sound of a blaster-shot. Even this jaded crowd has to flinch back at that. The first thing Beckett sees when he pushes past the gaggle of partygoers is the most immediate threat negate itself — a red-edged blade thrumming with naked energy for a split second before retracting into its handle, like a tame beast on a chain. Dryden Vos is standing over a dead man — or if he isn't dead, he's going to have a hell of a time reuniting the two halves of his brain.

Wasn't this supposed to be a cocktail party? Some games of chance, a polite conversation with the boss, and then cut out of there like your coattails are on fire. The marks furrowing Dryden Vos' cheeks have flushed reddish — and Beckett knows what that means. You don't have to be a genius to figure it out — his chest rises and falls beneath his exquisitely tailored coat, his nostrils flare. His blood's up, and that could go a couple of different ways but Beckett's not going to be in the way when the fallout hits.

The dead man's skull is still sizzling — not the skull, the brain. The top of the skull's been lopped off like the main course at a state dinner on Felucia. Dryden Vos rubs a finger down the cleanly-sliced edge of bone, and touches it to his tongue. The girl lieutenant is at his elbow in a heartbeat — she's dressed in a languid tailored jumpsuit, more suitable for cocktails and conversation than disposing of remains, and her dark hair is pulled up in a coil at the back of her head. Beckett doesn't envy her whatever comes next — a heap of paperwork, or more likely a hot date with a pair of pliers and the First Light's trash compactor.

Dryden Vos inclines his head to her only slightly, gesturing convulsively with his hands. Without a word spoken, the order is unmistakable: clean it up.

The dark-haired girl's expression doesn't change. She turns, gesturing to a quartet of masked and liveried servants — all Dryden Vos' lackeys are polished up like mirrors, nothing but the best for the boys at Crimson Dawn. It was hard to walk past them without the impulse to check your teeth for something green in them. The dead man's companion takes a few horrified steps back from the gaming table, tottering on her translucent heeled shoes — a Hylobon heavy in full armor seizes her in his arms as if she were a delicate lady on the verge of a swoon and all the animation floods from her face. Her body sags, and she drops inert as a stone. This lady's going to die slowly — just for picking the wrong guy as a patron for a night's work being lucky arm candy. That's just how it is.

Dryden Vos' poisonous blue eyes fix on Beckett where he stands, and Beckett feels his blood run cold. His whole face changes — the rust-red tinge ebbs away, replaced with an obscene sleek brightness. Bogus cordiality and free-flowing contempt — this man would sell him for parts as soon as pour him a drink, and they both know it.

"Ah," Dryden says, smooth as oil. "Beckett. So good to see you."

"What'd that guy do?"

"He was stealing from me," Dryden Vos says. As if it's obvious. No point in elaborating; wouldn't want to give people ideas.

"Oh, well. Of course."

"I hope it hasn't put you off your food. You're a sensitive soul at heart."

"Nobody's said that before."

It's not a compliment, coming from this man — rich of him to think Beckett's here for the food, or even the conversation. It's hard to play at the high rollers' table with a vacuum-sealed case cuffed to your wrist. Beckett lifts his shoulders, and the chain clinks.

"You'd never do something as foolish as that. Let's retire to my cabin, shall we?"

*

Like so many rooms on Dryden Vos' pleasure craft, this one is so elegant and artificial that it verges on bad taste — gleaming black and brushed gilt and not so much as a ventilation slit or a fuse panel to mar the perfection of it. You can't appreciate it as a ship when you're too busy appreciating it as a work of art. Beckett associates the taste of Ijas brandy with the real old-timers back home — sitting around making one hand of Double-Down last for hours, griping about the climate and the junk cartels and sipping stuff that'd strip the white off your teeth out of dented flasks. But all those old-timers are dead, and now Ijas brandy comes in gold-enameled bottles lined up on the matte black shelves of Dryden Vos' drinks cart.

The electric burn against the back of his throat is the same. He's going to need it. His wrist itches where the metal cuff used to sit, and the case full of contraband sits between the two of them like some kind of proverbial ten-ton creature in the room.

Every line of Dryden Vos' body oozes smoldering banked anger — it's not about the dead man at the gaming table, after all. He's heated up already in ways Beckett has never seen, in ways he'd barely suppressed on the trip over to the captain's suite — pacing and pressing a barbed hand through his hair

He's been gripping the tusk of a ceremonial helmet tightly enough that the thing looks ready to snap in two. When he catches Beckett looking the nervous gesture turns into a caress.

"What's got you all fired up?"

"Enough pleasantries. I believe you have something for me."

Beckett pops the case, and the seal hisses. Something in this case is an antique Sith holocron — he'd meant to negotiate a little, but now doesn't seem like the time. Dryden Vos lifts the thing up to the light — a pretty shimmer plays across its surface, but it's not aesthetics alone that make this artifact so valuable.

"Exquisite."

"As requested." Beckett snaps the case closed, kicking it under the desk with the toe of one boot. He can't quit thinking about that poor bastard with his skull sawed open.

If only Dryden Vos weren't leaning over him and thrusting himself in his face, pressing his body into Beckett's personal space as odiously as possible — then it would be easier to forget it, and for Beckett to avoid the desire to counter him in some really monumentally stupid way. Maybe even to be impolite about it.

"You didn't have any trouble acquiring it?"

"Nothing I couldn't take care of. Where would you be without the likes of me, Dryden?"

This is a miscalculation.

Dryden Vos reaches to take Beckett by the chin. The claw tipping his thumb presses in parallel to Beckett's mouth. Beckett raises his head, slowly.

"You're a cheap thief. I could have a dozen more like you."

"Don't call me cheap." Dryden Vos is going to find out just how cheap Beckett is when he ponies up for this pointless piece of wreckage.

"Hit me," Dryden Vos says.

"What?"

Vos twists his head to rub at an angry vein of red coursing down the side of his neck. "Hit me. This will go easier if you hit me."

He doesn't sound angry, he sounds flustered.

Beckett strikes him across the face. It occurs to him with the burning imprint of Dryden Vos' cheek still scorched into the palm of his hand that this may have been a significant misunderstanding of the request.

Pleasure blooms across his face like some night-blossoming flower. He twists Beckett's arm back. Beckett's involuntary noises of protest turn into something a little different when he makes out what Dryden Vos is packing, pressing against the bone of his hip.

"I should cut off your hand."

"Go right ahead. I always thought those cybernetic ones looked pretty sharp."

"Slowly. Don't mistake me, Beckett. You need me far more than I need you."

"Who else is going to bring you all these cute toys?" Who else is going to help him out with this little problem that's presented itself? Besides half the guests at the gathering a dozen floors below them. How many of them would survive the experience, that's the more pressing question.

"I could buy and sell a dozen of you, Beckett."

A feint. "You won't believe what I did to get that thing."

"You'll have to tell me all about it when we're settling up expenses."

Without warning, Dryden Vos crushes his mouth in a kiss. Tobias Beckett's metaphorical hackles are up in a millisecond, but he knocks back with teeth and tongue.

He's some pampered freak and he thinks Tobias Beckett is bought and paid for just because he kicked a couple credits his way for a dead cult's data storage. He gets his kicks like this. Dryden Vos' teeth scratch a bruise into the side of his neck — Tobias makes a sound of objection, and Dryden's fist closes in the neck of his shirt, wrenching him in closer.

There must have been something, something to set this off — something to set off some kind of mating cycle that Beckett could have gone his entire life not thinking about in conjunction with a Crimson dawn crime boss. That pretty carved face has gone ugly with desire — real ugly.

"Give yourself up." He breathes ragged breaths, Beckett can feel them against his face — furious and pathetic, like a pent-up beast. The veins in his eye-whites stand out red, and the markings on his face are flushed and ruddy — they trace down past his collar, down the angular crook of his neck, down to the hollow of his collarbone that Beckett can barely glimpse through the sheering cloth of his shirt. Vos indicates by gesture for Beckett to undress him — the high-strung rich prick, he can't even do this for himself without making a production out of it. His coat clings to the slim lines of his pristine white shirt, and the shirt's fastenings are obscured by the knife-edged overlap of fabric — Beckett has to feel with his fingers, or else risk tugging the whole thing off and over, and the latter becomes more tempting by the second with Vos jostling against him

The barbed hook of Dryden Vos' thumbnail snags at Beckett's coat.

"Take it easy," Beckett says. "Easy."

Vos slides out of his shirt like a reptile shedding its skin — his naked body underneath is white and spare and mammalian, so excruciatingly well-carved from flesh that it gives a pain to look at him. Maybe Dryden Vos had a past life as some dancing boy, or he just has more leisure time on his hands and more vanity than the average Hutt crime boss. His tailored trousers don't have a millimeter of extra fabric to them, and his arousal is unmistakable. Beckett fumbles to free Dryden Vos' erection. Dryden Vos makes a pained, angry sound and yanks his shirt untucked, groping blindly.

Vos is pantingly eager, or pantingly furious, or both — it shows in every centimeter of him, quite a few where it counts most. The ropy twisting shaft fills Beckett's palm, flushed and slick — tugging with his hand he can feel the two deep ridges running from base to tip, and the dull furnace heat of all that blood throbbing away. Vos' mouth is working against his shoulder, scratching a raw purple love-bite there — and how the hell did he know that that's what does it for Beckett without fail? More than all the expensive glitz in the world.

Which brings him back to the matter at hand. What had looked like a banded ridge is really a double row of spines — neatly folded inward, but looking liable to unfurl at any moment. That'd do something to sensitive flesh, all right — and suddenly Beckett understands why Dryden Vos isn't some famous womanizer of the galaxy. Not with anybody who had any say i the matter.

Great. All right. He's done more ill-advised things than this — screwed a Grindalid one time, that wasn't his finest hour. Azurans looked pretty familiar apart from the whole blue thing but as soon as you got them out of your clothes you were bound to notice a couple big differences.

Never renege on a deal. Never back down. Make a tactical retreat, maybe.

Those cool blue eyes are on him now, ringed in red. "Are you frightened of me?"

"Just a healthy respect." He's going to do this and he's probably going to regret it but he's never been one to back down from a challenge. Beckett grins in a way he hopes is dashing.

"No, no, no. This won't do."

Dryden Vos doesn't want him face to face. He wrenches Beckett into position with a strength that seems at odds with his willowy frame — he's got a grip like a Wookiee, though at least he's better groomed, and Beckett's protestations die in his throat. This isn't how he expected the whole step-into-my-office conversation to go, getting bent over over a desk between the stolen antiquities — with his belt jangling down against the glittering metal edge and a Mandalorian gauntlet under glass right next to his head, rattling around with every jostle and thrust. Dryden Vos' long hot fingers slip inside him — pressing him apart like a real gentleman, only he's too eager and it makes him clumsy. Beckett's legs involuntarily flinch apart — if he's lucky his groans of surprise and annoyance will be mistaken for transports of otherworldly pleasure. He'd expect something relentlessly impersonal from a man like Dryden Vos, a man who liked even his dirty work to have, but this is — messy.

Every thrust drives him harder against the edge, and presses the breath from his lungs — who knows if Dryden Vos really needs to breathe, or if his species just likes how it sounds. Dryden breathes whole phrases into his ear in some language Beckett's never heard before, and judging from their cadence they're not exactly love-words. This whole thing is a power-play, and Beckett's not going to fold — he steels himself, and braces his hips, and eases into the burn and ache.

More nasty grappling, pulled hair and bruising hips. Beckett's stoicism crumbles before long, overwhelmed by the unsettling tug and pull of spines in his ass — they're probably more effective at keeping a prospective partner from running off in the middle of mating than just asking politely, but the sensation is thrillingly horrible. It's impossible to forget what's inside of him, or who put it there — and that's the point, he guesses, that's been the point all along. Dryden's clawed hand presses down on the nape of his neck, and that tool fucks into him relentlessly — too deep, too fully, but when Beckett pulls away the diamond-sharp prickle of spines reminds him he can't, or at least he shouldn't.

If this were the other way around, Dryden Vos' greedy presses and hooking fingers would be flattering. But it's Beckett who's being shown his place, and he doesn't care for it much. Vos' free hand tugs him off half-heartedly, but it stops seeming like a nice gesture when Beckett finally comes in an agonizing white flash and Dryden Vos keeps going. Beckett spills into his hand, but that awful twisting thing has a mind of its own inside him and Dryden Vos is far from finished with him — his raw breathing comes from somewhere behind Beckett's right shoulder,

It keeps happening, until he's overstimulated and raw, his whole body begs to be left alone but he won't say the words out loud — this is a test, Dryden Vos is sounding out his willingness to endure impossible things without complaint, and Beckett's been through worse. His pleasure shrinks away into a tight little knot, and what's left is pain.

It occurs to him that whatever Dryden Vos is might be one of those species that eats their partner after mating. How many credits are in this for him? Start counting from one.
Dryden Vos finishes with an awful rattling hiss and a discharge of hot slick seed that Beckett can feel before it's happening — like a swelling pulse, one last terrible strain. Beckett eases up on his elbows, breathing brokenly. Dryden Vos slinks back, shirt hanging open and trousers askew — mussed and bloodless, white as bone. He places one hand on the exposed small of Tobias' back, and it's as chill as ice. All the blood has left his body, all his bones have turned to cold water, even the discomfort has dulled to a faint tingling — all he can feel is the cold press of that hand, and the even colder brush of the ring on Dryden Vos' finger.

"That was worth a few extra credits, wasn't it?" Dryden Vos' voice is broken with old desire, still raw.

Beckett turns his head until the little bones pop.

"Not my best performance."

"If you ever conceal something of value from me, you know what to expect."