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He huffed, turning his face away. But when I stepped closer, he let me touch his jaw and guide him back to me gently.
“You could stay,” he grumbled, his alien eyes swimming with concern and guilt for things he couldn’t control.
I scoffed, staring at him straight on. “I never would, Vorian. I told you—you’re it for me. But I can double down on that. Wherever you are is where I am. So, let’s you and me go find your shitty fucking father, huh?”
CHAPTER30
VORIAN
Ididn’t know exactly what a “shitty fucking father” was, but I suspected it was a human form of cursing Crux’s name, even more strongly than calling him a jackass had been. I liked it.
Even more, it made my chest expand to hear him say that there was no place on Thorzan for him without me.
It was not precisely what I wanted—I wanted him to be safe, living in luxury at the palace and working with the tailor, happy and sated and perfect.
But at the same time, no one had ever given up anything for me before. Not so much as a travel ration or a dead rodent. And there was Beau, saying that his beautiful room and fancy clothes were somehow less important to him than I was.
Vorian the Bastard was important to someone.
I took Beau’s face in my hands, his soft cheeks cool and soothing against my palms, and leaned in to brush my lips against his. “Yes. We will find Crux and take him to Xyren. Then he will no longer be able to deny me my own house.”
I thought again of the look my mother had given me, and wondered. Had she had something to do with Xyren’s decision?
It was almost incomprehensible, the idea that my mother had done something that helped me, but even more unbelievable was the idea of Xyren giving me the chance to end Crux and save the family’s reputation. And he had looked unhappy, while she’d given me that...
I shook my head. It did not matter. What mattered was following through and finding Crux before he managed to escape. I’d checked his ships first, and when he hadn’t been aboard either, I’d disabled them both by removing a few crucial pieces of the engine assembly, and headed for the house.
It wouldn’t be like Crux to leave without taking all the comforts of home with him, so it would be a reasonable place to find him. But again, I’d found nothing. And that had been the moment I had panicked, and started rifling through all his things, throwing them about.
Where could he possibly be?
He hadn’t had friends, he’d had lackeys. None of them would put their existence in danger to protect him, not now that the king had declared him a traitor and a thief.
It was easy to imagine him running or hiding, but he didn’t have a convenient place to hide. He was not brave enough to take to the wilds.
Maybe he would destroy the lab, to take everything with him when he went, but that would be a last resort, if there was no other choice. No other escape, no ally who would—
I grabbed Beau’s hand and turned toward the door, and he followed without question or comment.
I summoned a terrapad, giving it instructions on where to take us, and for the first time, thought about what it would be like to be renounced. Even the terrapads wouldn’t acknowledge a disgraced warrior, so they had to walk everywhere through the jungle.
In Crux’s current state of disgrace, he couldn’t have taken one—and if he had tried, it would be tracked in the computer system. But he didn’t need one to get where we were going. No, there was a convenient foot path to where we were headed.
Because for nearly ten years, every time the traitorous council member had visited Crux, he’d come on foot, not wanting there to be any record of his comings and goings to see my father. It had worked well, and no one knew that Vipha was Crux’s creature.
Except me.
And maybe my mother, not that I expected she’d done anything about it.
But even I had been taken in by that moment of Vipha’s duplicity. His quick turning on Crux. It was all a show.
The terrapad dropped us right at Vipha’s door, a handful of other Thorzi in the area stopping to gawk at the hybrid and human, neither the most common sight in the city, let alone together.
The path Vipha took led to the back of his home, far from the stone walkways that people took through the city when not traveling far enough to warrant a terrapad, and thus far from the prying eyes now upon Beau and me.
Unlike Crux, I had no need to hide, and I would never ask it of Beau. Everyone should be able to see him. Beau was a gift, and everyone should love him as I did.
Well, perhaps not in quite the same way I did.
