Page 64 of Reformation
“Yes?” came the perfectly calm, smooth voice.
“Berengaria, what the hell are you doing?”
“I’m finishing this,” she said. She sounded more than calm—if anything, she soundedsatisfied. “Raymond has to go away, permanently. Isolating him and tearing him down from his seat of power isn’t enough; he’ll only rebuild, especially with no clearheir or opponent. And you’re not planning on sticking around to tidy up the mess he’s leaving behind, are you?”
“No, but—”
“Then this is for the best.” She laughed a little. “He kept me like a fly in a web, like a sylph in a glass cage. But I made this cage my own, and now I’m going to show him what it feels like to have all choice in your future taken away.”
“What about your other brother?” Garrett pressed. “What about Kyle? He’s out there somewhere, and when he comes back, he’s going to need family around him, someone to support and care for him.”
“The best thing Kyle could do for himself, and our family, is never return.” Her voice rang with sincerity. “I never believed in curses, but if any bloodline carries one, it’s ours. Kyle needs to create himself anew, not rely on stale dogma and poisonous family connections. And if he everdoescome back, I refuse to be a burden to him. I failed him—”
“You tried tosavehim,” Garrett insisted.
“But I failed him instead.Yousaved him, Garrett, you and your family, your friends. And I love you for that, but I can’t be of any use to him now, or to you. I refuse to be made into someone else’s pawn, no matter how much love they feel for me while doing it.”
Garrett clenched and unclenched his hands, desperate for something to do or say that could convince her otherwise. “You can still save yourself. Let Raymond die and make a new life for yourself, take on a new identity. You can escape this!”
“Oh, darling, I don’twantto.” She chuckled lightly. “I want to be with my brother. I haven’t seen or spoken with him directly for nearly two decades, did you know? But I’ll see him soon. And he’ll certainly see me.” A rising alarm sounded in the background of her feed. “In fact, please excuse me, I need to take his call.”
“Berengaria,please—”
“Be well, Garrett.” She ended the transmission. Garrett watched, helpless, as the ships moved inexorably toward each other, Raymond’s doing its best to evade but, ultimately, unable to escape. Less than a minute later, there was an explosion.
Less than a minute after that, the pressure on Garrett’s lines of communication tripled.
“We have to get out of here,” Garrett said quietly. His hands were twitching, but he could still make them work. He waved away the holoscreen. “Before they decide not to let us leave.” He’d been counting on a vacuum of power in which to make his escape, but not one quite this sudden or severe.
“Where will you go?” Jonah asked.
“Pandora.”
“You won’t be able to stay there if you really want to be done with this. The Senate will call you back, you know they will.”
“I know.” Fortunately, he had a backup plan. It was temporary too, but it would safeguard him and his family for a time … whatever was left of his family. “Come on. Let’s go while we still can.”
Chapter thirty-eight
Jonah
Jonah had never thought that being rescued would feel anticlimactic, but that was before he got a handle on exactly what his only child had been doing for the past few weeks.
They were found before the night was over, mere hours after Cody and Ten landed, and his conversation with Cody had been put off out of necessity. The kids had been tired, they’d all needed to sleep, and Cody had been beside himself about Lacey while Ten had grilled Lt. Reyes about their friends on board theTriumph. But now they were back in the Box, sitting in the hospital waiting room to get an update on Lacey’s condition as soon as her surgery was done, and it was all Jonah could do to keep his voice from bouncing off the rafters of the damn place once his kid started explaining how he got to Pandora.
“Youwhatnow?”
“Snuck on board the clan’s ship,” Cody repeated, looking a little nervous. “Only we didn’t really sneak; Jack helped us out.”
“Of fucking course, he did.” And Jonah was gonna have somewordswith Jack, that was for damn sure, and the man better be damn happy they were separated by a million miles of space when they did because otherwise Jonah would punch him in the fucking face. “And then you … what, disabled it?”
“Disabled its hygiene systems, really. That’s all,” Ten said, like that made it so much better.
“You disabled a ship with thousands of residents—”
“Only two thousand and fourteen,” Ten offered.
“Like I said,thousandsof residents, in hostile space, while a battle was going on, so you could fly down to a storm-covered, besieged planet on a modified”—Jonah had to force himself to say the next part—“hovercycle. A fuckin’hovercycle.”
