“Whatever happened, it happened while they were sleeping. There was no fight. My father was the strongest male I have ever known and he never even got his feet under him. My mother’s hand was hanging off the edge of the mattress.”
Mara doesn’t move.
“And I screamed, although I have no memory of doing it.” I make myself say the rest. “None. There’s the room, and then there’s Trunk holding me on the floor outside in the passage, and there’s nothing in between. It’s just gone, but they’ve told me the story.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“I used to laugh,” I say.
Her head comes up.
“Before that incident, I was the joker in the family. There were nine of us and I was the one who couldn’t be serious about anything. I could make Daxon lose his temper in under a minute.”
“What happened?”
“It stopped.”
She waits.
“That’s all,” I say. “It just stopped. I didn’t stand over their bodies and swear an oath. I just have not one single time in eight years found anything funny.”
Mara sets her cup down on the table. “Okay,” she says. “So who were they?”
“It wasn’t a robbery. Nothing was taken. Not one thing, in a house with nine brothers’ worth of tools and gear in it. They came in past everything worth stealing, and they went to my parents’ room, and they left. I discovered recently that my parents were both murdered to silence them for something they knew, that no one wanted to get out.”
“Who?”
“A Royal Pigment House on Chronos.”
She frowns. “Royal Pigment?”
“One of the oldest Houses on Chronos, and one of the richest, and they intend to hold onto being rich. Do you know what this rock is actually worth? Not what Minecorp pays us. What theIllibriumis worth, in the Four Sectors, per gram, to a House that owns the supply.”
“I have a rough idea. I’ve seen the shipping manifests.”
“Then you have a rough idea of what a House like that will do to keep the Margol from being the ones who continue to extract the Illibrium.”
She sits back.
“They mean to phase Margol Xylan out of the mines and replace us with Royal Pigment assholes so that eventually, every crystal that comes out of this rock belongs to a specific House on Chronos.”
“And your father was going to expose this.”
“Yes. He wasn’t a rebel. My father was a miner who’d found something strange and wanted to know what it meant. And they killed him in his bed for it, and they killed my mother beside him, and they made it look like a robbery gone wrong. My eldest brother, Daxon, was banished on a false charge, and then they sat back on Chronos and waited for us to give up. We discovered that an employee named Kryzon of Twenty-Two was their mole here. He’s now in a cell on Arkell-Seven, with a sentence of two hundred rotations and no parole. He won’t name any names. We put a cooperating deal in front of him that would have taken sixty rotations off his sentence and he laughed at us.”
“That’s not loyalty,” she says slowly. “That’s fear.”
“Yes. And I need to warn you that I believe the grid failure you’re researching is linked to my parents’ murder.”
“Wow. Alright, thank you for letting me know…but that doesn’t change anything.” And then she gets up to clear the table.
I stand too, ready to help, amazed that I told all of that to this female. And impressed with her resolve.
Her shoulder is at the level of my ribs. Her head is bent, and her hair has come loose again on one side. Mara’s gloved fingers close around a cup an inch from mine, and she is close, closer than she has been all night.
And this is when I scent her arousal.
My eyes blink with surprise. This pregnant female wants me in her bed to pleasure mate? How is this possible?
