Chapter 40
Gemma
A zur was quiet for a long time.
Every moment that ticked by in silence, my heart sunk deeper and deeper into my belly. I could still smell the lingerings of lore on his clothes, but now the heady, spicy scent just made me want to curl into a ball.
But then, bright hope burst in me when he said quietly, “Very well. But not here.”
“I’ll go anywhere with you,” I said.
Azur was restless as we cleaned up. But there was no embarrassment in our actions as we tucked and smoothed our clothes back into place. The dizzying hunger of the lore had left me trembling, but I didn’t mind the sensation.
We left the storage room, ventured out into the darkened hallway, where, thankfully, no keepers were lingering. My face burned just thinking about what I’d done to Azur in open view, where anyone could have walked in or strode through the door at the end of the hallway.
Only, I couldn’t find it in me to regret it, even if my jaw ached from the act. I would never forget the look in his eyes as he’d watched me pleasure him. My only regret was not doing it sooner.
I shivered and Azur held me close. When he led me out of the family entrance’s door, out toward the courtyard and the terrace where we took our morning meals, I glanced up at him, feeling a chill in the air.
Kalia had told me that winter was approaching. The lore would be replanted then, mere weeks after it had been harvested, hibernating and preparing under a frost-ridden earth before it would emerge at the end of the cold season.
I could feel it in the air. The warm evenings were gone, giving way to a crisp breeze. I liked the cold though. I didn’t mind it. Especially when my husband’s arms wrapped tight around me to help shield it.
I tightened my hold on him when I found myself swept up in those arms, cradled against his chest, and he launched us up into the air, his wings carrying us easily. He flew up past the third floor of the keep to the roof, where he landed on a flattened, obviously well-worn spot in the stone.
“You come up here often?” I asked softly.
“It was my father’s favorite hiding place,” he told me. “When Mother threw her dinners with nobles he would rather not entertain. He would bring us out here, too, if we asked.”
I loved that. Azur obviously still came out here, judging from the dried flakes of lore I spied tucked into the grooves of the roof.
“You smoke out here?” I guessed, trying to lighten his mood. Because it had turned dark and brooding. It made me nervous, the change in him. Nervous about what I might discover, but this was a conversation that was long overdue. I supposed I just hadn’t expected to have it tonight .
I’m glad we are, I decided, lowering myself beside him as he kept a firm grip on my calf just in case I managed to stumble off the roof. He was slippery like a fish when it came to this conversation. I needed to catch him when I could.
The view was breathtaking, similar to the ones from my rooms—and Azur’s. Only, it felt even wider because we could see the sky above, the stars twinkling out beyond the dark clouds.
“I feel like I need to smoke now,” Azur rumbled, running a hand down his face.
“Is it really so bad?” I asked quietly, feeling a lump lodge itself in my throat.
Now I was worried.
Azur looked over the Silver Sea when he said, “Aina was my aunt. My mother’s only sister. Her beloved sister. Her twin.”
I stilled. So twins ran in his family’s bloodline.
“The pair of them were incredibly close, like Kythel and me. Aina lived here with us in the keep. Back then, we were in a time of peace with the Kaazor and with the Thryki across the seas. A tentative peace. It was quiet in the Kaalium—partly because of Aina. Her strengths laid in negotiations, not war strategy like Laras’s other advisors. She brokered a twenty-year treaty with the Kaazor. We would supply them with lore . They wouldn’t try to breach our borders in the north and they would keep their kyriv away from our villages, even the ones on the outer lands.”
My brow furrowed.
“The Kaazor broke their agreement about ten years in,” Azur added when he saw my confusion. “But Aina at least gave the Kaalium peace during that time. She was my mother’s opposite. Aina was bold and brash. Her laughter filled these halls, loud enough to make Zaale scowl.” Azur’s lips quirked before the brief smile died. “She taught us how to fight from the time we were young. How to use swords and blades. Daggers and bows. But mostly how to defend ourselves.”
“Even Kalia?” I asked softly.
“Never sneak up on Kalia,” Azur told me, shaking his head. He wasn’t touching me, and I found that I missed his heat. “She’ll have you pinned on your back before you’ve realized it.”
I could believe it.
“What happened to her?” I asked, my voice edged in uncertainty. “What happened to Aina?”
Azur’s wings twitched.
“She died,” he said flatly. “Seventeen years ago.”
Seventeen years ago?
“On Pe’ji.”
My breath whooshed out from my lungs and I turned to face him. My heart gave a mighty thump, and then it sped and I couldn’t stop it.
“On Pe’ji?” I whispered. “But that’s…”
“You know that we were their allies. The Voperians had no authority to take the planet from the Pe’ji. They tried anyway. Then the United Alliance got involved. That was how the New Earth forces were called in. Soldiers used to claim a planet that never should have been invaded to begin with,” Azur told me softly, his jaw ticking.
Father had never talked about the war or the politics of it. Though he’d been a decorated hero, though I knew that the Pe’ji had been overthrown, that the Voperians had been successful in their war campaign, partly with the help of human soldiers.
During the last battle of the Pe’ji War, my father had led his unit past Pe’ji’s defenses while the Kylorr had been distracted on the opposite side of the field. It had been my father to slaughter their war general, bringing panic and chaos to the fight until the soldiers had picked off the stragglers, one by one.
And the Voperians had paid the United Alliance well for their assistance. And then the United Alliance had paid my father well, giving him the estate in the Collis, giving him fame and glory—and money. More money than he’d known what to do with.
Until that money had been gone.
“The Kylorr failed the Pe’ji,” Azur told me. “The Kylorr of the Kaalium failed the Pe’ji in that war. But we nearly won it, if not for that last battle.”
“Aina was fighting in the field?” I guessed, my throat tight.
“No,” Azur said. “Aina was a peace ambassador only. She was brought in after the final battle to negotiate on Pe’ji’s behalf with the Voperians and the United Alliance, for at least partial claim to their land.”
My lips parted. “I don’t understand.”
“Aina was murdered,” Azur told me, making my breath hitch in shock. His eyes turned to me, bright red in the darkness. “She was killed by your father. Rye Hara. Leader of the Fifth Unit of the New Inverness forces.”
“No,” I said immediately, thinking of my father’s wide grin, his red, ruddy cheeks. Shaking my head, hearing his words sink into my brain but twist and morph until they didn’t feel real. “No, you must be mistaken.”
But there was a burn that started deep in my nostrils and in my throat and in my belly. A burn that made nausea roil in my belly until I thought I would be sick all over the roof.
“ No, ” I whispered, looking at Azur. “No, why would you say something like that?”
Azur’s expression was grim. There had been a time in our brief marriage when he might’ve delighted in telling me this. Where he would’ve enjoyed seeing the horror and the turmoil and the realization slowly begin to contort my features until my eyes stung and tears dripped down my cheeks.
But not now.
Azur reached out to touch me, but I recoiled, pressing my hands to my face.
“We never knew what happened to Aina,” Azur told me softly, continuing. “We were told her death was undetermined. That she went missing a week into the peace talks and no one had seen her. She just disappeared . Our family traveled extensively to Pe’ji to try to find her. My father hired every single investigator he could find to search for her. But Pe’ji is a wild planet. Its jungles are dense. It was a month later when we realized that we would likely never find her.
“My mother was broken after that. And she knew what had happened. She said she could feel it the moment Aina’s soul was released. She woke up my father in the middle of the night, crying hysterically. Her face was stained silver from her tears for weeks . She said she could feel the emptiness. That she could feel the emptiness where Aina had been. And I know what that feels like because I can feel it with Kythel.”
Azur’s voice was ridden with angst and despair. My shoulders were shaking, my knees beginning to bounce, my hands clenched into my dress. I could still feel the stretch and imprint of Azur inside my body. It felt like too much.
“We knew the United Alliance had something to do with her death, but we had no way to prove it,” Azur said after a long silence. “Still, we brought charges against them in the high courts. For sheer negligence and lack of protection for a peace ambassador in a time of war. They were fined heavily. Laws were written so that every future ambassador has a fully armed unit traveling with them. But none of that brought Aina back to us. Nor did it give peace to my family and especially to my mother. She never stopped looking for Aina’s body. The body is important to the Kylorr. We burn our dead and compress the ashes of their bones to create their soul gem, where their soul lives and is protected in Alara. But we never found Aina. Whether she was buried or burned or hidden or transported off planet, we never knew. Her soul has no vessel within our family’s shrine, and seeing it empty left my mother broken because she knew that they would never be reunited in the next realm.”
A sob left my throat, and I looked up at the night sky, the stars shimmering through my tears.
“My mother died seven years later, but in those seven years she never knew a day of peace. She searched endlessly. Tirelessly. Consulting countless investigators, reviewing every scrap of video feed she could find off Pe’ji, of which there was little. But I promised her that I would find Aina. I made my vow to her. I made my vow to our family,” he said, his voice guttural. “And then…two months ago, a black feed was recovered in an United Alliance storage facility on Voperia. I’d had investigators working in the background for years, waiting for anything at all, anything scrap of news that might give us direction. One of the investigators was on Voperia at the time. He broke into the storage facility and stole the video feed. When he unscrambled the code…there she was.”
Two months ago.
“Azur,” I whispered raggedly.
“The video showed Aina. On Pe’ji. With a human male who we later identified as Rye Hara, Lord of the Collis, and his unit. Four human males and two human females.”
My gut twisted.
Azur looked at me as he said, “Aina was a fighter. She fought them as best as she could. But the soldiers swarmed her and they sliced her wings so she couldn’t fly away. And your father took his plasma gun, he raised it to her chest, and he blew a hole straight through her heart. They dragged her body away, off feed, and we never saw her again.”
I was shivering on the roof. The world turned upside down, and I felt like I was thrashing and drowning, trying not to sink, as Azur’s words flooded my body.
I felt raw. Like my chest had been split open and everything was leaking out of me. Until there would be nothing left.
Azur took my face in one of his palms.
“And I vowed right then and there that I would destroy Rye Hara and everything he held close,” he told me softly as big, fat tears tracked down my cheeks. “I would begin with his eldest daughter. I would do everything I could to have her, to possess her…and then I would break her will, her spirit, her hope, just like my mother’s had been broken. Just like ours had been broken.”
“Were you going to kill me?” I asked woodenly. Not that I would’ve blamed him. Maybe I’d had reason to fear him after all. “That’s what Kaldur said, didn’t he? You needed my blood. The blood of your enemy.”
His brows drew down. He actually flinched, horror entering his expression at the question. “ No. ”
I gripped his forearm, squeezing his wrist, as his forehead came to mine.
His voice was ragged as he said, “But I was going to use you. Use your suffering as an offering to Raazos, who might lead Aina’s soul back to us even without her soul gem, her vessel. And when I was done with you, I was going to send you back to your father, turn the black feed over to War Crimes at the High Quadrant Council, and let the collectors flood back in to feast on whatever was left. I wanted your family’s name tarnished. Stripped. Destroyed. I wanted House Hara to suffer as we did, and I was so consumed with my vengeance that I couldn’t see beyond it. I couldn’t even see you .”
His lips pressed to my cheek, kissing away my tears, but it didn’t comfort me. Everything I’d known had been pulled out from right under my feet. I had never imagined this . This horrific tragedy that had befallen House Kaalium at the hands of my father and whatever, or whomever, had driven him to perform such a monstrous act.
It split my very soul, trying to understand.
Tonight, Azur had introduced me as Gemma of House Kaalium, Kylaira of Laras.
I’d felt hope then, mingled with my grief and my pleasure.
Now I just felt numb.
“How can you stand it?” I whispered against him. He pulled back to look at me. “How can you even stand to look at me, to touch me, to be near me, knowing my own father did this to you and your family? To Aina?”
“Gemma,” Azur said quietly, his gaze flickering back and forth between my eyes, frowning at whatever he found there. “It was my own mistake to believe you had knowledge of the crime.”
Horror flooded me. My breath hitched. “I didn’t .”
“I know,” he growled. “But my mind wanted to believe that you knew because it would be easier to hurt you if you did.”
I thought back to our wedding ceremony on Nulaxy. I wondered how in the world Azur hadn’t ripped my father apart right in front of me, tearing him limb from limb.
“Oh gods,” I whispered, suddenly drained. So incredibly tired that I felt sick and dizzy with it. “How you must hate me. How you all must hate me. No wonder…”
I began to cry then. Shuddering, aching sobs that I tried to stifle. But it felt like my heart was breaking. Not just the grief at the destruction of my relationship with Azur but also because of my father.
Even worlds away and he could still shatter my heart so completely.
“I don’t hate you, kyrana ,” came my husband’s strained voice, and I felt the strong pull of his hands come to my wrists when I tried to shield my face. I couldn’t even get up and leave. We were on the roof of the keep. “I wanted to. So much. But I couldn’t. I discovered you. I saw you. Your bright, unbending spirit. Your resilience. Your loyalty to your sisters. Your grief. I could never have hated that woman. Just the opposite, in fact.”
His words should’ve comforted me. They’d been meant to. But I couldn’t quite meet his eyes.
I’d begun to fall in love with my Kylorr husband.
And I believed that he’d begun to feel the same.
Only now…
I knew that we could never come back from this.
“I want to see the black feed,” I said quietly. My voice sounded hollow, even to me. “I want to see the video.”
Azur was tense beside me. “I don’t think that’s wise, laraya .”
“I want to see it,” I said, my voice firm. “I need to.”
Azur’s wings unfurled behind us. He debated for a long time.
Finally, I met his eyes—worried and concerned, I saw—and pleaded, “Azur, please .”
He finally relented. “Very well.”
I was tense in his arms when he flew us off the roof. I could still hear the strains and haunting melody from the ball still taking place downstairs. A ball that seemed eons ago in my memory. Time was strange. How could it have happened tonight ? When my whole world had changed since I had been within that ballroom? How had I been dancing in my husband’s arms without a care in the world?
We landed on the balcony of his office. At his Halo system, I waited with my heart beating hard against the bones of my chest. Wishing that it wasn’t true. Knowing that it was. Azur had no reason to lie. He wouldn’t about something like this.
Still, I prayed to all the deities in the universe that it wasn’t true. That it wouldn’t be my father on that feed, murdering a peace ambassador in cold blood, long after the final battle of the Pe’ji War, and then covering up the crime. Taking away a beloved member of House Kaalium, whose soul was lost to them.
When the video came up, though it was grainy and dark, I still felt a sinking in my belly. Like I was falling into the ground below, being swallowed up by darkness and soil and roots.
I would recognize my father anywhere. Though he was slimmer in the video, though his hair was less gray and Azur had muted the sound of the horrific scene loaded before me…I would recognize Rye Hara anywhere.
I watched it unfold, just as Azur had said, and I refused to look away even though I felt my heart shriveling up with every single millisecond.
I watched them cut her wings. Hold her down.
Taunt her as she tried to fight back.
I watched as my father killed Aina.
The bright burn of his plasma gun would be imprinted in my memory forever.