Dragon's Honor

by Natalie Grey

  “Give me a second.”

  She hadn’t known. How could she have? And even a day ago, he had felt a swell of pride at her bravery. She was taking meaningless luxury and turning it into help, wasn’t she? She hadn’t curled into a little ball when she found out Ellian’s true nature, or even slunk back to Ymir in disgrace. She had taken the resources at her disposal and she was going to do something meaningful with them. She had only overreached herself. That was all.

  The anger came too quickly now. It always did.

  “Aryn.” He spoke her name before he looked up, and felt her worry like a blow. “This was well-intentioned, but it will kill you. We need to turn this ship around and go back.”

  “No.” The answer was reflexive. “No, we don’t. I won’t do it.”

  “If you deliver these weapons to Ymir—”

  “They’ll have a fighting chance!” Her voice rang out wildly. “Don’t you see?”

  “I do see. And Aryn, I know more about this than….” He looked away. “You don’t understand what you’ve done. You want to help them?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Then go back.” He tried to decide whether or not to tell her, but the words came out before he could make up his mind. “The resistance is doomed,” he told her flatly. “There’s a chance that—well, never mind that.” Now was not the time to tell her about Talon’s involvement. It would only give her false hope. She, Aryn, needed not to be on Ymir right now. “If you do this … you’ll just be one more body.”

  And I can’t live with that. Those words, of all of them, stuck in his throat. The only ones she might have understood, and he couldn’t seem to say them.

  Her face had gone white, but she didn’t back down. She stared at him with pure fury in her eyes, and her chin lifted.

  “Then I’ll be one more body.”

  “Aryn!”

  “No, you listen! I am not going to sit here for the rest of my life and know that I did nothing. I left them there and ran away with the Warlord’s—” She searched for the word.

  “Quartermaster?” Cade supplied.

  The look she shot him said she was far from happy for his intervention.

  “Aryn, you did. And you said they let you. And do you know why?”

  She narrowed her eyes, but curiosity got the better of her.

  “Why?”

  “Because they love you.” He had never met a single one of these people, and yet he had never known anything with such certainty. “You know what Ellian said to me that first day?” She flinched, but she needed to hear this. “He said he could no more have left you on Ymir than he could have snuffed out a star. Of all the things he told me, Aryn, that one I believe. And I believe that’s why your family let you go. That’s why they lied. You had a way out, and they knew there was no hope for them. No one could know you and not wish you that happiness.”

  Her eyes filled with tears, but she did not come to him for comfort. She did not, he saw, want comfort. “They were wrong, then.” She wiped at her eyes. “It wasn’t a kindness to lie to me. It wasn’t their right. I should have known.”

  “If you had known….”

  “I’d have done something like this sooner,” she said flatly. “Or I suppose I might have stayed with the resistance.”

  That shocked him into silence.

  “Are you surprised?” she asked him bitterly. “Did the Dragon not figure it out?”

  He watched silently, at a loss. There was venom here he could not name, and a flush building in her cheeks. Her hands were clenched.

  “You may think it’s a lost cause,” she told him, her voice low and ugly. “And maybe it is. But in this war, you don’t pick your side because of who you think will win. You pick it because it’s right. And if they’re going to die, then I’m going to die with them. I will do anything in my power to make the Warlord pay.” She crossed her arms, satisfaction on her face. “And Talon is going to help me.”

  It felt like he’d been doused with ice water.

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  “Talon is going to help me,” she repeated.

  And ‘Talon’ was not a common name.

  “Talon Rift?” he asked her, and she swallowed. Her nod was fractional. “Is he on the ship with us?”

  Another nod.

  Dear God, what had he stumbled into?

  The click of the door behind him was perfectly timed.

  But it would be, of course. Talon would have been listening. Cade was at Aryn’s side before she could react, half-throwing her across the bed to sprawl on the floor as his gun came up, Talon’s head in his sights.

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