Fated Blades (Kinsmen)

“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?”