Adraas screamed and clutched his arm at the bicep while his forearm fell to the floor along with the column.
Malgus had taught the lesson he’d come to teach.
He deactivated his lightsaber, held up his left hand, and made a pincer of his fingers.
Adraas tried to use his own power to defend himself but Malgus pushed through it and took telekinetic hold of Adraas’s throat.
Adraas gagged, the capillaries in his wide eyes beginning to pop. Malgus’s power lifted Adraas from the floor, his legs kicking, gasping.
Malgus stood directly before Adraas, his hate the vise closing on Adraas’s trachea.
“You and Angral caused this, Adraas. And the Emperor. There can be no peace with the Jedi, no truce.” He clenched his fist. “There can be no peace, at all. Not ever.”
Adraas’s only answer was continued gagging.
Seeing him there, hanging, near death, Malgus thought of Eleena, of Adraas’s description of her. He released Adraas from the clutch of his Force choke.
Adraas hit the ground on his back, gasping. Malgus had a knee on his chest and both his hands on his throat before Adraas could recover. He would kill Adraas with his bare hands.
“Look me in the eyes,” he said, and made Adraas look at him. “In the eyes!”
Adraas’s eyes showed petechial hemorrhaging but Malgus knew he was coherent.
“You called her a mongrel,” Malgus said. He removed his gauntlets, took Adraas by the throat, and began to squeeze. “To my face you called her that. Her.”
Adraas blinked, his eyes watering. His mouth opened and closed but no sound emerged.
“You are the mongrel, Adraas.” Malgus bent low, nose-to-nose. “Angral’s mongrel and you and those like you have mongrelized the purity of the Empire with your pollution, trading strength for a wretched peace.”
Adraas’s trachea collapsed in Malgus’s grip. There was no final cough or gag. Adraas died in silence.
Malgus rose and stood over Adraas’s body. He pulled on his gloves, adjusted his armor, his cloak, and walked out of the manse.
THE RISING SUN PEEKED over the mountains on Dantooine, and the thin clouds at the horizon line looked to have caught fire. Shadows stretched over the valley, gradually receding as the sun rose higher. The trees whispered in a breeze that bore the scent of loam, decaying fruit, and the recent rain.
Zeerid stood in the midst of the damp dirt and tall grass, under the open sky, and faced the fact that he had no idea whatsoever about what he should be doing.
Probably sowing seeds, he supposed, or grafting vines, or testing the soil or something. But it was all a guess. He glanced around as if there might be someone nearby whom he could ask for assistance, but the next nearest farm was twenty klicks to the west.
He was on his own.
“Same as always,” he said to himself with a smile.
After getting clear of Coruscant, he’d flown to Vulta, scooped up Nat and Arra, and fled deeper into the Outer Rim. There, he’d sold Razor and its cargo on the black market and, with the credits he’d earned, bought Nat her own home and bought him and Arra an old vineyard—long unused for growing—from an elderly couple.
He’d become a farmer, of sorts. Or at least a farm owner. Just as he’d told Aryn he would.
Thinking of Aryn, especially her eyes, made him smile, but the smile curled down under the weight of bad memories.
He had never seen her again after leaving Coruscant. For a time he’d tried to learn what had happened to her, but a search of the HoloNet turned up nothing. He knew, however, that Darth Malgus had lived. He presumed that meant Aryn had not, and he’d been unable to tell Arra why Daddy sometimes cried.
And he still secretly hoped the presumption was wrong, that she’d escaped somehow, remembered who she was.
He thought of her every day, her smile, her hair, but especially her eyes. The understanding he saw in them had always drawn him to her. Still did, though he was drawn only to her memory now.
He hoped she had found whatever she’d been seeking before the end.
He looked around his new estate, at the large home he and Arra rattled around in, at the various outbuildings that held equipment he did not know how to operate, at the row upon row of trellises that lined the fallow vine fields, and he felt … free.
He owed no one anything and The Exchange would never find him, even if they somehow realized that he was still alive. He owned land, a home,