Born of Shadows (40 page)

He gave a bitter laugh that said he thought her question was ridiculous. “If you’d ever seen how they treat the males who’re banished, you wouldn’t ask that question. Suffice it to say, it was easier living on the streets than in the camp where Mom had me dumped.”

That she could definitely believe. Given what they’d done to her and her sisters, she could only imagine how much worse his hole had been. But that still didn’t explain why he was here and his actions these last few hours. “Why are you helping me?”

He shrugged. “You’re my sister.”

Like that meant anything. “You don’t even know me.”

“No, and when I first realized who you were, I was ready to let the League have you and then some. I’ll be honest. I’ve hated all of you for most of my life. But you’re not like the others and that’s a compliment.” He jerked his chin toward the monitors. “However, right now isn’t really the time to hash all of this. We need to get out of here while all of our body parts are still attached, especially our heads.”

Caillen stepped back more to allow him to take the controls as she moved out of his way.

Desideria didn’t speak as this new knowledge chased itself around in her head. She’d known about her brother, but she’d nnow expected to meet him. Especially not like this.

There were so many questions. So many things she wanted to know about him and his life. What he’d done. How he’d survived…

He really is my brother.

One who bore a striking resemblance to her father.

It boggled her mind.

Caillen scowled at Desideria’s continued silence. She appeared shell-shocked and pale. “You all right?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I know the feeling. You have the same sick look on your face that I’m pretty sure I had when they told me I was a prince. Nauseating, isn’t it?”

Yes. Definitely.

And she didn’t know what to think of her brother who was risking his life to save hers. Narcissa would never do such. Most days she hated her guts and Gwen wasn’t that much better. But now that she knew the truth, she understood why Chayden had seemed so familiar to her. He had their mother’s eyes and their father’s build. There was also something about his movements and mannerisms that reminded her of her father.

The cadence of his voice.

Their accents were different, but the inflections and tones were similar.

He’s my brother.
That one fact kept echoing in her head.

Fain gently brushed past them to take his seat while Hauk stayed topside, near the guns—just in case—something that was becoming their new mantra.

“Strap in,” Fain warned.

She and Caillen complied while Chayden engaged the engines then launched and flew between volleys of fire as the Exeterian Enforcers caught up to them. She groaned while he spun the ship to make it through the narrow opening of the bay’s doors. “You know, I used to enjoy flying until I met all of you. Now, I’m not sure I’ll ever want to do it again.”

Caillen laughed. “Think of it like a carnival ride.”

“I would, but those make me sick too.”

Fain pitched a small bag at her. “Make sure it all goes in. If you miss, nail Caillen and not me. Otherwise I’ll be joining you.”

“And I’ll be launching all of you out an air lock,” Chayden muttered as he arced the ship up. “Big bunch of pansies.”

She shook her head at his earnest tone.

Hauk returned the fire while Chayden dipped between their pursuers and shot them into hyperspace. Her head spinning from their wild ride and her recent shock, she saw the expression on Caillen’s face that said he was trying to digest this newest twist as much as she was. Forget about Chayden for the moment, they had a larger problem with his uncle dead.

No one would ever believe they hadn’t done this too. Who could clear their names now?

“What do we do?” she asked Caillen.

“I honestly have no idea. That was my best thought. Right now… I’m empty.”

Chayden snorted. “Normally, I’d take that opening. Good thing for you, I’m preoccupied with the near-death experience in front of me.”

Fain cursed as he sat back in his chair. He pulled up a news segment and flashed it on the main screen so that all of them could watch it. “I was scanning for our arrest or assassination warrants to be issued and look what I found.” He opened the channel.

The female commentator was brunette, petite and held a wicked gleam in her eye that said she was enjoying her job a little too much. “This is streaming in live, right this very second… All of you are the first to hear it, just as it’s happening on Exeter. Prince Caillen was spotted only moments ago leaving his father’s palace where his uncle, the acting emperor, was found slain along with his head advisor. Apparently His Highness is on a major killing spree with the League scrambling to identify who his next target might be and to stop him before he kills again.”

Desideria gaped. “How could they have that so fast?”

“Nothing moves faster than the media.” Fain changed the screen over to another report on a different frequency. “I swear, they hired a publicist to convict you both. I couldn’t get this much coverage if I painted myself pink and ran naked through the League’s main hall with a bomb strapped on my back, screaming ‘death to sycophantic pawns.’ ”

Desideria would have laughed if the situation had been a little less dire. She frowned as a woman around her age who was dressed in royal Exeterian robes stood in front of the media with a dour expression. Behind her were several of Desideria’s mother’s Guard, but the most shocking was Kara’s presence…

Why would her aunt be there? And dressed so strangely? Kara looked more like one of Caillen’s people than hers. The younger woman’s expression was bitter while she addressed the gathered reporters. The stripe under her face identified the woman as Leran de Orczy.

“It is with a sad heart that I report my cousin’s actions. My father was a good man and didn’t deserve this any more than my uncle Evzen did. If it’s the last thing I do, I swear I shall see justice met and I won’t rest until I hold Prince Caillen’s heart in my fist. The League is issuing the bounty on his head and we’ve already backed it with Exeterian funds. Whoever ends his killing spree and his life will be rich indeed and I will owe them my eternal gratitude.”

Stunned, she looked at Caillen whose face was as pale as hers had to be.

Had she heard that correctly?

He met her gaze and she saw the anger smoldering in the dark depths of his eyes. That fury made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. It was the look the angel of death had to wear whenever he went to take someone’s soul.

Without a word, Caillen unbuckled himself to take over the con where Fain sat. He isolated Kara out of the crowd and enlarged her photo.

“Anyone know who this is?” he asked in a tone so cold it was a wonder it didn’t give them freezer burn.

Baffled by his fury, she frowned. “My aunt. Why?”

Before he could answer, Chayden spoke up. “She’s the woman who hired me as a tirador against the Qills.”

Caillen felt his heart stop as that unexpected bomb smacked him in the face. “What?”

Chayden pointed to her image. “She came to the North Tavali a year ago and gave a hefty payment for us to make runs against the Qills using a Trimutian flag.”

Desideria was aghast. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“ ’Cause it was a lot of money and I’m a mercenary bastard. Not to mention, I took a lot of pleasure raiding Qill lands and ships. Payback’s hell and I was her willing bitch for it.”

Caillen gave him a droll glare. “Did you not ask her why she wanted you to do that?”

“Didn’t really care. I recognized her as my aunt, but didn’t say anything since she didn’t recognize me. I assumed her payout was authorized by my mother to start a war so they could raid Trimutian resources with the League’s backing.”

The same thing Caillen had thought, but now…

There was a whole lot going on here. He turned back to the face that had haunted his nightmares for years. “For the record, that’s the bitch who murdered my father when I was a kid.”

All four pairs of eyes turned to him.

Fain gaped. “What?”

Caillen stared at the cold face of the woman from his childhood. Yes, she was older, but those features were emblazoned on his memory. How could he forget the woman who’d torn his childhood apart and had ruined his sister and murdered the only father he’d known as a child? “She was in the alley when my father was killed. She and the assassin went off together.”

“Are you sure?” Chayden asked.

He gave a slow nod.

“It can’t be.” Desideria scowled. “Kara wouldn’t have…” Her voice trailed off as the young woman took her aunt’s hand and pulled her closer before she answered a reporter’s question.

Leran’s next words made all of them suck their breaths in sharply. “My mother and I are committed to honoring my father’s work. I’ve already spoken to my cousin Narcissa who is acting regent for the moment until a new Qillaq queen can be crowned and she’s put her best people on helping us to track down our parents’ killers and to bring them to justice as swiftly as possible. Blood or no blood, Desideria and Caillen will pay for their crimes.”

Desideria went cold as she realized who the woman really was. “That’s not Kara. It’s her twin sister, Karissa.” The one who’d married an offworlder…

“Your aunt married my uncle?” Caillen’s tone was low and sinister.

“Yes, she did,” Chayden confirmed. “I had no photo of her, and never thought much about it, but I remember it now.”

Hauk’s voice spoke through the intercom. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Yeah,” Fain said wryly. “We’re screwed.”

It took Caillen a full minute before he could answer that question. His thoughts whirled through his mind with a dizzying effect. “Karissa paid to have me killed as a kid.”

Hauk cleared his throat. “Yeah, we’re thinking alike.”

Desideria’s scowl deepened. “Why?”

Pausing at her question, Caillen rubbed his brow as everything came together and he finally understood a lifetime of weirdness. Things that had seemed like coincidences now made total sense to him. “Don’t you see? With me out of the way, her daughter would be in line to inherit my father’s empire.”

Desideria shook her head in denial. “Look at her. She’s younger than I am. Her daughter wouldn’t have even been born at the time you were kidnapped.”

Chayden cursed. “Not this one, but…” He pulled up an obituary and put it on the screen beside Karissa’s photo. He turned his attention to Caillen. “She had another daughter. An older one who, as a teenager, died in an accident about the time you would have been three.”

“Not long after I was kidnapped.”

Chayden gave a curt nod. “I never realized Kara had a twin sister. All I’d ever seen was that the queen had another sister who was married off. There was no record of their birth or of them being twins because the Qills don’t think of births as significant. They don’t register them the way we do. They only register when someone becomes an adult which the two of them didn’t do simultaneously because of Qillaq law.” He smacked himself on the forehead. “I can’t believe I never thought to double-check the identities of the women in the pictures.”

But who could blame him? As he said, if you didn’t know they were twins, there was no record.

Desideria let out a long sigh. “It wouldn’t have mattered if you had checked. Karissa’s entire history, like yours, would have been erased the moment she left Qilla for Exeter. Likewise, no one ever told us what planet she’d gone to. To our people, it’s irrelevant.”

Chayden’s expression said he thought he was an absolute imbecile for not seeing through it. “Since I didn’t know they were twins, I assumed Kara was the one who’d hired me on my mother’s behalf to start the war. But now I’m going to bet it was Karissatrying to wage war on them. Frame the Trimutians and then strike while the queen is preoccupied with a war. What an effing idiot I am…” his voice trailed off as his brows came together into a fierce frown. “Unless…”

“Unless what?” she asked.

“We’re assuming Karissa was working alone with her daughter. What if she wasn’t?”

Desideria went cold as she realized the full extent of this nightmare and her overheard conversation came back to haunt her. Chayden was right. The more she thought it over, the more it made sense. Why would Karissa be working alone? “She and Kara could have been plotting this coup for years.” Her mind raced with implications as she replayed a lifetime of abuse at her aunt’s hands.

What if Kara hadn’t volunteered to train them out of the goodness of her heart? What if she’d volunteered to murder them and shred their egos so that they wouldn’t be fit to take their mother’s place? Yes, it was Narcissa who’d been there, but Kara had set the scene for those deaths. Maybe Cissy was just her instrument.

“What if Karissa is working with my aunt Kara too?”

Why hadn’t she thought of this before?

Fain made a low whistle. “Twins to rule dual empires. Together, they’d be one hell of a force to be reckoned with. No one would be able to fight them. Not even the League.”

Chayden shook his head. “Especially with Trimutian resources to call on if they’d taken over their empire too. They’d own the entire Frezis sector.”

Desideria raked a tired hand through her hair as reality tore through her. “But how do we prove this? No one will ever believe us.”

Before anyone could answer, a blast rocked the ship.

Caillen went flying as Chayden straightened in his chair to engage the new ship that was firing on them. “How the hell do they keep finding us?”

Fain’s gaze went to Desideria. “Are you tagged?”

“Pardon?”

“Do you have a tracing chip in your body?” he asked again.

Caillen let out a foul curse. The fact she didn’t know what it was said it all.

She wasn’t the carrier. The Qills didn’t use that technology. His people on the other hand…

“Not her. Wanna bet I do?”

Fain’s eyes widened as he got it. “When you were arrested.”

Caillen nodded. “You know they tagged me.” It was standard operating procedure. “I didn’t even think about it.” Damn it, he should have. But then he’d never been arrested before and he’d had a lot of other things on his mind the last couple of weeks.