EPILOGUE
NEREZZA
“At this time, investigators believe mechanical issues are to blame for the transport crash, which claimed the life of Roderick Battis, the presumed heir of House Battis, along with several other members of House Battis . . .”
General Orion Ocnus crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head. The overhead lights made his short dark brown hair look like needles jutting up out of his ruddy scalp. “Another bloody failure. This is becoming a bad habit of yours, Nerezza.”
At his snide comment, my hand fisted around my wineglass.
Fury roared through me, but I resisted the urge to hurl the glass at Ocnus.
The general was standing next to me, and we were both in my luxurious suite, watching the gossipcast images of the transport crash on the holoscreen.
I wasn’t going to soil my own space by doing something so childish as throwing wine in the condescending bastard’s face. No matter how much I wanted to.
Ocnus turned toward me, his bushy eyebrows lifting, like he could sense my white-hot rage.
Maybe he could. Despite my loathing of him, Ocnus was nothing if not observant.
A clear challenge sparked in his black eyes, as though he was daring me to reveal my true feelings about the situation and especially him, but I wasn’t going to fall into that trap.
I raised the glass to my lips and took a slow, deliberate sip. The wine was an excellent vintage, with notes of apples and berries, but right now it puckered my tongue like vinegar. I swallowed the wine and plastered a benign expression on my face.
An angry flush crept up Ocnus’s neck. He didn’t like being kept waiting. Too damn bad.
“If you’ll recall, approaching Roderick Battis was your idea,” I replied, my voice as smooth and even as the glass in my hand.
Ocnus harrumphed. “Yes, well, you’re the one who made the arrangements.”
Ocnus had come to me with his plan several days ago. He’d leveraged someone in House Battis into becoming his spy in the Erzton. Ocnus’s spy had told the general about Roderick Battis’s dome of death, and Ocnus had seen a chance to capture Vesper Quill.
Despite all the information I’d stolen from the Serpens Corp servers, the Techwave scientists still weren’t any closer to figuring out how to fix Ocnus’s new hand cannon, which was based on Vesper’s design.
So Ocnus still needed to get his hands on my long-lost daughter in order to mass-produce the Techwave’s weapon.
All things considered, Ocnus’s plan hadn’t been a bad one.
He’d told me to contact Roderick Battis with an offer: invite Vesper Quill and Kyrion Caldaren to his training facility, or face the consequences of the Techwave leaking the info about what he was really doing in his maze to the Erzton gossipcasts.
Blackmail was one of my favorite pastimes.
Knowing which buttons on a person’s psyche to press and for how long and hard was an art form that I had mastered long ago.
Roderick Battis had been exceedingly arrogant, and it had been highly amusing to watch him squirm.
Roderick had done what people always did when they were cornered: deny he had done anything wrong, and then when confronted with the irrefutable evidence of his guilt, he’d tried to bribe me to look the other way.
In many ways, people were just like instruments, and all you had to do was figure out which strings to pluck to get them to do exactly what you wanted.
My social-engineering ability let me see those internal strings, but Roderick had been easier to manipulate than most, and I’d played the Erzton lord like a maestro conducting an orchestra.
Roderick had fancied himself a hunter, so I’d given him a big-game prize in Kyrion Caldaren.
Ocnus had even supplied Roderick with a Black Scarab and a new prototype armor the Techie scientists were trying to perfect for the human soldiers.
Something else Vesper would have been able to help with, if only things had gone according to Ocnus’s plan.
Ocnus kept staring at me, that accusatory look still on his face. I took another sip of my vinegary wine.
“I might have made the arrangements, but you’re the one who supplied the weapons. Maybe you should have given Roderick more Scarabs to capture Vesper and help him kill Kyrion, instead of just a single machine and one suit of modified armor.”
Ocnus waved his hand. “Bah! Even with the best armor credits could buy, a pampered lord like Roderick Battis would never have gotten the better of a battle-hardened warrior like Kyrion Caldaren. Roderick was just supposed to keep Kyrion busy and out of the way while the Scarab captured Vesper in the maze and the House Battis Hammers escorted her to our ship.” His face darkened.
“But things didn’t go according to my plan. ”
“Funny how that seems to keep happening to you,” I replied, my voice still velvety smooth.
Another angry flush swept up Ocnus’s neck, and he glared at me for a moment before flapping his hand at the holoscreen. “Can anything be traced back to us?”
“Of course not,” I lied. “I contacted Roderick through a secure private channel, and the Black Scarab and modified armor were sent to the House Battis training facility. There’s no way Vesper, Kyrion, or anyone at House Collier will be able to trace anything back to us.”
That wasn’t entirely true, but Ocnus didn’t need to know that.
Oh, I had contacted Roderick through secure means, and the equipment had gone to his facility, but I had no idea who Roderick might have bragged to about what he was doing.
It was entirely possible he had told someone his goal was to kill Kyrion and kidnap Vesper—and exactly who was funding his latest hunting expedition.
That part of the plan had been my idea. As amusing as it would have been to capture Kyrion and torture him for all the wrongs he’d done to me, Vesper was much more likely to be quickly, thoroughly broken if her truebonded partner was dead, so I’d told Roderick to make sure Vesper was captured, and then to kill Kyrion as quickly as possible.
But I was guessing the Erzton lord had ignored my orders and decided to hunt the dangerous Arrow instead of immediately eliminating him.
Now Roderick was dead as a result of his own foolishness.
Still, it was no great loss, especially since I got the delightful bonus of chiding Ocnus about his plan failing.
Ocnus watched the crash reporting on the holoscreen for a few more seconds, then stabbed his finger at me.
“You have to fix this, Nerezza. We still need Vesper’s expertise before we can mass-produce the hand cannon, and we could also use her brain on a few more projects.
” He shook his head. “You look so much like your daughter, yet you have none of her mechanical ingenuity. What a shame.”
I ground my teeth and tipped my head at him. “Understood. I’ll start working on a new approach.”
Ocnus eyed me like he thought I was going to set my wine down and get started right away. The general didn’t realize that he was just as expendable as Roderick Battis, and by the time he figured it out, it would be too late—for him, of course.
I took another sip of wine. Ocnus huffed again, then spun around on his heel, wrenched the door open, and stormed away.
“Good riddance,” I muttered.
The crash footage kept playing on the screen. Ocnus’s spy hadn’t found out exactly what had happened yet, but I was willing to bet Vesper was behind everything that had gone wrong.
Roderick had messaged me when Vesper and Kyrion had arrived at his facility and then again when they had entered his maze.
My plan to separate and isolate the couple had worked perfectly, but everything else had failed miserably.
Somehow, Vesper and Kyrion had taken down Roderick, and then Vesper must have orchestrated the ship crash to hide the fact that she and Kyrion had killed the Erzton lord and his people.
Every time I thought I had the perfect plan to finally take care of her once and for all, the girl squirmed away from me yet again.
More white-hot fury roared through me, and for once, I couldn’t contain it.
I spun away from the holoscreen and hurled the wineglass at a nearby window.
The delicate glass shattered on impact, although the sturdy window itself remained intact.
I stood there, breathing hard, my chest heaving, my entire body vibrating with fury.
I wasn’t quite sure why. This wasn’t the first time my plans had been foiled, but Vesper and Kyrion were quite possibly the most formidable, frustrating enemies I had ever encountered.
I despised losing, especially to the same people over and over again.
I stood there watching the wine drip down the window for several seconds. Then I blew out a breath and calmed myself. I went over and hit a button on my desk. A voice crackled through the speaker embedded in the table. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Send a cleaning crew in here,” I commanded. “I spilled some wine.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the voice replied. “Right away.”
I yanked the chair out from behind the desk, sat down, and turned off the gossipcast. Then I used the holoscreen to start swiping through one file after another.
Roderick Battis might have gotten himself killed, but he’d given me access to more Erzton secrets than he realized.
All I had to do was find the right one, connected to the right person, and I would get everything I had ever wanted.
And then I would finally eliminate all my enemies, starting with General Orion Ocnus, then Callus Holloway and Kyrion Caldaren, and, finally, Vesper Quill.
Thank you for reading Only Rogue Actions. Vesper Quill and Kyrion Caldaren will return in another Galactic Bonds adventure.