29. Lorken
Lorken
"Iknow nothing of that name," she said, but the words came a beat too slow, her gaze darting away from mine for a beat before returning.
Training as a Vandar warrior had taught me to read my opponents. The barest lean of the body or flick of the eyes could reveal a strike before it came. Athena was not my opponent, but I could read the doubt on her face all the same.
"You hesitate."
Her jaw tightened. "I don't—" She stopped herself, and something crumbled behind her eyes. "I've heard it before, that’s all. I don't know why, or where, but it's familiar."
I wanted, more than I wanted to draw breath, to believe her. Every instinct I possessed told me that the woman standing before me with a quivering chin was not capable of the destruction Zarn accused her of inflicting.
But instinct was not evidence. The truth was that I barely knew Athena. I knew she was clever and willful, but those were not strong arguments against her being a saboteur. Everything I felt for her was instinct and desire, although as a warrior I’d learned to rely on those to survive.
"My brother uncovered your lineage and your surname.” The words scraped my throat like gravel. "Your true one. Not the stage name you use now, or the one before that."
She only stared at me as if I was speaking a foreign tongue. “My true name?”
“Tell me about your father."
"My father?" She flinched and wrapped her arms around herself, her confidence and defiance melting away in an instant.
"I barely remember him. I remember him leaving, but that's about all.
My mother never spoke of him again. We left for Kashara not long after.
" Her voice went soft. "I always felt like she was afraid of him and feared he might come looking for us, even though he was the one who walked away. It never made sense to me."
She looked so sincere as she talked about her childhood pain that everything in me wanted to cross the room and gather her in my arms and swear on the gods of old that whatever blood ran in her veins changed nothing of what I felt.
But I could not offer her that comfort until I was certain she held no Zagrath sympathies.
"Your father's name was Hommler," I said. "He was the son of a Zagrath general who slaughtered Vandar raiders by the hundreds during the wars before you were born. He was a brute who took pleasure in his pursuit of my people.”
Athena went perfectly still, her face draining of all color. "You're lying." Her voice shook so badly the words were barely decipherable. "That's not…that can't be true."
"I wish that it were not." Every part of me wished it was a lie. Just as every part of me wished I did not know her lineage.
“My father was a Zagrath?” She choked back a sob. “He was part of the Empire? He was one of them?”
I did not know enough of her father to know what he had done for the Empire. He might not have worked tirelessly to oppress people as his father had done, but he had nonetheless carried the name Hommler. He had been Zagrath.
“My mother never told me,” she whispered, more to herself than to me.
“She never breathed a word. She never allowed me to ask about him or talk about him. Was this why? Was she afraid I would find out that she’d slept with the enemy?
Was she afraid she’d be persecuted for consorting with the Empire? ”
Then she jerked her head up, as if she’d been struck by something. “Is this why your brother was accusing me about sabotaging your ship? Does he think I’m a traitor because of my grandfather?”
I did not respond, but I didn’t have to. My silence was all the answer she needed. Her legs gave out from beneath her, and she sank to the floor in a boneless collapse, her hands pressed to her mouth as she shook her head over and over. “How could she keep this from me?”
But even as she said it, even as the horror in her eyes looked real enough to shatter me, I caught a spasm in her expression that wasn't quite surprise.
Had some buried part of her suspected there was a reason her mother had never spoken his name again?
Had her gut told her there was a good reason to hide her father from everyone?
Then she peered up at me, her eyes swimming with tears. “Is this why you dragged me away? Do you think I’m as guilty as he does? Do you think I could have done this horrible thing?”
I wanted to tell her that I didn’t believe a word of it, that I never had. I should have told her that. I should have knelt beside her and gathered her into my arms and told her that I believed that none of this was her doing, that a father's sins were not a daughter's crimes.
But I was too gutted that my brother had been right about her lineage.
More than that, I was furious with myself.
Had I been so blinded by my obsession for her that I hadn’t bothered to learn a thing about the woman before I’d brought her on board and moved her into my private quarters?
This was the misstep of a young warrior, not a Raas.
I had already let my feelings make a fool of me. I could not let them turn me into a softhearted halfwit who fell for a female’s tears. Not even if the sight of her made me want to do nothing else but comfort her and forget every bit of her past and mine.
With a tortured growl, I turned and stormed from my own quarters, leaving her crumpled on the floor behind me.