Read Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two for Free Online

Inside the Templar box lay coiled a length of black hair, easily more than a meter long. He knew who had killed the Thallians, who had destroyed their city and set their slaves free.
    He’d bet good money she was on the Veracity even now.
    So why would Raena release the recordings she’d made of the booby-trap she’d set on her Templar tomb? She wasn’t condemning Sloane for funding the grave robbing. Was she trying to misdirect the media: to protect Sloane—or Kavanaugh himself?
    He was too tired to figure out Raena’s motives tonight—and after finishing the too-sweet bottle of xyshin, he was too drunk. He powered the screen down and kicked off his boots, stretching out on his bunk in his clothes.
    He fell immediately into a dream, as if it had been waiting for him.

CHAPTER 3

    K avanaugh had serious qualms about robbing Templar graves. It was bad enough that the rest of the galaxy blamed humans for exterminating the Templars. If the galaxy discovered that a human team was now looting their graves, he didn’t like to think where that would lead.
    Still, as Sloane said, it wasn’t as if the bugs inside the tombs were using the weapons and armor buried with them. And it wasn’t as if Sloane hadn’t paid off every official in the quadrant who might be intrigued by what the “archaeological” team was doing.
    That Sloane could loot the Templar tombs without a second thought saddened Kavanaugh. And yet here Kavanaugh found himself, leading the team, wondering how in the hell he’d volunteered for this.
    At least the impossibly hard stone kept the caves’ contents incorrupt: metal was as polished as the day it had been entombed, corpses as fresh. In the past couple of weeks, Kavanaugh had seen more than he wanted of dead bugs contorted by the Templar plague.
    Nothing indicated that this particular cavern would be different than the others. If it had been up to Kavanaugh, he’d have let the men close down the machinery for the night, sent them back to the bunkers to get out of the knifing, granular wind. Unfortunately, Sloane had made it clear to him that not meeting the quota would cost Kavanaugh his job. He was on the verge of saying, “Fine, I quit,” but the boss, long ago, had been a friend.
    When they opened this tomb, the huge explosion dropped the ground from beneath their feet. Then the blast wave knocked the team back against the loader, holding them in place a moment, air crushed from their lungs. When it released them, Kavanaugh commented, “Think you used too much.”
    “I used just enough,” Taki huffed.
    Kavanaugh always had a moment, as he slithered past the edge of a slab, when he feared it would rock back into place and crush him. Or worse, it would rock back after he’d passed it, trapping him inside the tomb. No telling how long it would take someone to die inside one of those graves, how long until the air ran out or dehydration made breathing cease to matter. It wasn’t as if Sloane would feel he had enough invested in the team to rescue anyone.
    Most of the tombs they’d entered had warehoused whole companies of bugs, the dead warriors of a single starship buried together. Kavanaugh played his light around the inside this cavern to find only a single catafalque, an uncarved slab of obsidian roughly in the center of the room. Whoever lay atop it must be important, he thought. Shouldn’t take too long to loot one body.
    Kavanaugh peeled off his face shield and lifted his flask, sucking down the last half of its contents. His boot knocked something over. When he bent down to retrieve it, he found an Imperial-issue electric torch. Damn. Had someone beaten them to this one?
    “What’s a human girl doing in here?” Taki asked.
    Kavanaugh stopped fiddling with the torch to see his team had converged around the catafalque. He couldn’t make sense of what they were saying. Why would there be a human girl inside a Templar tomb?
    “There’s your dancing girl,” Curcovic teased. “Maybe