41 Her Best Armor Had Always Been a Smile
Her Best Armor Had Always Been a Smile
I don’t care if she’s busy! Put her on.” Spie paced her balcony, practically shouting into her CB at the obtuse assistant to the assistant to Marta Eulogon.
“Tell her if she doesn’t talk to me right now that I’m going to announce to the whole empire that I’m officially withdrawing from Love Galaxy . ”
Long seconds passed during which Spie could make out hushed whispers from the assistant’s end. The bridge call cut off abruptly. Spie was about to rip her CB off her wrist and throw it off her balcony when another call came through, this one from a private frequency.
Spie answered immediately. “Mother.”
Gracelin’s regal features projected into the air.
Even in the early hours before dawn, not a hair on her head was out of place.
But she definitely needed a touch-up of undereye makeup.
For as long as Spie had known her mother, Gracelin Expani had never been one to sleep well.
“Spielin, child, this really is not the time for one of your temper tantrums.”
Spie blew out a measured breath to keep from going off on the woman who birthed her. “I’m aware, Your Excellency .” She stressed the honorific into a mockery. “Nicky told me.”
“Told you what, dear? I have significantly more pressing issues at the moment and an imperial union address to record.”
“That you fucked a Uiyoni dignitary. That I barely qualify as human. That the X72 contestant is being transported to a maximum-security prison outside Elsidor because she’s been blamed for killing women that Nicky killed.” She could’ve added more, but that about covered the basics.
But Gracelin Expani didn’t miss a beat. Spie often wondered how she could’ve come from such a cold woman. Is this what would happen to Nicky in thirty years’ time? Had their mother once been innocent and kind?
“Watch your language, Spie.” Gracelin glanced over her shoulder and lowered her voice.
“Your brother should never have told you any of that. Nor should you be repeating it. Better yet, forget it. Bury it. And don’t you ever tell another soul.
I have a lot to deal with right now, and I need you to stay out of the way. ”
Stay out of the way. Like Spie was a child who didn’t know her place. She dug her nails into the palms of her hands.
“This isn’t what I signed up for. Three women dead? Nicky losing his shit? What have you done? He isn’t cut out for this. He’s going to drink himself into oblivion from guilt!”
Gracelin puckered her small, regal mouth.
“Are you done? Have my lessons gone so drastically awry? This overreaction is precisely why I never trusted you with the truth. It doesn’t matter who your genetic father is—you’re an Expani.
We Expani are Expan. Your brother’s condition is irrelevant.
You two are no more Uiyoni than I am a bird.
Now, was there a point to this communication?
Because you’re old enough to deal with unpleasant information on your own. ”
Spie didn’t know what she’d expected. Her mother to show an ounce of regret? Of empathy? To apologize? What a ridiculous notion.
“Actually, yes. Exonerate Artemis Ialan. She’s innocent. She doesn’t deserve to take the fall for any of this.”
The image of Artemis’s wrists being cuffed prodded painfully at Spie’s mind.
It reminded her of another night nearly eight years before, when Arbora had been escorted out of the imperial palace as though she were a lowly criminal.
That day, Spie had done nothing to stop it.
Had stood idly by, afraid to go against her mother.
She’d spent her life “rebelling” but not in any way that actually mattered.
Sleeping around, refusing university, showing up minorly stoned to meetings (Nicky was right; her tolerance for substances had always been high—with a shiver, she filed the thought away for later).
They were the acts of an insolent child.
She’d always known there was a line but had never crossed it in truth.
It was one thing to act a rebel, another thing entirely to be one.
“What is this, Spielin? Some desperate plea for my attention?” Gracelin sighed dramatically.
“The X-er ambassador is expendable, a necessary casualty in a much-larger conflict. Freeing her would immediately put your brother in danger, put you in danger, me, and from there, the entire empire would shake, cracks forming like a planetary surface undergoing tectonic-plate separation. You’re telling me that you care more about the life of some fringe-planet dweller than you do your own brother’s?
Do I truly have to explain in plain language what will happen if anyone discovers the truth? ”
Spie sank onto a deck chair. Her skin felt like sandpaper, rough with salt from her midnight dive, her scalp itchy, her eyes swollen and raw. She needed a shower; she needed sleep.
The earliest rays of the morning sun brightened the distant horizon.
“I—”
What was Spie asking for? Artemis’s release, certainly, but at what cost?
How had everything gone so horridly wrong?
She was never going to be with Artemis; she’d known that from the beginning.
But the thought of doing nothing while she let her family slander and then murder her?
An excruciating pain sliced through Spie’s gut at the thought, the kind that made her want to fold her arms over her chest and double over while her stomach curdled with nausea.
If that had been the worst of it, then perhaps Spie could’ve endured it.
Could’ve found a way to stand aside and forget the last two months with Artemis Ialan.
Could forget Artemis’s filthy mouth and dry humor, her adorable lack of style, her intelligence and inability to bend (Spie put on a show of arrogance, but Artemis Ialan actually was arrogant), her complete unwillingness to be anyone and anything other than exactly who she was.
But there was more than attraction between them.
More than the invisible pull between bodies that could be sated and forgotten after a night between bedsheets.
At least for Spie. She supposed she couldn’t say if Artemis felt the same.
But their brief entanglement on the beach had only left Spie hungrier, and not just for sex.
For closeness, intimacy that had nothing to do with the physical.
A soft and fledgling yearning so delicate, it frightened her.
For gentle kisses and playful whispers, for someone to hold and be held by, to laugh with, to cry with.
A person safe enough to unmask herself for.
Spie had never had that before, and until meeting Artemis Ialan, she’d never believed it possible.
An even-worse pain struck, this one concentrated entirely in her heart, like shards of glass imbedding in the palpitating muscle, shredding it bloody but not tearing quite enough to keep it from continuing to beat.
Was there anything more painful than the ceaseless throb of a breaking heart?
“Are you going to speak or just sit there in sullen silence?” Gracelin shook her head in her condescending way. Like Spie was some child who couldn’t grasp the harsh realities of life. “When will you grow up?” As though growing up and understanding the necessities of murder were one and the same.
Maybe they were, for an emperor.
With a trembling flick of her wrist, Spie terminated the bridge call.
She would die herself before she ever let her coldhearted bitch of a mother witness the tears that were beginning to thrash down her face.
But she hated crying, was annoyed with herself for yet another useless stream of emotion, hated the tsunami of helplessness that had overwhelmed her being.
She wanted to feel anger, rage, hate. She wanted to feel powerful.
With a soundless scream, she yanked her CB off her wrist and threw it as hard as she could.
Toward the ocean waves turning blue under the brightening sun.
But the device got nowhere near the water, plummeting within a copse of trees a few dozen feet from her balcony.
Logic said no human could throw an object far enough to reach the water, but Spie was far from being logical.
Her sense of impotence only increased, and she collapsed atop her deck like a spineless eel.
But succumbing to the hailstorm of anguish pinning her to the cedar floorboards would be akin to letting her mother win.
So, she gave herself only a moment to wallow in pain before doing what her mother had always taught her to do: shove the bloody tissue of her breaking heart back inside her chest, dry her eyes, and straighten her aching, pounding bones.
She stood tall, rolled out her shoulders and stared into the brightening morning.
Already, three hovercrafts were arcing across the sky, descending on where she’d tossed her CB.
In seconds, they’d turn in her direction.
And she refused to let them witness her tears.
Forcing the corners of her mouth to twist upward, she waved. Her best armor had always been a smile.
Gracelin Expani thought she’d won. Was so very used to winning. But that was only because Spie had never battled her mother in truth. For years, she’d been labeled the rebellious daughter. It was time Spie truly lived up to the name.