Xel: Broken Bond (Rogue Bonds #3)

CHAPTER ONE

XEL

I stared at the body lying on the floor, in the centre of the hotel’s dining room. So it was true. My master was really dead.

I stepped closer, feeling a morbid curiosity about it. He’d always been so animated in life, talking, gesturing, bustling about. It was hard to imagine how such a lively man could be dead.

But there he was, lying motionless on the floor.

His face was pale, his moustache neatly trimmed, as always.

His arms were splayed out on either side of him and his suit jacket was rumpled.

He wouldn’t be pleased about that. He’d always gone to a lot of trouble to dress well, wanting to impress the guests as he worked his way through the crowd at breakfast.

Today, though, the trays of pastries, scrambled eggs and miniature sausages were going to go uneaten. The guests had all been shooed out of the dining room, and it wasn’t likely anyone would have an appetite now anyway.

“You’d best keep out of the way, lad,” a police officer said to me, gently moving me away from the body. “Not a pleasant sight, I’m sure. How about you go take a seat, if you’re not feeling too good.”

I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. But, not wanting to get in the way of the cluster of police officers and paramedics, I retreated to the side of the room, sitting down on an abandoned chair.

There was a half-eaten plate of breakfast sitting on the table, and I pushed it away, the smell making me nauseous.

Or maybe that was simply the creeping realisation that without a master, I had no idea what my future held. He’d been the centre of my entire world; him, and his grand hotel, and the staff who kept the place running.

I watched as one of the paramedics removed a tablecloth from one of the tables and carefully draped it over my master’s body. My master disappeared underneath the white sheet, and I once again tried to figure out how I was feeling. I was supposed to be feeling sad, wasn’t I?

Well, no, ‘sad’ wasn’t nearly a big enough emotion to be feeling about the death of one’s master.

According to my trainers back on Eumad, I should be elated to have a master, delighted to serve him, and be devastated by the thought of even disappointing him, never mind losing him entirely.

So it felt like something of a betrayal to him that I couldn’t even muster up a generic feeling of sorrow.

If I could dare to admit it, then I might have realised that what I was feeling was more like… relief.

But that couldn’t be right. He was my master. He was my entire reason for drawing breath. How could I be feeling relieved to be away from him?

“I don’t know what happened,” Kathy, the head housekeeper, was saying to one of the officers, a short distance away.

“I was talking to some of the guests over near the entrance. They had an issue with the shower leaking in their room. Then suddenly people started shouting, and I turned around and Mr Ronson was lying on the floor. Dolo and Raf did CPR until the paramedics arrived. They’re two of the kitchen staff. But that’s really all I know.”

“Are you aware of any medical conditions Mr Ronson had? Or any medication he was on?”

“No, not at all. He was a very private man. Even if he’d had any health problems, he wouldn’t have told his staff.”

“Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to harm him?”

Kathy’s eyes opened wide. “No!” she said, sounding shocked by the idea. But then her forehead creased in a frown, and she added, more quietly, “Well, no, I don’t think so.” Interesting that she wasn’t terribly confident about it.

But if I was being honest, then I couldn’t disagree with her. No one would have emphatically declared that my master was the sort of man that everyone loved.

Was it disloyal of me to be thinking that? Or, given that my master was now dead, did it even matter anymore?

What was going to happen to me now? I’d never been told what happened to a dimari after their master died. There were rumours that masterless slaves were sent to labour camps, since mindless labour was all we were good for after our bond with our master was broken.

A labour camp had always sounded like a horrible thing; a cold, sterile place devoid of friendship or meaning. But on reflection, was that all that different from the life I lived now? Repetitive work, shallow conversations, lonely nights.

“Excuse me… Xel? Is that your name?”

I looked up, seeing the police officer standing in front of me. I stood up, knowing that was the polite thing to do. The man was a human, and not a small one, but I still stood a good three or four inches taller than him. “Yes, I’m Xel,” I said, suddenly feeling profoundly tired.

“And you are Mr Ronson’s dimari, is that correct?”

“Yes,” I confirmed again.

“Were you here in the dining hall when he collapsed?”

“No, I was around the back in the laundry. Kathy came to get me after the paramedics were called. She thought it was important for me to know what had happened.” It probably was important. But I still didn’t have a clue what to do with the knowledge.

“You’re referring to Kathleen Norris? The head housekeeper?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you know her well?”

I nodded. “She organises my shifts. When I arrived here, my master put her in charge of most of my work.”

“And how would you describe Ms Norris?”

I glanced across the room. Kathy was now consoling one of the kitchen staff, a young woman who had only been working for the hotel for a week or two. No doubt this was far from the level of excitement she’d been expecting when she’d taken the job.

“She’s very organised,” I told the officer. “She tries to make sure everyone has enough shifts to cover their bills, but not so many that they get overworked.”

“What about personality-wise?” he pressed. “Is she friendly? Approachable?”

Nobody would describe Kathy as friendly. She was efficient. She was capable. But what she lacked in warmth, she made up for with a firm morality that meant she would always look out for the underdog.

“Kathy didn’t hurt Mr Ronson,” I told the officer, skipping right to what he actually wanted to know. “Whether or not she’s likeable, she’s far too honest for that sort of thing.”

“No, I did not poison the food!” a shrill voice shrieked from across the room, and I turned to see Holi, one of the head chefs, glaring at another one of the officers.

She was a Wasop, with vibrant black and yellow stripes across her skin, and she wore her jet black hair in a mohawk.

And though she was only a touch over four feet tall, she wasn’t the slightest bit intimidated by the human officer towering over her.

“The cantankerous old fart had a heart attack,” she stated, gesturing angrily towards the sheet-covered body on the floor.

“And as soon as someone does a proper autopsy, I’m sure that will be perfectly obvious. ”

It seemed the police were pushing the murder angle fairly heavily, then.

Did they honestly believe that someone had enough of a grudge against him to kill him?

And should it alarm me that I wasn’t all that surprised by the idea?

Not everyone had liked my master. For all my loyalty to him, I was aware of that.

Kathy looked over then and saw me watching the spectacle.

And she also saw the officer still trying to get answers out of me.

She came marching over, her fists clenched at her sides.

Kathy was not a tall woman, though long days of hard work had given her thick arms and thighs.

But she had a way of carrying herself that more than made up for her lack of height.

“For goodness sake, would you leave the poor lad alone,” she scolded the officer.

“He’s just lost his master and he doesn’t need you prodding at him.

And as Holi just said, it’s far more likely that Mr Ronson died of a heart attack.

Come over here, Xel,” she said, taking my hand and leading me away, ignoring the officer’s affronted look.

“How are you doing, hm? Are you holding it together?”

I was not ‘holding it together’. I had far too many questions about what I was going to do now.

Would I still work here at the hotel? Would I have to go and live somewhere else?

Who would decide when I got to eat, and where I should sleep, and what clothes I should wear?

Without my master, I didn’t know how to do the simplest things.

But Kathy wouldn’t know the answer to any of those questions either, so I nodded and said, “I’m fine. ”

“You’re certainly not fine,” she said, with equal parts empathy and exasperation.

“Just sit down here and take a breather, okay?” She led me to a chair near the entrance to the dining hall, away from the bulk of the crowd.

“I’ll come and check on you in a bit. Some of the wait-staff are in a tizzy about whether or not they’re still going to get paid, and I need to go and calm things down.

But I’ll tell you what. I’ll get you a cup of coffee…

Oh, no, you can’t drink coffee, can you.

Never mind. What about a lemonade? I’ll have Raf bring you over a lemonade.

And don’t you worry about a thing. I know some people who might be able to take you in, so we’re going to get something sorted, you hear me?

I don’t know what the official protocol is for dimari who…

” She stopped suddenly, and I followed her gaze across the room to the rear entrance.

A tall, lanky, human man had just wandered in, looking for all the world like he owned the place.

And for all I knew, maybe he did now. I felt Kathy bristle beside me.

The man – Dorral was his name – caught my eye from across the room and smirked at me.

Then he schooled his features into an appropriate look of concern and hurried across the room to my master’s body.