“He killed them,” Yelir continued, his eyes narrowing. “By action or inaction, this one is responsible for their deaths. Revolution was upon us, and he chose the side of our oppressors. When I call him a traitor, it’s because he betrayed his kin of his own volition. Rentir is not the only male whose role was to guard the overseers, but heisthe only male on Yulaira who sided with them during the rebellion.”
His heart squeezed in agony. Yelir’s every word punctuated with pain like a dagger twisting right between his ribs.
“Yelir, we should go,” Ven interjected, his face etched with a scalding pity. “Thalen is expecting us.”
With a trembling hand, Cordelia sheathed her blade. Her face was now carefully blank. So soon after she’d finally opened up to him, she was completely sealed off once more. Afterbasking in the light of her honesty, it was like being sealed up in the dark.
“I see,” she said calmly. “I… I should…” Her mouth opened and closed, clearly at a loss for an excuse, then shut so hard her teeth clicked together. She turned on her heel and started walking, brushing past Rentir.
He caught at her arm, torn between the certainty that he deserved her scorn and the desperate need to assuage it. “Cordelia, please, let me explain.”
“Later,” she said unevenly, shrugging out of his grip and taking an unsteady step back. “I need to think.”
She left him there, his hand still hovering in the air where it had last touched her. Every echoing footstep was a plasma bolt in his heart.
“At last,” Yelir said with a sigh from behind him. “Some consequence for the traitor.”
Ven cleared his throat. “Yelir, we should?—”
“What did you think, Rentir? That you could keep something so precious for yourself after all you’ve taken from others?”
No, he thought, shoulders sagging.But I had hoped. Foolishly, selfishly, I had hoped.
“You deserve nothing.” Yelir yanked him around by his shoulder, lowering his head until they were nearly nose to nose. “Nothing. Exactly what you left to those who trusted in you on that bloody day.”
“I know,” he grated, shrugging out of Yelir’s grip. “I know!”
I am sorry, he thought, but he would not let those words leave the prison of his throat. They were not enough. They would never be enough.
Yelir straightened, smug and satisfied that he had gotten under Rentir’s skin. His eyes drifted to the corridor Cordelia had retreated to. “Do not worry about the woman, traitor. There are plenty of shoulders to cry on here; I might even offer her mine.”
Rentir’s blood cooled to ice, his awareness narrowing to a singular anger.
“She seems like a lot to handle,” Yelir mused, rubbing a hand over his jaw. “A golden boy like you… well, I’m all too sure that you wouldn’t know the first thing about pleasing another. Not when the overseers condemned our fraternization. I bet you don’t even know the pleasure of your own hand.”
He was laughing at his own mockery, nudging a stone-faced Ven in search of validation, when Rentir’s anger overcame his good sense.
With a roar, Rentir tackled the larger male, lifting him up off the ground and slamming him viciously to the stone floor. Bones cracked beneath the force, but Rentir was not finished with him. Yelir blinked dazedly in the instant before Rentir’s fist cracked across the low bridge of his nose, breaking it with a crunch. That seemed to catch him up, and the miner began to fight back in earnest.
Two hands caught at Rentir’s wrists, briefly immobilizing him as the other two landed blow after blow to his kidneys. The pain only churned Rentir’s blood rage higher. His vision tunneled, and he was no longer seeing what was in front of him, but Yelir with his arms around Cordelia, offering faux comfort in the hope of using her to needle Rentir. Cordelia, who had been betrayed enough. Cordelia, who washis.
Mine. She ismine. You cannot have her.
His fists pounded against something hard, splitting his knuckles, but he kept striking blindly. All he could feel was the anger, the outrage. Everything else was a numb haze.
“Rentir!” someone was shouting distantly.
A blow to his chin rocked his head back, and his surroundings came back to him in a rush, like the first breath of air after being submerged. There were more males in the hall now. Yelir was lying on the ground beneath him, his face abattered pulp that he barely recognized. He only realized that his tail was wrapped tight around the male’s throat when Haerune knelt to desperately yank it free.
Yelir took a rattling breath, his chest expanding as someone dragged Rentir away. He stopped fighting them, going limp in their grip as he took in the carnage of his temper.
Not again.
“I didn’t mean to,” Rentir croaked, looking up to find it was Thalen who was holding him back. “He was speaking of Cordelia in such a way… and then I… I cannot remember what I did.”
Thalen’s expression was inscrutable. He looked from Rentir to Yelir, who was being attended to by Haerune and Ven. “Get him to the medpod.”
The men lifted the massive miner with some effort, carrying him down the corridor toward the medbay. When they were out of sight, Thalen finally released him. Rentir slumped against the wall, looking up at his leader through a rapidly swelling eye. Silence stretched between them.
