Fated Blades (Kinsmen)

“Your mother ran away from home.” Ramona stared at him, incredulous. “She left you.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“I remember when it happened. Our family made a big deal out of it. I was twelve, which means you were fifteen years old, and your sister was seventeen. Your mother abandoned her children. We all thought she simply stepped down as the head of the family. I didn’t know . . .”

“Nobody knows outside of a few close members of the family. Nobody wanted to advertise that she’d suffered an emotional collapse.”

Kinsmen were obsessed with hereditary genetics, and they gossiped.

Ramona grimaced. “We would’ve done the same. I can imagine what would’ve been said if it became public. ‘Ava snapped. What if she passed her mental instability to her children? Will they crack under the pressure if you cut them deep enough?’ It would be like tying up a bleating lamb in the middle of the woods.”

“Exactly. My mother was seen as weak by the family. Nobody said it, but the silent judgment was deafening.”

“Do you think she was weak?” she asked, her voice soft.

“I think she needed help in the worst way. With enough trauma and grief, anyone can be broken.”

Ramona looked away. “Did you help her?”

“My aunt tried. I’ve seen the records. Psychiatrists, psychologists, grief counselors, the abbot of the Blazing Mountain Monastery . . .”

Ramona raised her eyebrows.

“Like you said, my aunt is lovely but frightening. Unfortunately, you can’t help someone against their will. My mother refused all of it, especially the calls from my sister and me. She wanted to be free of anything that reminded her of my father, including her children. In the end, we could only respect her wishes.”

Ramona frowned. “You said you understood two things—one good, one bad. What was the good thing?”

He grinned at her. “I realized I could leave.”

She chuckled.

“Until that moment at the breakfast table, I hadn’t known it was possible. It hit me like a bolt of lightning. I could just leave. I could just go somewhere else, where I wasn’t the son, the nephew, the heir. Zero pressure, zero expectations. So, when I turned eighteen, I split.”

“Where did you go?”

“To Calais V. They have a mercenary hub there. One of the crews needed a warm body, so I got hired. They didn’t care where I was from. They didn’t want to know my real name. As long as I did my job and didn’t cause too many problems, they were happy to have me. They liked my reaction time, so they trained me as a pilot. I was with them for five years.”

“Did you have fun?”

He leaned toward her, and she mimicked his movement. The space between them was so small now that if he reached out, he could stroke her soft cheek with his fingertips.

“I had loads of fun.” He winked at her.

She smiled and leaned back.

“I’ve seen the entire sector. It was a job, and sometimes it was dangerous, but we always had a good time. People who were bad at their jobs died or got fired. Everyone who was left was pretty damn good. I was one of them, and I was pretty proud of myself.”

“So what happened?”

“The Opus Massacre. I told you about it. Nine thousand miners slaughtered.”

She nodded. “I remember. The Vandals killed the children and marked the body count on their armor.”

“Shortly before the Vandals attacked, the colony had sent out a ship, two hundred and fifty passengers and forty crew. Half of the passengers were recent graduates going to Raleigh III to attend the academy there. None of them older than eighteen. Some of the others needed advanced medical treatment, some were visiting family. The usual thing.”

The tremor in his right hand was back, but his voice remained measured.

“They joined the civilian fleet in Danube System and sat there for a week until it assembled. Fifteen vessels—four Leviathan freighters, some frigates, and the rest random small fries—all going almost all the way across the sector. Three mercenary companies banded together for the convoy, us and two others. With that much muscle, most pirates would let us pass, so it was easy money. Three weeks of being bored, then a nice payday and a few days of liberty to blow the money.”

The tremor was obvious now. He squeezed his hand into a fist.

“We were making a transition between jump points at Nicola. Nine hours of slow flying across a deserted star system to get from one jump gate to another. We were almost to the jump point when the Vandal fleet came out of it.”

He remembered it as if it happened yesterday, the wail of alarms and the sudden armada materializing on the screen.

“I was piloting Wasp, a light patrol vessel. Basically, a scout ship with a jump drive, two cannons, and a crew of four. For the nine-hour run across an empty system, it was just me and the gunner. We were on the bridge. One moment there was nothing, and then the mass signatures started flooding in. A cruiser, three heavy destroyers, ten frigates. The biggest ship we had was a light destroyer.