Stormbreak (Seafire #3) - Natalie C. Parker Page 0,67
“No,” she said. “He’s not, but I am still your sister and I know that has to mean something to you.”
“Caledonia.” He exhaled slowly. “Lir saved me. He plucked me out of all the other children coming into the family and gave me the strength I needed to survive. I wouldn’t be here if not for him.”
“That—that—” Caledonia sputtered, launching to her feet in a rage. “That is true, Donnally, but not in the way you mean it! He is the reason they found our ship that night! I believed he wanted our help, and he took that—he used that stupid moment of mercy against me and he murdered our families! We would not have been found if not for that. You never would have been taken into their ranks and you never would have needed someone like him to make you strong.”
She was breathing hard now. Her skin tingled and her head felt light, but she felt fully rooted in her mind.
“Would you leave Pisces if someone asked you to?” he countered. “Would you throw away everything that you’ve done together if I were the one asking you to abandon your cause?!”
“Pisces didn’t kill our parents.”
“Neither did Lir.”
“Hoist your eyes, Donnally!”
Donnally reeled back as though she’d slapped him. He blinked rapidly, then stood and strode angrily across the small room. He stopped at the other side, keeping his back to her. A fresh tension was visible in the line of his shoulders and the slight tuck of his chin.
Caledonia held her tongue and waited. This gesture was so familiar that she did it on instinct. When they’d fought as kids, Donnally always reached a point where he turned his back and shut everything out. It had taken Caledonia far too long to learn that the best way to lose the fight was to intrude on those quiet moments.
As she watched, Donnally’s breathing slowed, the tension dropped from his shoulders, and he opened his eyes. He nodded, agreeing silently with himself, and Caledonia recognized the way one corner of his mouth twitched as if the desire to smile, to concede, to consent was whisper thin, but present.
Caledonia stood on the brink of relief, but when Donnally turned around, he spoke a single, devastating word, “Leave.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Tassos was waiting for her when she left the cell.
He leaned against the opposite wall, speaking quietly with Cepheus. The two of them looked up when she dragged the hatch closed behind her and spun the lock herself. Pisces started forward, doing her best to mask her concerns, but Caledonia could see the question in the smallest pinch of her sister’s eyes: Steely?
Caledonia felt as though she’d been driven beneath stormy seas, sucked down a whirl she had no hope of fighting until she could do nothing but inhale all the salt of the sea. Her insides screamed for relief, but on the surface, she was a stone.
“Do you know what I like?” Tassos asked. When he grinned, the scar on his left cheek pinched together, distorting the corner of his mouth and the shape of his eye.
“I’m certain I don’t care what you like, Tassos.” Caledonia’s voice was flat.
“I like when things come together as though I planned them,” Tassos continued with no regard for her response. “And I like when seemingly useless things turn out to have value. Or, in this case, more value. Donnally? I thought he was only important to Lir, but it turns out”—here he paused to drive a finger toward the shape of her family sigil high on her temple, half-hidden by her hair—“he’s the honest-to-salt brother of the Bale Blossom. And he’s mine.”
The spike of panic Caledonia expected to feel was dulled by a sudden rush of anger. In a rush, she closed the distance between them until it was no more than a sliver of stale air.
“Donnally made his choice,” she snapped, letting anger and disappointment and panic weave into uncompromising confidence. “If you think you’re going to control me through a brother I barely remember, then you’re as dumb as you look. And if you only have forty-three ships to offer me, Tassos, then you are less valuable than I’d hoped.” The look of shock on his face was pleasing on some distant level, but Caledonia didn’t take time to enjoy it. “But we can fix that.”
“What do you mean?” Tassos asked through grinding teeth.
“Take me to your comm center,” she said, all authority. “We have an announcement to make.”