Fated Blades

CHAPTER 8

Karion stared at them from the screen of Ramona’s tablet. Matias had managed to rig a makeshift terminal using her tablet and the portable power supply. The signal was weak, but it was better than trying to carry on a three-way conversation via messages through the implants.

They had just finished almost five hours of dancing. Matias’s face gleamed with sweat. His hair was damp—he had emptied his water bottle over his head. She knew her own face was flushed. She sat on the edge of the terrace, clearly out of breath.

Her brother raised one eyebrow at her. Of all of them, he resembled their mother the most, with nearly black hair, narrow features, and a dangerous edge.

He glanced at Matias, then back at her. His face remained neutral, but she saw concern in his blue eyes. Ramona hid a smile. No matter how old she was, Karion would always see her as a five-year-old tagging along with him on his older-brother adventures.

“Would you like me to give you two some privacy?” Matias asked.

“No,” she said. “We’re in this together.”

Karion looked directly at her. Having come to terms with Matias’s existence, he decided to ignore him. “I found the assholes. You were right—they booked an entire hotel.”

“Which one?” Ramona asked.

“You’re going to love this. They’re holed up in the Kamen.”

She laughed.

Adra was full of hotels. From small and seedy to huge and palatial, they dotted the city, but the Kamen was special. It was the smallest of the seven hotels in Stone City, the historic district where buildings were carved into the red stone cliffs.

The screen split, and the Kamen appeared on the right side. The front wall of the hotel emerged from the living rock of a towering mountain, fifty meters tall and consisting of three oversize floors. Ornate columns flanked the two entrances and rose high to hug a third-floor balcony large enough to host a small wedding. Those entrances were the only way in or out of the hotel. Everything except the front facade was blocked by the mountain.

Two walls, each thirty-two meters tall and six meters wide, thrust from the sides of the hotel, cut into the mountain. A stone plaza lay between them. Each of the seven Stone City hotels faced one, flanked on the sides by tall walls. During the festival, the plazas hosted the dances, a different dance for each hotel. Dancing groups made their circuit, moving from one location to the next, while tourists watched them from the walls and VIPs viewed their performances from hotel balconies cut into the living rock.

The Kamen was an easy place to defend and a horrible place to escape from. It was also in high demand during the festival, booked months in advance.

“How the hell did they book the entire place?” she wondered.

Karion looked at Matias.

“Drewery.” Matias spat out the name like it tasted rotten.

“He made some sort of deal with the owners. They canceled all reservations, citing ‘state needs.’ They’re likely regretting it now, since the senator’s dirty laundry is being aired over every news channel. Two Senate investigations have been announced.”

“The Vandals must have paid an exorbitant amount for the hotel,” she guessed.

Matias leaned forward. “Did they book the walls?”

Karion kept looking at her. “The Kamen is privately owned, but the walls belong to the city. Those spots were booked directly through Adra’s festival commission. Some of them were awarded as prizes for cultural achievements and contributions to the city. Drewery couldn’t touch them.”

Her brother allowed himself a narrow predatory smile. “It gets better. During the festival the two tunnels leading to the walls to the hotel are closed. The spectators have to enter from the street via a staircase, and the city’s security forces keep the foot traffic out. Unless you’re on the list, you’re not getting on those walls.”

That meant no Vandals would be shooting at them from the top of the walls.

“However, there are sitting galleries on both sides of the plaza, on the ground level,” Karion continued. “They are reserved for guests of the hotel. If you enter that plaza, you will be fired upon from both sides and the hotel itself. It will be a killing box.”

“Can we get a spot on the walls?” Ramona asked.

“Are you worried about the spectators?” Karion asked.

“I’m worried that the Vandals will try to shoot their way to higher ground once we start killing them. The city’s security is expecting drunk tourists trying to crash the party and dance with the pretty people. They’re not prepared for mass murderers in combat armor carrying burst rifles. I want to put someone on those staircases.”

For all his perceived power, Drewery was not a kinsman. The provinces ran on favors, and the old kinsmen families had a lot of influence.

Karion rubbed his face, thinking. “Uncle Sabor would be your best bet. He should have enough clout, but he’d only do it if you asked him.”

“I’ll make the call,” she told him.

“I think you should reconsider this plan,” Karion said. “The risk is too high.”

“We don’t have a choice,” Ramona said. “We must recover the tech, and hitting them at the hotel is the only way to minimize casualties.”

Her brother glanced at Matias.

“Just say it,” she said.

“There are fifty-four Vandal ‘asylum seekers’ staying at the Kamen. And an off-worlder.”

Suddenly she was uneasy. “Name?”

“Lukas Dunlap-Whitaker.”

The name lashed her like a whip.

Matias clenched his jaw for a moment, the line of his mouth hard. “Varden got himself a pet secare.”

Karion ignored him. “Lukas lists himself as a mercenary. He isn’t. He is a killer for hire. He’s been doing this for forty years, and he’s very good at it. Two hundred and twelve confirmed kills to his name. Four of them secare. He actively looks for secare jobs. He likes eliminating us.”

Damn it. “Thank you,” she said.

“Think about it carefully. You remember what Ray wrote in his notes.”

“Ray wrote a lot of things,” she said.

“‘The secare are wolves who know only war and murder,’” Karion quoted. “We are not wolves, Ramona. We are dogs. We still bite and rip, but only when we have to, because we made a nice life for ourselves on this planet. That man is a wolf. Some things are not worth dying for. I sent you the roster of the guests on the wall. I’ll wait for your decision.”

Her brother touched his fingertips to his lips, brushed his forehead, and the screen went dark.

She checked the file through her implant, looking at a row of spectator names. Damn. She closed her eyes for a long moment. There was no way to win. Everything she had worked so hard for was teetering on the edge of a cliff, and she didn’t know how to keep it from falling.

“Talk to me,” Matias said.

“First, we still have the issue of civilian casualties. How many people have you killed, Matias? I’m not talking about when you were in space. How many people have you killed on Rada, with your seco?”

“Counting the Vandals?”

“Yes.”

“Twenty-four. Two in an isolated incident of industrial espionage, another three because an idiot decided to make his name by attacking me in public and his bodyguards jumped in, and the rest of the people I killed during the feud with the Vinogradov clan. They tested me after I took over the family.”

“Thirty-one for me. You were expected to take over the Baena family. The attack on you was almost a courtesy. I was seen as a last-minute replacement for Karion. I was tested twice, first by the Rook Trust and then by the Le family. Every life I ever took was in self-defense or retaliation, and even so, I’ve killed enough people for a lifetime already. I don’t want to accidentally hurt an innocent person. I don’t want anyone to be caught in a crossfire. I can’t. It’s not worth it.”

He crouched by her. “I know. I understand.”

“And, we’ve been trying to do this quietly, and there will be nothing quiet about this. I’ve looked at the roster of guests. Adra’s mayor will be on those walls. Park Sung Hyo, the provincial senator. Three kinsmen families . . . there will be no way to hide that we were dumb enough to let our spouses have an affair and run away together with our research. Everyone will know.”

“Perhaps that’s not a bad thing.”

She frowned at him. “How? Even if we win by some miracle, our standing in society will be disintegrated. That means more feuds, more blood.”

“Right now, there are foreign troops on the soil of this planet, brought here by a corrupt senator. They have threatened Rada’s citizens, attacked them, and now they are planning to purchase tech stolen from two kinsmen families. If it wasn’t us, if it was the Escanas, or the Vinogradovs, or any other kinsmen family, and you knew they were about to face off with the Vandals, would you help them?”

“Of course. We are all Dahlia kinsmen.”

“Would they earn your respect, even though they had been betrayed by people they trusted?”

“Yes.”

He smiled at her. “It’s Adra. Everyone appreciates a good show. Dancing in Kamen Plaza or two kinsmen secare taking back their property and honor from the foreign eradicator troops. Which show would you rather watch if you were Adra’s mayor?”

A faint light appeared at the end of the dark tunnel in her head. She started toward it. “We’ll get points for style, if nothing else.”

“It’s not the betrayal,” Matias said. “It’s how we handle it. It’s our mess. Hiding it is no longer an option, so we will take care of it in front of everyone. We do not hide, we do not sneak—we do it, and we make sure nobody who watches it ever forgets it.”

Ramona smiled.

Matias stretched, rubbing his knee. The healing booster had taken care of the swelling and most of the pain, leaving behind only an echo of a dull ache. It was their fourth evening in the forest. Tomorrow his people would pick them up. They’d have twenty-four hours to prep in Adra. The plan was complicated. He would have liked two weeks to test it, but even then, he couldn’t recreate battle conditions. It would either work or it wouldn’t.

He had called his aunt after Karion had told them about the secare. He asked for a favor, and then he asked about Angelo Baena.

“The girl told you,” Nadira had said. “Well, she is a secare. She knows where to stab.”

“Is it true?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“Blame your great-grandfather,” she told him. “After that second clash, he purged all of the records. He didn’t want the future generations to grow up with the family’s shame. I only know because he had forgotten about some data banks he left in an old storage room, and I found them when I was about twelve. It rocked my world. My father didn’t even know.”

“You should’ve told me.”

“What would it have accomplished? Angelo Baena wasn’t some heartless renegade, Matias. He did what he did because he was part of a synchronized pair, and when their unit withdrew from one of the final battles, they left him and the woman he loved behind. They abandoned them to their fate, Matias. He survived; she did not. His diary will make your soul bleed. He didn’t want money. He wanted revenge. He stopped because he had done to Ray Adler the exact same thing Ray Adler had done to him, and it didn’t make him feel any better. He regretted it every day of his life. It’s ancient history. Let it go.”

“It would feel like you’re torn in two.”

“What?”

“Losing your match in a pair. Like having half of you amputated.”

She’d stared at him with her piercing eyes. “Did you and the Adler girl synchronize?”

He hesitated for half a second. It felt like betraying Ramona’s confidence, like sharing something that belonged only to the two of them. But sooner or later their families would have to know, because he had no intention of letting Ramona go. “Yes.”

Nadira glared at him. She was the closest person to a mother he’d had ever since his own parent abandoned him. Being on the receiving end of that stare was like hurtling into the sun.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Six generations since the last synchronization, and you pair up with your lifelong enemy?”

Lifelong enemy was a bit of a stretch, but he didn’t want to argue. “Yes.”

Nadira stared at him for another long moment. “Why can’t anything be simple with you, Matias?”

“Because life is complicated.”

She’d exhaled and waved him off. “Go. Practice. Work on achieving harmony. I need to pray.”

He did practice, until he thought his body would give out. And after he was done, he made himself work on things that would have to be settled tomorrow, because he didn’t want to think about turning into Angelo Baena.

Matias looked away from the divorce agreement on the tablet in front of him. The sun had set a while ago. Around them the forest breathed. Swarms of purple fireflies meandered through the air, mesmerizing spots of light against the indigo and navy of the woods. It was beautiful in the way only the wilderness untouched by humans could be.

He glanced at Ramona perched on the ramp of the temple. She bent over her own tablet. Her dark hair was loose, and it spilled over her shoulder in a soft curtain.

They needed more training. They needed more time.

She looked up as if sensing his stare. He wiggled the tablet at her. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

She passed her tablet to him without a smile.

He looked at it. “An annulment? After four years?”

“He will give it to me.” Steel vibrated in her voice.

“Why not a divorce?”

“A divorce is when two people can’t make their partnership work. We were never partners.”

He gave the tablet back to her. “Tell me about him.”

She looked up at the night sky. “Gabriel is a quintessential ‘second son.’ His family owns a freight fleet. His grandfather built it, his father improved it, his older cousin runs it. She runs it well, very well. Five years ago, Gabriel’s older brother tried to stage a family coup. He felt he had a better claim than his cousin. Their father picked his cousin as his successor for a reason, and when Gabriel’s brother took off with a third of their fleet, she asked my father to solve her problem. In the secare way.”

“Did he?” Matias already knew the answer, but he wanted to hear her say it.

“Yes. My father would never accept money for his services.”

“Only the traitors do mercenary work,” he said.

She sighed. “You’re not a traitor, Matias. Angelo Baena was, but you are not him. Anyway, my father trades favors. In this case, it was an exceptionally large favor, and he wanted an equally significant favor in return. Rada had to become a permanent stop on their trade route, and our family would be guaranteed a cargo spot on any of their vessels stopping here, no questions asked, at a very steep discount. They agreed on condition that I marry Gabriel, conveniently taking him out of the picture before someone in their family decided to use him for a second coup.”

“What was your father shipping?”

Ramona gave him a side-eye. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“The tax on exporting relucyte relays is thirty percent,” Matias said. “It’s quite prohibitive. Of course, your father couldn’t possibly be shipping relucyte. That would make him a dirty tax evader. What were those shipments labeled? Oh, I remember now. Low-grade transistor modifiers.”

She picked up a pebble and tossed it at him.

“Was it worth it?” he asked.

“No. I didn’t want to marry Gabriel, but Father threatened to excise me, and he was stubborn enough to go through with it. Karion had just lost his arm, and Santiago kept getting into dumb fights and creating legal issues. I had to stay. A year later I forced my father out.”

He thought her father had peacefully retired. “How did you manage that?”

“I had help from my mother. She’d wanted to retire for a long time. And my father didn’t resist very much. He was in his late fifties when he had us. By the time I took over, he had worked on behalf of the family for seventy-two years. The day after he retired, we were out of the relucyte business.”

“How did he take it?”

“Surprisingly well. He believed in trial by fire. In ancient times, my father would have thrown me and my brothers in a pit with wolves to fight over scraps to toughen us up. He later told me that I had been too passive. Forcing me into a marriage I hated ‘galvanized’ me into action. When I had gotten the better of him, it just confirmed in his head that he had done everything right. The relucyte was no longer his problem. He settled into his forced retirement. Occasionally he calls me and nags me about producing some grandchildren.”

“Why didn’t you have any? You like children.”

“I didn’t want to have Gabriel’s children.”

The finality in her words struck at him.

“It’s not because he didn’t want to. Gabriel would have loved to have a little version of himself. It was a punishment.”

Inwardly, Matias recoiled. He’d never understood why he and Cassida were childless. They’d slept together often enough, at least in the first two years. Neither of them was infertile. Now he knew. Cassida didn’t want to have his children. She had written him off.

“What kind of man is Gabriel?” he asked.

Ramona sighed again. “Charming. He is easy to talk to. He’ll greet you with a welcoming and genuine smile. He makes you feel like he’s really glad to see you and very interested in whatever you have to say. You’ll talk to him for fifteen minutes, and half an hour later you can’t recall exactly what you’ve discussed, but you’ll be left with this vague pleasant feeling. And if somebody asks you about him, you’ll tell them Gabriel is the nicest guy.”

That explained volumes.

“At first I tried giving him a position with the family. Nothing too important, but enough to keep him busy. He had a nice office and his own team. He played businessman for about three months. He was openly distracted during meetings, he forced his subordinates to make decisions for him, and he gave his team no direction, but he charmed the four female employees into his bed. One of them was almost three times my age.”

“Why?” Why would a man married to Ramona be with anyone else?

“Because he could. Cheating is pathological with him. I quietly replaced him and told him to direct his attention away from the family’s employees. Having your husband screwing everybody who works for you tends to damage one’s standing.”

He knew kinsmen who would’ve killed for less. “Did he ever try to justify it?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t feel he had to. The first time, when I was angry and hurt, he waited until I vented enough, gave me that charming smile, and told me he’d made reservations for a special dinner the next day.”

“Did you go?” He would bet his life she hadn’t.

“No.”

A shadow flickered across her face. Gabriel had hurt her. She hid it quickly. She was a proud woman, but Matias had seen the knot of pain, outrage, and sadness that for a moment twisted her mouth and dulled her eyes. He would have to be careful in Adra. If he got his hands on Gabriel, the urge to wring his neck might prove too tempting. Ramona wouldn’t mind being a widow, but he couldn’t rob her of the satisfaction she would feel when she made her husband sign the annulment.

“Gabriel agreed to the marriage because the alternative was, in his words, ‘too messy,’” she said. “I thought that if we couldn’t love each other, at least we could try to be a team since we were stuck together. After the fight, I knew we would never be a couple. So I settled for leading separate lives. I made him comfortable.”

For some reason, that word made him violently angry. “Why didn’t you divorce him?”

She gave him a small sad smile. “The agreement my father signed has a ten-year noncompete option. If I divorce Gabriel before the ten years are up, his family will cancel my shipping contracts. If I attempt to hire a different shipping company, I will owe his cousin a huge amount of money in compensation. It will cripple our family financially.”

He had a rotten feeling. “And if Gabriel dies?”

“Funny you ask. If Gabriel dies, I will also be fined. Although this fine will be one-tenth of the amount I’d have to pay if I divorce him. His existence is inconvenient to his family. They want him dead without staining their own hands with blood. They expect me to murder him to cut myself free.”

Rage swelled in him. “Your father—”

“As I said, he thought I was too soft. This was his lesson about hard choices.”

He wasn’t sure who he wanted to strangle more, her father or her husband.

Her eyes were clear, her gaze hard. “I won’t do it. I will not allow them to force me to kill another human being. I alone will decide whose life I choose to take.”

Gabriel was the dumbest man in the galaxy.

Ramona sighed. “My plan was to wait the contract out. Once we got the seco research, I realized that it was the perfect way to get the family’s finances on solid ground. We had to find something to replace relucyte, and the seco presented an ideal opportunity. I threw myself into work.”

He knew that feeling.

“I didn’t expect any marital loyalty,” she continued. “I gave Gabriel plenty of money and all the freedom he could handle. All he had to do, literally, the only thing he had to do, was to be loyal to the family. He was incapable of even that. Do you know how he got our files, Matias? He walked into the cyber center, smiled, and downloaded them. Nobody paid him any attention. We’d labeled him harmless and useless for so long that nobody even questioned his right to be there. He walked right out with all of our research. This is the man I married. And now I am done. I no longer care about his family or the fines. I only want to be free of him.”

She would be free of him if it was the last thing Matias did.

Ramona shrugged as if trying to take off a restraining garment. “Your turn.”

“I needed a law.”

“The sixth-level tech embargo,” she guessed. “That was you?”

He nodded. “Seco development required importing Kelly-particle agitators. There was no way around it. It would take eighteen months to build them planet side, eight months to set up the factory, and the rest for assembly. We didn’t have the time or the funds to do it, but we could buy them for a fraction of the cost. I pulled some strings to get the proposal for lifting the embargo on the Senate floor, but Drewery and his bloc shut it down.”

Surprise slapped her face. “You sold yourself to Drewery for the seco research, and we and the Davenports benefited from it.”

He smiled. “It sounds bad when you put it that way.”

She dragged her hands across her face. “For the love of the galaxy, Matias, why didn’t you ask for help? We could’ve banded together with the Davenports. We have political connections . . .”

“Would you have helped the renegade?”

“For the seco generators? Yes, I would. I would’ve twisted my family’s arms until their elbows were turned backward.”

“Lobbying would’ve taken time. Drewery was a sure bet.”

“Just how did that conversation go? I will push a law through if you marry my daughter?”

“Pretty much. I knew he was dirty, although I had no idea how dirty. That I learned later. My initial plan was to bribe him. We met. He must have seen something he liked, because he offered me Cassida on the spot.”

She shook her head, and when she spoke, she sounded bitter. “At least I have an excuse, Matias. My father made me do it. But you, you did it to yourself.”

“No, I made a strategic decision. It didn’t seem like a bad deal. I would have to marry eventually. Cassida is beautiful, intelligent, and charming.”

Ramona threw her hands up. “Cassida betrayed you!”

“I didn’t say anything about her loyalty. I discussed things with her prior to the engagement. I explained that the life of a kinsman is filled with danger, that one day I might not come home, and if we had children, it might be up to her to raise them alone. I tried to be clear that I worked long hours, but I promised that I would make time for the two of us and if she was in any kind of trouble, I would do everything in my power to fix it. I told her that if she didn’t want to marry me, she did not have to. I would make sure her father wouldn’t force her, although five minutes of watching Drewery and his daughter made it painfully obvious that he has never forced her to do anything in her entire life. I asked her what she wanted out of the marriage.”

Ramona had an odd look on her face. He wasn’t sure how to interpret it.

“Believe it or not, she said she wanted me. She was enthusiastic about being my wife, in the traditional aspect of the term. We got along well.”

Ramona groaned. “Well, of course she was enthusiastic . . . never mind. Please continue.”

“It seemed like everyone would accomplish their goals. I got a lovely wife and the law I desperately needed, Drewery got a kinsman son-in-law, and Cassida got a husband who would keep her in the lifestyle she’d become accustomed to. It was only after we were married that all of us realized that nobody got what they wanted. Except for the agitators. We did get those.”

He shook his head. In retrospect, the whole thing seemed idiotic.

“Drewery proved a massive liability,” he continued. “Everything he touched was tainted.”

“And Cassida?” Ramona asked.

He looked at the stars above his head, feeling the familiar unpleasant tension flood his muscles. “I’m a disappointment to her.”

“How could you possibly be a disappointment?” She seemed insulted on his behalf.

“I thought we’d covered expectations before the wedding. Turns out that I wasn’t taken seriously. Cassida and her mother viewed me as a fixer-upper. A man who with proper guidance and direction would become everything they wanted.”

Her eyebrows came together. “And what did they want?”

“Something completely different.”

She waited for him to elaborate.

He took a moment to find the right words. He never discussed it with anyone. He never planned to discuss it, either, and putting the tangled mess of thoughts and emotions into complete sentences took effort. It hurt.

“I didn’t understand what the problem was at first, so when Cassida began complaining, I tried to make her happy. She said she wanted to do something worthwhile. I offered her a position with the company, but she refused it. She decided to do charitable work, so I gave her a budget. She spent some of it, but she was growing more and more unhappy. Looking back at it, there were clues, small things that at the time seemed insignificant. She complained that someone else got a seat on some charity’s board instead of her. I commiserated.”

He realized his voice was rising. He’d bottled the frustration for so long it was breaking through. He forced his voice into an even tone.

“She wanted me to attend a dinner with a provincial senator, but I was too busy. I told her to go by herself. She threw a fit, the first of many. She couldn’t go by herself, I had to be there. Why couldn’t I understand such a simple thing?”

Ramona shook her head. “She did comprehend the concept of running a family enterprise?”

“Only when it came to her family business.” His words dripped with bitterness. His attempts to achieve detachment were clearly failing.

“Politics?”

“Yes. She decided to sleep separately.” He paused. It still stung after all this time. He’d thought he was over it. “I gave her space. The longer this went on, the more I felt that there was something I was missing. Finally, she lost her patience and explained it to me.”

“Oh, I can’t wait,” Ramona said.

“Being the wife of a kinsman, even a prosperous one, wasn’t prestigious enough. Cassida wanted to be married to a man with ‘power.’”

Ramona burst out laughing.

Suddenly he felt lighter, as if her laugh had somehow crystallized the absurdity of that declaration and now it was all he could see.

Matias grinned back. “Her perception of power was shaped by her upbringing. For all of her outward sophistication, Cassida is rather sheltered. Her charity efforts were a way for her to enter the upper echelons of society, but she didn’t get the kind of reception her mother enjoyed. The best spots went to the spouses of politicians. To be valued, to be important, she had to offer useful access, and nobody who mattered to her wanted access to me. I had to become somebody, a man who could grant favors and pull strings. She wanted to make an entrance and have every head turn toward her.”

“Did she ever ask you what you wanted? Did you communicate to her that doing what she demanded would make you miserable?”

“Yes. I’m getting to that. About six months ago Drewery invited us for a family dinner, during which it was explained to me that a junior senator position was about to come open and I was guaranteed to take it. I told them I wasn’t interested. Cassida’s mother demanded to know when I was going to grow up and start doing what was best for everyone. I told her that if she spoke like that to me again, it would be the last time we would ever meet face to face. And then I walked out. Cassida caught up with me at our house. You know that saying, ‘flew into a rage’? Well, that night I got a visual demonstration of what it actually meant. She screamed, she threw things, she cried. I had embarrassed her in front of her parents. I was useless and stupid. And ungrateful for all the strings her father had pulled. She hated every moment she had to stay in the room with me because I was so unbearably dense that she wanted to hit me until I started bleeding.”

“She’s psychotic.” Ramona shook her head. “If she had done it to Gabriel, he would have given her anything she wanted. He isn’t built for that kind of relentless pressure. He would have just folded and gone along.”

He gave her a look.

“Oh.”

They shared a few minutes of silence.

“So what happened?” she asked.

“After she was done screaming, I told her that I’d chosen my path. I had responsibilities and goals. I worked hard at making my family safe and prosperous. I wasn’t a child. I didn’t need to be led or fixed. I wasn’t about to sacrifice the future of my family and my own peace of mind to please her or her family. If she wanted the trappings of power she so badly craved, it was up to her to achieve it on her own. I would support her in that pursuit. She told me that wasn’t what she wanted and that I was a horrible human being. I told her to expect divorce papers in the morning.”

He felt exhausted just remembering it. That was a night he never cared to repeat.

“And yet, you’re still married,” Ramona said, her voice resigned.

“She joined me for breakfast the next morning. She was apologetic and contrite. She said she was under a lot of pressure from her parents. She didn’t want a divorce. She loved me and wanted to make the marriage work. I agreed to give it six months.”

“Why?”

He’d asked himself that same question countless times over the last few months.

Matias let out a deep sigh. “Because she cried, and she was sad.”

Ramona stared at him.

“I was her husband. It was my responsibility to take care of her just as it was her responsibility to take care of me. Marriage is compromise. The least I could do was try to find some common ground. We agreed that I would place greater importance on her needs, and in return she would try to understand what made me happy. We reached a state of ceasefire. Things were calm.”

And he had settled for that calm. He saw that clearly now.

“Occasionally we had dinner together, sometimes we slept together, I made sure to make time for the invitations she wanted us to attend, and she stopped her unrelenting assault on the way I lived my life. We were cordial. I was . . . busy. Very, very busy. I knew Drewery would become an issue eventually, so I took the necessary steps, but getting the seco generator up and running mattered more at the time. I thought everything was settled until the morning you walked into my office.”

Ramona smiled at him. “You are a good man, Matias Baena.”

“But a terrible husband,” he said, his words half self-deprecation, half confession.

She shook her head. “No. Everything I’ve learned about the Drewerys so far tells me they’re a family that plans long term. Kinsmen command respect, but we don’t usually get involved in politics. Drewery’s family has been on the planet for only four generations. He thinks his roots are shallow. He was born and raised here, yet he doesn’t understand that it’s not how long you have been in the province—it’s how you conduct yourself that makes you a Dahlian. He wanted the authenticity of the old Dahlia family, and the only way to get it was to marry his daughter to a kinsman.”

“True,” he agreed.

“Unmarried kinsmen who are heads of their families are in short supply,” she said. “Most of us are engaged by the time we hit our late teens in the name of some family alliance. My grandparents even went to another planet to find a secare for my father to marry. And here you were, twenty-eight, at the head of your family, with a solid financial foundation and very few dirty secrets. You were a prize catch. I’ll bet you anything that you were discussed at their dinner table long before Drewery decided to suddenly care about tech-sector imports. You were weighed, measured, dissected, and found worthy, and then you were baited and trapped.”

He’d considered this possibility before but dismissed it. “Seems like too much trouble to catch me.”

The twin moons had climbed high into the sky, the large disk of Ganimede glowing with green and the smaller, brighter Silver Sister spilling pale light onto the woods.

Ramona leaned forward, her eyes open wide.

All around them star flowers bloomed, glowing with delicate white. Their petals curled outward, opening the large bell-shaped blossoms wider and wider. Across from them the largest flower shook once, and a fountain of glittering golden spores rose into the air, floating on the gentle night breeze.

Another flower released its spores, then another. The woods shone with gold. A single shiny spark landed on Ramona’s hair.

“You said it would be too much trouble.” Ramona’s voice was soft and wistful. “I would go through a lot more trouble to catch you. You have no idea how rare you are, Matias. A man who is competent, smart, considerate, loyal . . . a man who blocks a sonic blast so you can escape and throws his arm to shield you during a crash. What woman wouldn’t want you, Matias?”

All this time he’d told himself she was off limits. The chain he’d put himself on just broke. He wanted her more than anything, and he desperately hoped he didn’t screw this up.

Matias braced himself and went for it. “Do you?”

She raised her head to look at him, and he saw the answer.

Matias cleared the distance between them in a heartbeat. He wrapped his arms around her, crushing her to him. Her body felt amazing, strong, flexible yet soft, the same way it felt when they danced. The mere touch of her skin overwhelmed him, cutting through logic and reason. Nothing else mattered except her. He buried his right hand in her hair, breathed in her scent, and kissed her.

The connection between them flared, bursting through him like an explosion. His senses shot into overdrive. He felt her melt against him, the warmth of her, the taste of her tongue, the fragrance of her hair . . . it felt like he had waited for her all his life without realizing it, and now that he’d found her, he’d never let go.

She pushed away from him. It was a small, gentle movement, but it cut him like a knife. He looked at her face and saw tears in her eyes.

“I can’t,” she whispered. “We can’t. We’re still married.”

He didn’t care.

“Let go, Matias.”

He did. It almost killed him, but he opened his arms and watched her rise and walk away into the shimmering woods.