by Jenn Lyons
interrupted. “It’s quite all right. How did he die?”
I watched him carefully. “He was killed by a Sarcodinay knight during the assassination of Minister Vana-Nus Lorvan.”
He swallowed. “I see.” He paused. “I suppose you want to ask if me if I know why Paul would do such a thing?”
For a second, I felt a light-headed.
Gotcha.
“Oh no, Gala-Rhodes,“ Vanessa began.
“Call me Alex,” he said, mechanically.
“Oh. Oh yes. Alex, then. No, you misunderstand: Paul didn’t assassinate Minister Lorvan. Another man did that, while Mallory and Paul were at a restaurant in FirstCity. Paul was an innocent bystander.”
He looked surprised, and then any expression on his face found a quick place to hide. Alexander stared out the window, eyes narrowed, and then a low chuckle escaped his throat. He threw me a glance both admiring and cynical.
“Nicely done,” he said to me.
I inclined my head. “Thank you.”
Vanessa looked from me to Alexander, and then back at me.
“How much did he tell you?” Alexander asked.
“Very little,” I replied. “You’re being blackmailed.”
He grimaced. “Less blackmail than extortion.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it?”
He didn’t look at me. Alexander set down the empty glass and spread his fingers across the smooth wood surface of the desk. He stared at his hands. For a long time he didn’t say anything.
I waited. We’d hit him in the knees with a lead pipe. He was going to need time to recover.
Without looking up, he said, “Are you both still interested in working on the Janis drive project?”
“I don’t think this is the time for that—” I started to say.
“On the contrary, this is the only time.” When he looked up at me, his eyes were hard as metal. “I need to have my team finalized before the treaty is signed, which means I need to have you on board before the day after tomorrow so I can inform the Council.”
“I am currently involved in a very complicated investigation and—”
“He died because of you.”
My mouth fell open. I could only stare at him in shock. That quickly, and I was the one my legs cut out from under me.
“I told him to leave it alone,” Alexander continued in a dark, harsh whisper. “I told him to leave you alone, to stay far away from you. But he wouldn’t listen. He was so convinced that only you could make this right he walked right to his own death.”
“You’re blaming me for this? I was only at that restaurant because Paul invited me! And I certainly didn’t pull the trigger on the maser that killed him!”
“Oh you may not have meant to kill him, but make no mistake, he’s dead because of you. And he’s hardly the first, is he?”
I choked on Alexander’s words and turned away. Lorvan had only been in that restaurant because he’d come to see me—not Paul, who made Lorvan so uneasy—me. The assassin followed Lorvan. He’d only been there because I’d provided the opportunity. I’d forced Lorvan, without meaning to, into a situation where he was vulnerable and his bodyguards were anxious enough to attack all possible threats, including Paul, who wouldn’t even have been in Sector 1 if not for me. Alexander saw it clearly enough. Purposeful or not, I had dragged a slew of death behind me.
I almost crumpled at the realization, and slumped against the glass.
“You owe Paul’s memory,” Alexander told me with a voice like hot iron. “You owe it to him to make real the one dream he wanted.”
At that moment, I had no trouble believing he was Nicholas’ brother.
I pulled myself upright, walked over to the cabinet, and poured myself a glass of that clear liquid, which burned hot enough on the way down to prove it was something other than dihydrogen monoxide. I drank it all down in a long, slow gulp, the way a child does when they ask for a glass of water in the middle of the night.
“Stop it!” Vanessa said. “She didn’t kill Paul. She didn’t cause his death. If Paul told you anything at all about their relationship, you know she would have rather died.”
“Then why is she standing here, instead of Paul?” Alexander’s voice snapped harsh and hard.
I placed the glass down on his desk and glared at him with quicksilver eyes. “The next time a maser fires near you,” I told him through clenched teeth, “Why don’t you try throwing yourself in its path?”
“Is that supposed to be a threat?“
“No, that’s how he died. But if you’d like to interpret it to mean ‘Go to Rio,’ go right ahead.” As his face turned bright red, I leaned down on the table and looked across at him. “I’ve known him since I was eight-years-old. You can call me any name that strikes your mood and you can tell me I owe it to Paul’s memory to stick it to your brother, but do not ever suggest that I let him die. He was my family, he meant everything to me, and he saved me in ways that you cannot possibly understand.”
Alexander’s yellow eyes narrowed and focused, and he drilled through me with a murderous look. “Don’t be so sure,” he said.
“Shall we sit down and compare notes?”
“Whatever relationship you had,” he sneered, “is trumped by the fact he was MY husband!”
“For how long? A week? Did Maia-Leia Shana even let you off your leash for long enough to have a proper wedding?”
“Funny you should mention rabid bitches and leashes. Who let you off yours?”
“I’d rather be a bitch than Maia-Leia Shana’s fucking slave!”
Alexander stopped and blinked his eyes in pure amazement. “What the hell did he ever see in you?”
“A damn sight more than you ever will!”
“THANK GOD for that! Or thank YOU, I should say, since you’re—” And his angry voice trailed off as he stared at me. His eyes widened, with recognition, with sudden and undisguised fear. The fear was deep and shocking, and it lanced through him like a laser. He knew me. I had seemed familiar to him from the moment he’d seen me in the landing bay, but he’d dismissed it as déjà vu brought on by Paul’s stories. It was only now, looking me in the eyes, looking at those eyes turned to boiling, writhing silver from righteous anger, that he remembered precisely when he’d first seen me.
When I was eight.
Rhodes had seen me right here on Keeper’s Island, when I was eight-years-old. He’d been ordered away from getting too close, but he’d seen, from a distance, from the security cameras. He mostly remembered my angry, shining eyes, so striking on a child with dark skin and light hair. He’d never had a name, never known the identity of that furious, lethal little girl. If he had, he’d certainly never have gotten into a shouting match with me.
And it is one thing to remember an eight-year-old girl, and quite another to recognize the same girl all grown up.
Alexander and I stared at each other. His expression was a combination of fear, doubt, hope, bitterness, and relief. His emotions were so conflicted that they were almost impossible to read, and all of it being chased down by the numbness of learning about Paul’s death.
“Are you both quite through?” Vanessa asked, completely unaware of the reason for the sudden end of our argument, but perfectly willing to exploit the opportunity to dress us both down. “Or shall I let you continue since you were about to reach the hair-pulling stage of your little schoolyard tiff?”
“Vanessa...”
“Do either of you realize how childish you sound? Has it occurred to you that you’re competing for ownership of a memory? You’re both very intelligent people. Maybe you should act like it, or better yet, you could try growing up.” She glared at us in exasperation.
I tried to meet her eyes, and found it impossible.
“I can see,” she said, “that I made the right decision when I decided to come along with you, Mallory. I shudder to think how this would have gone if I had stayed back in FirstCity.”
I exhaled, looked down, and prete
nded to make a studied examination of the flooring.
“You both ought to be ashamed of yourselves,” she continued. “Paul loved you both. Why are you so jealous of each other?”
I crossed my arms back over my chest and half-sat on the table, which gave me a convenient excuse for avoiding Alexander’s stare. We sat there in awkward silence. I knew why he’d stopped fighting: it had occurred to him, like the floor dropping out from under him, that he was risking his life. Rhodes had no idea that my powers were still ‘latent’ or at least, had been latent for most of my life. As far as he knew, people I grew too angry with had a bad habit of dropping dead.
Likewise, I was pretty sure he knew why I had stopped fighting, that he smart enough to guess from my reaction that I had been reading him. Which was true. I was actually impressed by how quickly he’d pulled himself together and covered his unease, but then I guess he’d had sixteen years to attune himself to the idea of a human telepath. It was only the specific identity of that human telepath who’d thrown him into disarray.
He sighed. “She has nothing to be jealous about.”
I glanced back at him in disbelief. “Are you joking?”
“Of course not.” He frowned at the desk, as if it had been caught out after curfew. “The entire time I knew him, he never shut up about you. How strong, determined, intelligent and capable you were. There was no problem you couldn’t handle, no enemy you couldn’t defeat. How do you think it feels to know that when the situation was grimmest, your lover didn’t turn to you to make it better? That not only did he think you couldn’t help him, but