Born of Shadows by Sherrilyn Kenyon
Desideria went cold as she realized who the woman really was. "That's not Kara. It's her twin sister, Karissa." The one who'd married an offworlder...
"Your aunt married my uncle?" Caillen's tone was low and sinister.
"Yes, she did," Chayden confirmed. "I had no photo of her, and never thought much about it, but I remember it now."
Hauk's voice spoke through the intercom. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"Yeah," Fain said wryly. "We're screwed."
It took Caillen a full minute before he could answer that question. His thoughts whirled through his mind with a dizzying effect. "Karissa paid to have me killed as a kid."
Hauk cleared his throat. "Yeah, we're thinking alike."
Desideria's scowl deepened. "Why?"
Pausing at her question, Caillen rubbed his brow as everything came together and he finally understood a lifetime of weirdness. Things that had seemed like coincidences now made total sense to him. "Don't you see? With me out of the way, her daughter would be in line to inherit my father's empire."
Desideria shook her head in denial. "Look at her. She's younger than I am. Her daughter wouldn't have even been born at the time you were kidnapped."
Chayden cursed. "Not this one, but..." He pulled up an obituary and put it on the screen beside Karissa's photo. He turned his attention to Caillen. "She had another daughter. An older one who, as a teenager, died in an accident about the time you would have been three."
"Not long after I was kidnapped."
Chayden gave a curt nod. "I never realized Kara had a twin sister. All I'd ever seen was that the queen had another sister who was married off. There was no record of their birth or of them being twins because the Qills don't think of births as significant. They don't register them the way we do. They only register when someone becomes an adult which the two of them didn't do simultaneously because of Qillaq law." He smacked himself on the forehead. "I can't believe I never thought to double-check the identities of the women in the pictures."
But who could blame him? As he said, if you didn't know they were twins, there was no record.
Desideria let out a long sigh. "It wouldn't have mattered if you had checked. Karissa's entire history, like yours, would have been erased the moment she left Qilla for Exeter. Likewise, no one ever told us what planet she'd gone to. To our people, it's irrelevant."
Chayden's expression said he thought he was an absolute imbecile for not seeing through it. "Since I didn't know they were twins, I assumed Kara was the one who'd hired me on my mother's behalf to start the war. But now I'm going to bet it was Karissatrying to wage war on them. Frame the Trimutians and then strike while the queen is preoccupied with a war. What an effing idiot I am..." his voice trailed off as his brows came together into a fierce frown. "Unless..."
"Unless what?" she asked.
"We're assuming Karissa was working alone with her daughter. What if she wasn't?"
Desideria went cold as she realized the full extent of this nightmare and her overheard conversation came back to haunt her. Chayden was right. The more she thought it over, the more it made sense. Why would Karissa be working alone? "She and Kara could have been plotting this coup for years." Her mind raced with implications as she replayed a lifetime of abuse at her aunt's hands.
What if Kara hadn't volunteered to train them out of the goodness of her heart? What if she'd volunteered to murder them and shred their egos so that they wouldn't be fit to take their mother's place? Yes, it was Narcissa who'd been there, but Kara had set the scene for those deaths. Maybe Cissy was just her instrument.
"What if Karissa is working with my aunt Kara too?"
Why hadn't she thought of this before?
Fain made a low whistle. "Twins to rule dual empires. Together, they'd be one hell of a force to be reckoned with. No one would be able to fight them. Not even the League."
Chayden shook his head. "Especially with Trimutian resources to call on if they'd taken over their empire too. They'd own the entire Frezis sector."
Desideria raked a tired hand through her hair as reality tore through her. "But how do we prove this? No one will ever believe us."
Before anyone could answer, a blast rocked the ship.
Caillen went flying as Chayden straightened in his chair to engage the new ship that was firing on them. "How the hell do they keep finding us?"
Fain's gaze went to Desideria. "Are you tagged?"
"Pardon?"
"Do you have a tracing chip in your body?" he asked again.
Caillen let out a foul curse. The fact she didn't know what it was said it all.
She wasn't the carrier. The Qills didn't use that technology. His people on the other hand...
"Not her. Wanna bet I do?"
Fain's eyes widened as he got it. "When you were arrested."
Caillen nodded. "You know they tagged me." It was standard operating procedure. "I didn't even think about it." Damn it, he should have. But then he'd never been arrested before and he'd had a lot of other things on his mind the last couple of weeks.
His father>
Chayden shook his head in denial. "Yeah, but my jammers should still keep it blocked so that they couldn't find us."
Caillen wasn't so sure about that. "What are you running?"
"X-Qs. Why?"
They were the best, Caillen admitted. But they weren't perfect. "If my chip's on a TR frequency..."
Chayden growled. "That's it. That's how they keep locating us."
It was how the assassin on the Andarion outpost had kept track of them too. Gah, how stupid for not seeing it sooner. That was how the assassin had been able to get a location for them in the field. But for the frequency his mirrors ran on, they'd have been dead.
And all because he was a moron.
"Is there a medical scanner on board?" Caillen asked.
Chayden indicated the wall with a jerk of his chin. "Med panel behind you. There's a bag in it that should have one."
Caillen moved to it while Chayden did his best to outmaneuver their newest addition and Hauk tried to blow their enemies out of space.
Desideria came forward to help Caillen locate the right bag and to find the scanner inside it so that they could escape this latest nuisance and hopefully prevent any more. How wonderful it would be to have five minutes of peace from the people trying to kill them.
Caillen paused as he caught the traumatized look in her gaze. How could any woman be so beautiful and vulnerable at the same time? It made him want to protect her. To take her away from all of this and just hold her and make love to her until she smiled again. "I'm sorry."
"For what?"
"Getting you into this mess."
She offered him a kind smile that made his cock come alive in spite of the danger they were in. "It was my aunt who did it. Not you. She'd have been after both of us anyway. Honestly, I'm glad I threw you into that pod and jumped on top of you."
Smiling, Caillen leaned in and inhaled the sweet scent of her hair as an image of her naked beneath him tormented him with the most precious memory of his life. Even in the middle of all this chaos, and in spite of the fact that they could die any second, he found comfort in her presence.
She was his breath.
His world.
And he didn't want to lose her. She'd come to mean so much to him in such a short period of time. He didn't understand it, but there was no denying the fact that he couldn't even think about her leaving without a vicious pain stabbing him in the cht.
You know she can't stay with you.
Refusing to think about that, he handed her the scanner he'd finally found underneath and not inside the bag Chayden had mentioned. Figured Chayden would be wrong. "Find the chip, my lady."
She took the scanner and hovered it over his body. Caillen waited for the signal to tell them where it was located, but he didn't hear it.
After a few seconds of scanning all the way down his legs, Desideria straightened. "It's not registering
Caillen frowned. "It has to."
"See for yourself." She handed him the scanner.
He looked through the readings, trying to find anything that she might have missed. But in the end, he had to admit the truth.
She was right.
There must be one inside her after all. He cleared the reading and then scanned her body.
She was also negative.
No way...
"This can't be right." He looked over at Chayden. "Your scanner's broken."
Chayden bristled. "My scanner's not broken."
"Obviously it is since neither of us is registering anything at all."
Chayden gave him a droll stare. "Nothing's wrong with the scanner. I had it calibrated a few days ago."
"Wow, you really have no life, do you?"
Chayden made an obscene gesture over his shoulder at Caillen before he dipped the ship to avoid fire. "Did you check your ass?"
He rolled his eyes at the mere suggestion. "It wouldn't be there."
"Yeah it would." Chayden laughed in an evil tone. "Think about it. Where's the one place a prisoner on the run couldn't dig it out and the one place you could put it without them knowing it? Fat of the ass, my friend. Fat. Of. The. Ass."
Caillen groaned in pain as he realized Chayden was right. What better place to put one?
His ass. In fact, the fat there would actually help strengthen the signal.
Yeah, that made sense.
Cursing his luck, he returned the scanner to Desideria and turned around for her to scan his back. There was nothing as she hovered it over his shoulders and spine.
A second later as she neared his buttocks, he heard the sound of it locating the chip.
believable. It was right in the fleshy part of his left cheek. Of course. Where else would it be? And now that he thought about it, he remembered waking up with his ass sore the day after they'd arrested him. At the time he'd assumed they'd kicked him or dumped him hard on the ground.
He should have known better.
A krikkin tag.
"Will the degradations never end?"
Fain snorted. "Hey, just be glad you have your woman here. Otherwise we'd throw your carcass out the air lock before we went digging on your cheek for it."
Sad thing was, he believed they would.
He handed Desideria a small laser scalpel from the medical pack and inwardly cringed at the thought of what she was about to do to him. "Can you do this?"
"So long as we don't get hit by a blast."
He cut a meaningful glare to their pilot. "Hold it steady, Chay."
"I make no promises and bear no liability for your lunacy, her clumsiness or any injury my unfortunate luck, uncharacteristic ineptitude or continual stupidity may cause."
Nice legal disclosure. Rotten bastard. He should have been a lawyer instead of a pirate. "I'm still going to take it out of your sorry hide if you screw me up for life. And if I die, I'm going to haunt you and shatter all power circuits whenever you need them most."
Then he returned his gaze to Desideria whose brow was lined with worried concern. Damn, she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. Never before had he trusted anyone the way he was trusting her right now. With his life. "For God's sake, please don't sneeze and if you're holding a grudge against me for anything I did, real or imagined, I apologize profusely and swear I'll never do it again."
"Don't worry, Caillen, I'll be careful."
He definitely hoped so. But the wicked gleam in her eye and slight smile on her lips made him wonder if he'd lie down as a rooster and get up as a hen.
Stop being paranoid. You can trust her.
After lying on the floor, he opened his fly and slid his pants down to his hips. Desideria held the scalpel so tight, her knuckles whitened. She was terrified and he hoped that meant she felt at least a little bit for him what he felt for her.
He winked at her to give her encouragement. "Just kiss it later and make it better, baby, and I'll be all good with whatever you do."
Desideria let out a low annoyed sound at his teasing. Would he never take anything seriously? But all things considered, she adored that about him. Her heart pounding over the task to come, she slid his pants down far enough that she could reach the area where the chip was embedded and yet still keep him dressed enough not to be embarrassed in front of the others. "So how big is this thing anyway?"
Chayden made a sound of irritation. "You know, that's not really a question I want to hear my younger sister ask a man, especially not one I consider a friend, while he's lying bare-assed on my floor."
Hauk and Fain laughed.
Desideria was less than amused. "Remember, brother, I'm currently the only one holding a weapon."
Caillen glared at him. "Really, Chay, why don't you concentrate on the people trying to kill us right now? 'Preciate it, pun'kin." He turned his attention to her. "About the size of your smallest fingernail."
Fain laughed again. "Damn, I should have been taping that response and using it for playback at every party from here until I die."
Desideria couldn't believe how awful they were being given how dire this was.
Caillen glared at him before he finished his instructions. "It shouldn't be more than a few centimeters in. Anything deeper and it wouldn't transmit a strong enough signal to trace."
She moved to make a small incision on his flesh. Just as she neared his skin with the scalpel, the ship spun sideways from a blast. She let out a small squeak as she narrowly missed slicing into Caillen. She'd barely pulled back in time. A second more and she could have really hurt him.
I could kill him by doing this...
That thought made her hands shake.
How could she do this? One slip and...
Caillen reached out and covered her hand with his. Those dark eyes seared her with the one thing she knew he didn't give easily.
His trust.
"You can do it, baby. I have all faith in you."
Those words choked her because she knew how rare and sincere they were. It was a trust she had no intention of betraying. Nodding, she moved closer again. If she didn't get the chip out, they'd be a moving target from now on. All of them.
They'd be able to find Caillen and kill him whenever they wanted to.
I have to do this.
Steeling herself for it, she made the incision.
Caillen went rigid, but he didn't make a sound as she very carefully extracted the chip from his body. Ew. It looked like a bloodied silver bean. Just as Caillen had said, it was about the size of her smallest fingernail and held a tiny wire sticking out of the top.
Fain tossed her a small packet of sterilized coagulant for the wound. She applied it, then gently patted Caillen on his undamaged right cheek so that she wouldn't hurt him. "All done, sweetie."
He screwed his face up in distas he pulled his pants up and fastened them. "Well after that testosterone-shattering experience, I have no more dignity to worry about. Ever. Anyone have a cushion I can sit on? A really big fluffy one? Hell, let's even make it pale pink with bows on it just for good measure." He took the chip from her and crushed it under his boot heel while she went to wash her hands.
Fain gave him a cocky grin. "Look on the bright side, drey. You've never had much dignity anyway. I know. I've seen the P.O.S. ship you pilot."
"Thanks, Fain. Your personal support means so much to me. Glad I can rely on it."
"Hang tight," Chayden said an instant before he banked sharp left and slung Caillen into a control panel.
Cursing, Caillen banged his injured leg and butt cheek. Pain exploded through him with such ferocity that for a moment he thought he might pass out. But as soon as he caught his breath and glanced to the right, his heart stopped beating.
Desideria.
She was lying sprawled on the ground, half in and half out of the head.
Please be all right. Please be all right.
He ran with a limping gait to where she lay on t
"You okay?"
She nodded slowly before she pressed her hand against her forehead.
Caillen held her tight until his rage took hold of him. "Good, 'cause I'm going to kill that bastard brother of yours." Rising from the floor, he reversed course so that he could reach Chayden and beat him down until he whimpered for death.
That was the plan that went to hell when he saw what Chayden was flying through. All in all, the man was doing a phenomenal job on the horde that had descended while Desideria had tended him. There were League ships everywhere. All of them armed and loaded for pirate.
Crap.
Without conscious thought, he tried to take the controls.
Chayden slapped at his hands. "Sit your ass down. I can handle this," he said between clenched teeth. "Both of you strap in."
Angry at the bitch-slap, Caillen wanted to hurt the man. Normally he would. But now wasn't the time.
Desideria sat in her chair and called out to him. "C'mon, Caillen. Let's not distract the pilot while he's fighting for our lives."
Galled to the center of his soul that he was having to trust his life to someone else's piloting abilities, he followed suit. "I don't like being a passenger."
"Yeah, now you know how I feel," Fain muttered. "Suckillen. Lee back here. However it could be worse."
"How so?"
"You could be the pilot."
Caillen rolled his eyes at the Andarion. But honestly, he had to give Chayden credit. The man twisted through the gauntlet and came out between two cruisers with the narrowest of margins--it was a miracle they didn't scrape metal. Chayden pulled back and they shot up at the steepest of angles. Just as the alarm sounded that they were target-locked and about to be blown apart, Chayden maneuvered into a wormhole.
The ship went dark, then exploded in speed as the natural opening propelled them across the universe.
For the moment, they were safe again.
Caillen let out a long breath. "I think we're probably running out of luck at this point and I know my underwear can't take any more abuse--not that I wear underwear, but if I did it would be soiled. How many more near misses do you think we have in us?"
Hauk laughed over the intercom. "Collectively or individually?"