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Trickster could stifle her with a pinch to her arm.
    “Feisty.” Jace shook his head and turned away. “Don’t need one like that.” He stalked off. If he were too eager, Trickster would smell it. Mercifully, Garrett and Heller remained silent.
    Jace heard Trickster slap Kraft. Hard. He cocked his head over his shoulder, anticipating the pleasure in watching her rip the weasel apart. But she didn’t. Kraft shook her head and stood even more ramrod straight. She must be drugged out of her mind. Barehanded, Kraft could yank Trickster’s head right off his scrawny neck and make him do the unspeakable to his own ass.
    “She’s upset you even ask,” Trickster said. “She is the finest cook on the Fringe.”
    “Really?” Jace didn’t believe Kraft could boil water, let alone claim fame as a cook, but he turned back to Trickster with bored indifference.
    “You ever heard of Fairing’s cook?” Trickster asked.
    “Since Fairing is the most epic thief who ever worked the Fringe, I’ve heard of him,” Jace said. “Fairing’s cook is almost as epic as Fairing himself.”
    “This cook-whore is Fairing’s cook.”
    Jace felt his eyebrows rise almost to his hairline. “Not only do you want me to believe she can cook, but you want me to believe she’s Fairing’s cook?” Trickster wouldn’t know the truth if he saw it crap in his hat. “If you’re going to lie to me, Trickster, at least make it passable.” Turning on his heel, Jace stalked off. “Especially since there’s no way to confirm your tale since Fairing died a year ago.”
    “Fairing speaks from beyond the grave,” Trickster said.
    “And his ghost speaks only to you?” Jace asked.
    “To any who have this.”
    Trickster waved a paper at him, coyly, like a hanky. He smiled with dark malevolence when Jace reached for it.
    Jace read over the holodigitext quickly. The document could be forged, but he didn’t think so. Compelling enough as she was, Captain Kraft was more so when he discovered she was, without a doubt, Fairing’s cook.
    “How do I know she’s not riddled with disease?” Jace forced himself to dicker over her finer points as a commodity. He didn’t want Trickster, or any other man in the room, to have any notion that he cared about her.
    “By this.” Trickster handed him a clean bill of health from an IWOG hospital.
    “How’d you get this on a cook-whore?” Jace asked.
    “There’s a doctor at the Kali hospital who has a predilection for the exotic, shall we say.” Trickster flashed him an oily grin. “My doctor provides this service for me in exchange for that which satisfies his rather strange appetite.”
    “Please, don’t unpack that.” Jace had no interest in some IWOG doctor’s perversion. “How much do you want for her?”
    “A pittance, really. I have too much stock as it is.”
    “Fifty.” Jace appraised Kraft with a cold eye.
    “For a cook?” Trickster asked archly. “Try five thousand.”
    Jace turned on his heel and strode away. Trickster’s smarmy, conciliatory attitude became clear—the fetch wanted as much for Kraft as he’d just paid for the salvaged goods.
    “Three thousand!” Trickster shouted.
    Jace stopped but didn’t turn around. A two thousand drop in a breath meant Trickster wanted more out of this than money.
    “One hundred,” Jace countered.
    “Two thousand.”
    “No way.” Jace walked to the door of Trickster’s lair and turned back like an afterthought. “Two hundred.”
    “Fifteen hundred.”
    “Five hundred.”
    “Fifteen hundred,” Trickster said definitively. “I won’t go any lower. That’s a bargain for a cook. Especially this cook.”
    Jace looked Kraft over again. Like an oddly dressed tin soldier, Kraft stood boldly proud despite the garish makeup and skimpy clothes. Oblivious because of the drugs, she seemed impossibly vulnerable. He shuddered at the thought of what Trickster would do to her if he didn’t buy her. A surge of protectiveness mixed with a