“He’s just a regular human. I see the way they look at him. The way they judge him and sneer at him behind his back. He’ll never be good enough to be one of them. They only keep him around because of the money he gives them.”
“Your money,” Keen said, emphasizing the first word. “The money your father left in a trust meant to take care of you for your entire life. The money your mother let Randy access.”
The pain of that old betrayal broke through the surface, and she nodded slowly. Not wanting them to think the worst of her mother, she explained, “Randy is manipulative. It’s one of his gifts. Mom was sick. She was dying. He was her husband, and she trusted him to take care of me. I don’t blame her for any of it.”
“You don’t blame your mother for abandoning you with a bunch of Splinter terrorists?”
She bristled at the way he described it. Her fingers smacked the screen of the tablet as she angrily typed out her answer. “My mother died. She didn’t abandon me. There’s a huge difference.”
“She left you with him. She could have made other arrangements,” Keen insisted.
She rolled her eyes and smacked away at the tablet’s keyboard. “Like what?”
“She could have given you to family.”
“My father and mother were only children. My father was a war orphan. My mother was abandoned because of her deafness.” She didn’t want to get into the awful tale of her parents meeting at that home for unwanted children on a planet called 4S-8KN. Instead, she said, “There was no family to take me. Just Randy.”
“What about him?” He turned his tablet around and indicated a photo of an old man, his hair shockingly white and his eyes bluer than the sky. “Do you know who this man is?”
She shook her head.
“He’s your grandfather.” Keen swiped to another photo of the man in full Sky Corps uniform. “Admiral Flint. Retired Director of Shadow Force.”
She studied the man on the tablet. There were similarities she couldn’t ignore between this man and her mother and herself. His nose, the shape of his eyes, the pointy tip of his ears—she recognized the same features in her own reflection. Keen wasn’t lying. This man was her grandfather.
“He’s not my family.”
Keen frowned. “I just told you—”
“He might share my genes, but he’s not family. He’s a monster.” She waved her hand to silently tell him to get the old man’s photo out of her face. “He abandoned my mom because she couldn’t hear. He’s trash, and I want nothing to do with him.”
“What you want doesn’t really matter,” Keen replied tersely. “You’re his granddaughter which makes you his property.”
“The fuck it does!” She smacked at the tablet’s keyboard. “I am no man’s property!”
“On this ship you are,” Keen said. “And considering the trouble you’re in right now, you may find yourself begging the old man to stand up for you.”
“I’d rather go to prison.” She meant every word she typed.
“That can be arranged.” Keen sat back in his chair and shrugged. “Once I get what I need from you, I don’t give a shit where you end up.”
She smirked. “That’s probably the first completely honest thing you’ve said to me since this bullshit interrogation started.”
“Probably,” he replied. “If you want to talk honesty, why don’t you tell us why your mother threw in with the Splinters? Was it because her old man threw her away for being useless?”
Maisie pushed down the bitter feelings that arose. Her poor mother had been so young when she had been sent away and abandoned. What she had suffered in that orphanage had been horrific, and Maisie would never forgive her grandfather for what he had done.
“Is that why your mother joined up with Randy? Because she hates us,” he gestured to himself and then the other men in the room, “for what happened to her as a kid?”
Maisie shook her head. “I don’t know why my mother made the choices she did. All I know is that my mother married Randy after my father died because they owed him a debt.”
“A debt?” Keen perked up at that bit of information. “What debt?”
“I don’t know. She never said, and I learned not to ask questions like those.”
“What kind of questions?”
“The ones with answers that might get me killed.”
“Probably why you’re still alive,” Keen remarked. “Still, it would be helpful to know more about the ties between your mother, father and Randy.”
“You’ll have to ask Randy