Forged (Star Breed #10) - Elin Wyn Page 0,53

these years?

A soft tap at the door caught my attention and I froze.

If it was my uncle, which side of him would it be?

Could I ever trust either of them again after this?

Hakon’s body, sprawled in a lifeless tangle of limbs on the Command Center’s floor, Ambassador Thalcorr desperately trying to stop the bleeding.

It didn’t matter what I looked at it, didn’t matter if my eyes were open or closed.

That was all I saw.

The soft tapping came again.

Maybe it didn’t matter who it was.

It would never be who I wanted to see, not ever again.

And they hadn’t even let me say goodbye.

“Enter,” I said, my voice as empty as my chest felt.

But it wasn’t my uncle.

I flew at the tall figure, but this time instead of excitement to see him, only rage burned through my veins.

“How could you?” I beat at Luca’s chest. “How could you let him do that?”

His arms wrapped around me and, finally, the dam broke. Tears I hadn’t let myself cry since I’d been taken away from the bloodstained room in which Hakon had been killed and shoved in the guest quarters, burst out in a torrent.

“I know, Yasmin,” Luca said, stroking my hair. “I know. It’s not fair.”

And all of a sudden, I was twenty again and we had just found our father’s body.

“I didn’t realize he was going to do that,” Luca murmured. “Maybe I should have.”

I pushed away from his chest and dashed the tears from my face. “What is happening to our family? What happened to him? How could he change so much?”

Luca led me over to one of the plush chairs in the room’s seating area, then rooted through the decorative pillows. Finding one that met his approval, he handed it to me to clutch, the same as I had all through childhood.

I hugged the pillow to my stomach, as if it could keep me afloat in this new sea of lies I found myself cast into.

“I’m not sure he’s changed,” Lucas said. “I’ve been with him longer than you, working at his side, even before you disappeared.”

“I didn’t disappear, I sent a message,” I answered. “I don’t understand why neither of you got it.”

“Uncle might have gotten it,’’ he said. “But he keeps his plans very close to the chest. Always has, even before Father died.”

“That’s not true,” I argued. “He’s always told us what he’s doing, what his strategies and tactics are, his dreams to rebuild ExaTek.”

Luca went to the suite’s replicator and punched some buttons.

“For a long time, I thought that, too,” he said, then waited while the replicator worked. “Until I started having nightmares.”

“Nightmares?” I said. “Recently? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It was a couple years ago, but recently enough. You were getting your life back on track,” he said, shrugging, then handing me a steaming cup of tea, milky and sweet, just the way I liked it.

He kept his black, bitter.

“I realized the nightmares were trying to tell me something,” he said, taking the chair facing mine. “And I didn’t tell you because, well, if I was wrong, I didn’t want to turn your life upside down for no reason.”

“But you weren’t wrong, were you?”

Luca shook his head. “I don’t think so. For the last three years, I’ve been watching Uncle, trying to separate out what we thought we knew from the truth.”

“But what were the nightmares?” I insisted, even though I was afraid I knew the answer.

He took a long sip of tea before answering. “It was the day we found Father. I kept reliving it, night after night, until I realized all of the emotion had been removed from the scene. It was like watching it through a camera lens, like an old vid.” Luca met my eyes, and the bleakness in his shocked me. Until I realized that, after the events of the last few hours, my own expression was probably a match for his.

“I started looking at the room where father died more closely,” he continued.

I drank my tea; the soothing sweetness I had counted on to relax me now pooling in my gut.

“What did you find?”

“Are you sure you want to know? I know today was hard for you.” Luca tilted his head to the side. “Who was he?”

The image of Hakon, bleeding on the floor, covered my vision again.

“I think he would have been my future,” I admitted. “I love you. I don’t know what to think about Uncle Ran anymore. But I was beginning to think that maybe, maybe