Fated Blades (Kinsmen)

Ten minutes ago, as the cybernetic security department fell on its figurative sword in front of him, his brain had already cycled through the possibilities and arrived at the only possible course of action. He’d been going to propose the same thing, and if she’d balked, he had a list of arguments ready to convince her. She’d saved him the trouble. If only his enemies were always so obliging.

Ramona was waiting for his answer.

He let her wait for another breath and nodded. “Agreed.”

Matias Baena was something else.

Ramona leaned back in her seat and listened to him issue a flurry of orders to his CSO and Ladmina, his VP. He rattled off a quick, succinct rundown on immediate corporate tasks referred to in a manner that told her next to nothing about their true meaning and moved on to a catalog of things he required.

A fast, untraceable aerial with a survival kit.

A threat assessment on the Davenports, the third family with access to seco tech.

An internal lockdown on all information associated with the data breach.

A gag order and an expungement of her visit this morning, erasing all traces of her presence in the building from their surveillance.

An immediate implementation of a monitoring protocol tracking Cassida by implant and banking activity and both Cassida and Gabriel through a face recognition algorithm. If his wife spent any money, appeared in range of any cameras accessible by the public, or attempted to leave the planet, Matias would know about it.

He must’ve constructed a thorough list in his head, and now he methodically went through it, knocking items off one by one without a pause. Nothing was left to chance. He’d dissected the situation into chunks and addressed every aspect.

Precision was the quality secare prized most.

He acted like a secare, and he looked like one too. Her family kept the archival footage of the original unit, and she had watched it so many times over the years she could likely draw them from memory—the lean, strong soldiers in identical charcoal black, hardened by battle, stripped of all softness, with eyes that warned you off. The space crews developed the spacer stare, a haunted, distant look. The secare stared at you like a pack of human predators.

With his powerful body in a black doublet and his chiseled, harsh face, Matias would’ve fit right in, but it was the stare that cinched it. The scalding-hot stare of a hunter.

She had always thought he was cold, a closed-in, distant man with a stern glower. Someone capable of rationalizing cruelty. Someone who didn’t bend because he couldn’t be bothered, who never lost his composure. Impenetrable, like a chunk of obsidian. Who knew there was fire under all that volcanic glass?

A stray thought flickered through her mind. It must be so nice to have someone like him watching your back. Someone competent. Decisive. Someone who has his shit together. Too bad he is an enemy.

Earlier that morning, Ramona had sat in her office alone and viewed the two recordings of Gabriel, the first showing him stealing their data and the second of him meeting Cassida. She remembered the exact moment her brain processed what she was seeing. She felt a blinding pain, and then she went numb.

There was no time to feel or to come to terms with anything. She had to save the family. The emergency was so dire it pushed all her emotions out, leaving room for nothing else.

She had to hunt Gabriel down. She had two brothers, her parents, two aunts, an uncle, and a handful of cousins, and yet she had no one to turn to. Karion might have joined her, but she needed him to hold on to the family while she was gone. Santiago, her younger brother, was barely twenty and lacked patience. He would fly off the handle, and that was the last thing she needed now. None of the other relatives were secare, except for her retired parents, and she would rather die than get them involved.

She was on her own. At the time she had simply accepted it, but now, as she listened to Matias, she felt a crushing realization—she was alone. Utterly, completely alone. She would never let it stagger her, but it hurt.

The CSO and VP departed, Solei giving her a cold, flat stare before he left the room. Matias tapped the corner of the desk, and the ethereal light screen materialized on the wall. An older woman appeared, sitting on a garden bench against the backdrop of heavy dahlia blooms, her skin a deep brown tinted with red, her silver hair braided into a thick plait wrapped in an elaborate gold mesh.

“Aunt Nadira,” Matias said.

After Matias’s father died, his mother sank into her grief, abandoning her post as the leader of the family. Nadira jumped into that pilot seat before the Baenas had a chance to drift off course and steered the family for another eight years, until Matias was ready to take over.