Page 25 of Vindicated

My hands twitched with the desire to curl into fists. “You know much of actresses now?”

Zarn’s grin was easy, as if we were discussing something amusing instead of information he’d dug up on the woman currently in my quarters. “Enough to know that her name isn’t a problem.”

I exhaled a breath, blowing out much of my patience with it. “Do you have a point, brother?”

“Only that the name she took appears to have been done to make her a more alluring performer. The name she had before that was harmless enough.” He tapped one finger on the smooth surface of the console. “It’s the name she was given at birth that’s curious.”

I wanted to ignore him, but I couldn’t. Not without seeming to disregard the safety of my ship. Still, it was hard to imagine Athena’s name being a security risk.

“You’re telling me that the intelligence you gathered on the woman who risked her life to save our Vandar brother is a changed name?”

Annoyance flickered across his face. “A name change might not seem significant at first glance, but tell me why her mother changed both of their names when they moved to Gollun Prime?”

“Why don’t you tell me?” I snapped, not bothering to keep the growing irritation from my tone.

Zarn swiveled to face me, the crooked grin replaced by a solemn expression. “There could be a few reasons, but it stands to reason they were running from someone.”

“Athena’s father,” I said, a flash of protectiveness washing over me. What had she and her mother escaped when they fled to Kashara?

“Yes and no.”

I crossed my arms over my chest and scowled.

“Records show that her mother changed their name when they arrived on Gollun Prime, but it’s the name they discarded that tells me why.” He stole a quick glance at the screen again. “Hommler.”

I turned the word over in my head. “Should that mean anything to me?”

My brother shrugged. “Not unless you studied the old Vandar Zagrath battles as much as I did.”

Zarn had always been fascinated with the Vandar hordes who’d taken on the Empire and decimated it more than a decade ago. He’d memorized the warlords who’d led the charge, the battles they’d fought, and the enemy they’d fought against.

“Assume I haven’t.”

“Hommler was one of the Zagrath generals the Vandar went against. He was one of the most brutal.”

I shifted as I stood, unease prickling the back of my neck. “You believe this Zagrath general is what…”

Zarn shook his head. “Hommler was killed during the battles. He isn’t the woman’s father. But the planet she moved from, the planet she was born on was one of the very few places where the Zagrath maintained a presence. I don’t have full access to all the enemy files, but from what I can deduce, the general had at least one son.”

Even though the sounds of the command deck hummed around us—the bursts of static from transmissions, the beeping of computers, the tapping of fingers—the silence between us stretched.

“You are suggesting that Athena’s father is a Zagrath and her grandfather was a general who slaughtered our people?”

Zarn’s throat bobbed as he swallowed, and he squared his shoulders. “Yes, Raas.”

Calling me Raas had been a clever move. It dampened my desire to throttle him. I digested the information he’d told me, finally nodding. “If her mother changed their name then she was trying to leave him in the past.”

Zarn tilted his head back and forth. “When they arrived on it, Gollun Prime was not controlled by the Zagrath. Either she was hiding from him, or she was hiding their name from the people in her new home. At the time, the name Hommler was known throughout the sector, and not for good reasons.”

“Either way, she was trying to move on,” I said. “We do not even know if Athena knows that she once carried a different clan name.”

“That is true, although she would not have been an infant.”

My pulse jangled as I thought of the beautiful woman with the ebony hair. Did she truly possess Zagrath blood? I’d detectednot a hint of Zagrath sympathy in her. Not that I had spent a great deal of time with her. But would a Zagrath sympathizer do so much to keep a Vandar safe? If she was a devotee of the Empire, would she have secreted a Vandar prisoner off their planet?

I shook my head, a part of me trying to convince myself as much as my brother. “She is no Zagrath.”

“She might not know she is a Zagrath, but the evidence points to the fact that she is descended from one of the worst ones, Raas.”