AN: Sorry for the delays lately. Been kind of busy with school and stuff. Hopefully a longer chapter this time will make up for it a little bit. -grin-


"So, your dad owns this whole yard, huh?" Jack half-questioned, half-stated, craning her neck to look at multitudes of spacecraft. She really couldn't believe how big the ship yard was. Or how lost one could get walking through it...

The girl from school who was escorting her merely shrugged. "He owns the yard and a third of the port. He's got two business partners, but one of them is his sister, and she pretty much leaves all the business aspects to him...They inherited it, from my grandpa or something, I guess..." she replied shyly, shoving her hands deeper into the pockets of her jeans.

Jack nodded, blinking as if to clear something unbelievable from her line of sight. "Wow, that's really something. And you work here?"

Amy shrugged. "Yeah, I do a lot of the boring office work. Filing, that sort of thing. It's all right."

Jack had quickly found such downplaying was typical of the shy girl. She was quiet, modest. Not really a super fit for Hope's little club personality wise, but too rich and too pretty to be left out of it. Jack had quickly taken a liking to the girl in the short time she'd spent getting to know her.

She was especially fond of the quiet and modest part...

"So, are any of these ships looking familiar?" Amy asked at last, after several more minutes of ongoing silence.

Jack grinned sheepishly. "Well, I'm not really sure. How many more are left on the list?"

Amy pulled the list out of her back pocket and unfolded it. "Five more singly occupied ships in this quarter of the yard. The next one is just up ahead. Right there," she said, pointing out the small hopper sitting on lot D-81.

The two girls stopped in front of it, looking up at a ship that looked exactly like three of its neighbors. The only difference being the model and serial numbers on the sides.

"What name is it registered under?" Jack asked, and Amy looked down at her list.

"Um, Dominic Kaze."

"Kaze with a 'C'?"

"Kaze with a 'K'."

"Okay. This is probably it. Now all we have to do is find the doorbell," Jack said, for the most part confident in the truth of her words.

Amy smiled just a little as she stepped forward and raised one hand to press the call button. "If you're sure?" she asked, looking over her shoulder at Jack and once she had the dark haired girl's reassurance, she pressed the button.

A moment or two later the ramp slowly engaged, hissing as it dropped down in front of them and settling into the ground. Dom was standing inside next to the interior opener switch, leaning against the wall without a shirt on and looking cocky as hell. Jack felt a slight flutter in her chest. They'd only been apart one day and she'd missed him...

A slight smile touched her lips. "I found you," she taunted playfully.

Conte merely whistled in response. "Damn, I'm really starting to like this planet. Two gorgeous women come to my ship just to see me? I thought that sort of thing wouldn't happen until I got to heaven...if I ever get there," he teased flirtatiously, flashing them his most charming smile.

Both girls laughed easily. Jack couldn't help wondering how a guy who'd probably spent the majority of his life on the run had gotten so good with people. And how she'd managed to end up so bad with them.

They had business to attend to, but Jack wasn't sure how exactly she was going to keep her mind on it as long as Dom wasn't wearing a shirt. After a moment or two of silence that was, for the most part, due to her and Amy not being able to tear their eyes away from the half-dressed badass hottie on display before them, Conte finally seemed to get over his enjoyment of being gawked at and, chuckling, excused himself to go 'put on something more comfortable, wink, wink'.

Jack caught Amy looking at her with a goofy grin on her face, one that probably perfectly mirrored her own. "You never said the guy you were looking for was hott!" the blonde accused mildly, keeping her voice down so it wouldn't carry inside the ship.

Jack merely shrugged. "If I'd said he was good looking when I was asking around to see who'd know how to find him, don't you think all the other girls we eat lunch with would be here now too?"

Amy nodded, shrugging a bit with a friendly smirk. "That might be posssiblllyy... But anyway, as much as I'd love to stand around and stare at him some more, it's getting late, and I have to finish up a few things in the office before it closes. If I don't, my dad just might kill me. So, I'll see you at lunch tomorrow?"

Jack smiled. "Definitely. And thanks, Amy. For helping me out."

Amy smiled back as she turned to go. "No problem, that's what friends are for..."

Jack stared at the retreating back of the girl she'd known for such a short time, just that afternoon, really.

You have friends now, Jackie. Try not to act so surprised. They might catch on that you've never had any before.

She smirked at that, and at the thought that she was now very much alone with one of her favorite new 'friends'. And last she'd checked, he wasn't wearing a shirt. Maybe if she hurried, she'd catch him before he put one on again.

Jack couldn't help but grin a little as she approached Conte from behind. He was standing in his living/bedroom, apparently searching through a large pile of clothes on the floor for a shirt to wear. The place seemed messier than she remembered it being, but then again, she'd been pretty out of it at the time. Hadn't noticed a lot of things, apparently. Like the wide assortment of tattoos and markings that covered the upper portion of Dom's left arm, spilling onto his shoulder blade and nearly half way down his back on one side in a mismatched mural of pictures and emblems.

"Wow, that's really cool," she started, softly touching the classic jolly roger drawn so beautifully just below his shoulder blade. It was the mark of a true rogue, a member of the Pirate's Guild.

Conte stiffened roughly under her touch and she pulled her hand back, slightly bewildered. What had she done wrong? He didn't turn around to look at her, didn't explain, just stood frozen for a brief moment before finally allowing his muscles to relax as he went back to the task at hand, trying to find something clean to wear.

"Sorry," he finally mumbled. "I ain' used to bein' touched there by people who don't mean to hurt me. It's sort of a...reflex, I guess..."

She studied the broad plane of his back a bit more closely, and upon a more extensive examination she could see why he'd reacted as he had. Most of the tattoos, the ones that she didn't recognize as representing a crime guild or as the markings put on kids who went to Juvy Slam, were there to cover up some of the nastiest scars she'd ever seen on any one person.

She wanted to touch them, feel the raised skin where he'd been cut into and caused what must've been some of the most excruciating pain imaginable.

He was studying her over his shoulder with one eye, and the look she gave him when she noticed must've been begging for permission, because he nodded slowly. "Go ahead," he said softly, once again turning to face forward, acting like he was still continuing his search, even though his hands had stilled. He was waiting, waiting to see what she was going to do.

Slowly and softly Jack traced over the raised lines, losing them occasionally in the dim lighting and underneath the dark contours of color meant to hide them. It didn't take her long to discover that they were numbers, almost like a permanent serial number.

"Who did this to you?" she asked at last.

Dom shrugged his heavy shoulders, apparently looking down at the black t-shirt in his hands, the one that he'd finally selected from the pile. "I don't know who they were. Some sort of sick slap-dash med team trapped all the hell the way out at Slammer Nine. They branded me with heated steel...one character at a time. It was my identification number, so that when they found my body, they'd know which prisoner I was. In the numbered slams you don't get to keep your clothes when you're dead. Someone's bound to take them. They don't keep dental records, and even if they did, most guys die with broken jaws, smashed teeth. Sometimes they wouldn't even find bodies though, because we were all kept half starved and some got so desperate they'd eat a corpse. Never really slept while I was in Nine. Kept thinking that I might end up a meal for somebody.

"No wonder I went crazy in there..." he said, softly, almost to himself, his large hands clenching into cotton subconsciously while he stared straight ahead.

If she'd been able to see his eyes, she would've known that at that moment he wasn't standing in the same room with her. In his mind, he was back in Slam. Back at a time when any second could turn into a fight to stay alive.

Jack slowly slipped her arms around his chest, hoping she wouldn't startle him as she hugged him from behind. "Anyone would've gone crazy in a place like that. I know I would've," she assured him, hoping her words served as comfort and wouldn't come as an annoyance. Jack was incredibly aware that she had no idea what Dom had been through, she'd never had to go through anything so horrible. No wonder Riddick had survived so well on T2. Slam was just like that planet, only the beasts hunting you in prison were even more intelligent and more deadly than the hammerheads.

And there was no light to help keep them at bay.

Conte turned slightly in her embrace, and Jack reluctantly released him, seeing his left shoulder just before he had the chance to pull on a shirt and cover it up. Unlike the mishmash of tattoos on his backside, the scene on Dom's shoulder was all the same piece, and it was by far the most beautiful thing Jack had ever seen in ink. An old fashioned dagger was perfectly shrouded with a blood red ribbon, and around the fringes burned a black flame so realistic, she could almost feel the heat radiating off his skin.

He paused, noticing her staring with wide eyes at the picture, and at last he smiled just a bit. "If I'd known you'd stare at me like I was a piece of steak, I would've let you see that one a long time ago, Jack," he teased mildly, flexing his arm a bit to further improve her viewing pleasure.

"That's soo sweet!" she said, completely enamored, almost in awe of the work of art. "Where'd you get it?"

He chuckled, at last pulling his tee over his head and covering all she'd just been staring at so intently. "Actually, you only get that one if you become part of this really exclusive club," he informed her, quickly covering up the dark mood he'd so briefly drifted into with his regular sarcastic humor.

"Like what?" she asked, still staring at the spot almost dreamily, as though she could still see his arm through his sleeve, lost in thoughts of how that tattoo would look on her lower back...

Dom walked over and plopped down on his couch, effectively ending her short reverie. "If I told ya that, I'd probably have to kill ya," he said, snickering to himself, stretching out his arms along the couch's back as he reclined slightly, casually crossing his legs at the ankle as he propped his boots up on a nearby coffee table.

"So," he continued after a moment of letting her collect her thoughts. "Was there some reason why you tracked me down today, Jackie, or did you just miss me that bad?"

Jack quickly snapped out of her daydreams, at last focusing on the task at hand. Funny how hard it was getting to focus on anything that wasn't Dom while she was with him... "Oh yeah," she said, sobering more than a little. "I came here cause there was something about Shella I found out last night, and I need you to help me figure out what it is... Or rather, who it is..."

His smirk turned a bit more self satisfying as he looked at her, his eyes glinting as he grinned like a shark. "Well, in that case, baby, you've definitely come to the right place..."