“I have to ask something,” I said to Kade, as we waited for the car to arrive. “The Culrads burst into the room with guns, but you didn’t move a muscle. Kent’s team and the Culrads were all threatening to shoot each other. You didn’t react. But Vendanu pulls a gun on Jethrigol, and suddenly that’s the catalyst for you to start turning people into meat soup? Why? Why her and not anyone else?” Kade was back in his brown colouration now, having reverted to that after the Nwandu had been escorted from the room. But his true nature was very clear in my mind. Kade was an assassin. He’d been designed to kill us; me, Bryce, Henderson… anyone who got in the Nwandu’s way. And if I was going to retain control of such a powerful weapon, I would need to understand it a damn sight better than I did right now.
Kade frowned, thinking about my question. “None of the others were a direct threat to you,” he said, after a few moments. “I recognised Khelesh when he came in with Jethrigol, and given your deal with him over the cargo, I didn’t anticipate him threatening you. Kent’s team wouldn’t have harmed their own military personnel. But Jethrigol was about to prove to the court that Vendanu was my intended master. What she wanted most of all was to get me back. Since you are my bonded master, you were the greatest barrier to her achieving that, so it made sense that you would be her next target, after Jethrigol. That was unacceptable.”
“So you decided you needed to take her out, no matter what?”
“I needed to protect my master,” he said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “That is the way I was designed.”
“And what about the thing Volgoch said about the dimari being convinced to love their masters? Do you love me?”
Kade opened his mouth to answer. But at that moment, the taxi pulled up, cutting off anything he might have been about to say. And given my own uncertainty about his answer, perhaps that was for the best.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Kade
Aiden brooded all the way home. I knew he still wanted an answer to his question, but I didn’t think he’d want to discuss it where we could be overheard by the taxi driver.
When we arrived home, he opened the door and switched on the lights, illuminating the dark house as the sunlight outside faded. I moved through the house, closing curtains and turning on a few more lights. When I got back to the living room, he was still loitering in the entrance hall, apparently lost in thought.
I came to stand in front of him. “Yes, I love you,” I told him. “But I don’t know if that’s going to make a difference, if you’re going to insist on believing that the only reason I love you is because the Eumadians programmed me to.”
“They did program you to,” he replied stubbornly. “And I thought you’d managed to defy your own training to save my life at the winery. But it wasn’t that, was it? You only disobeyed my orders because you were programmed to protect me at all costs. So you’re not even protecting me because you care about me. You’re doing it because you were programmed to.”
“You’re viewing this like it’s necessarily one thing or the other,” I replied. “Love or programming. Why can’t it be both? I didn’t love you at first,” I pointed out, thinking I was probably going to shock him with that news. “When you opened my crate, you seemed so disappointed with me. You didn’t understand my skills. When we got back to the base, you gave me your surname, but you didn’t have sex with me. In some ways, you seemed to want me so much, but in other ways, you kept pushing me away. You didn’t explain a lot of things to me, about who you were, or what my job was, or what you expected of me. I was really annoyed.” His expressionchanged to one of bafflement, and then he looked outright offended. He opened his mouth to respond… but then seemed to think better of it.
“So what changed?” he asked, after a pause.
“You did,” I said succinctly. “You started listening to what I was saying. You stopped asking me so many questions. You started giving me better orders. You started understanding me. So I started loving you – more for your willingness to try, rather than the exact outcome.”
He stepped back and stared at me, long and hard. “I’m not the only one who changed,” he said, after giving it some thought. “You’ve just given me a fairly critical rundown of my performance as your master. That’s not something you would have done at the start.”
I laughed. “Certainly not,” I agreed. “But I understand what you want better now. You don’t want a puppet. I would have been one, if that was what you wanted. But you want a companion. You want someone to challenge you and make you look at the world in new and different ways. I can give you the illusion of that, so long as you understand that my ultimate goal is still to make you happy.” This was a thoroughly raw sort of honesty that I was giving him, and I really wasn’t sure how he was going to react. But he’d been honest with me about the fact that he was not my intended master, so I figured it was appropriate to return the gesture.
He looked away, chewing his lip as he processed that idea. “The Nwandu were going to use you to kill us,” he said, after a pause. “Does that bother you? Do you find that idea disturbing at all?”
I grimaced. I had a feeling he wasn’t going to like my answer. “It bothers me that Vendanu was going to try to break my bond with you,” I replied honestly. “I would not have enjoyed ending up as an ‘expensive ornament’, as Jethrigol put it. But the reality is that if I’d never met you and I’d bonded with her in the first place, I simply wouldn’t know the difference. I would have had no loyalty to you, so killing you would have caused me no particular distress.”
He frowned. “You don’t have a problem with being used to enslave an entire sector of people?”
I stepped closer to him and laid a hand on his chest. My expression was grave, and I hoped it would prepare him for my less than desirable answer. “You’ve used me to kill how many Geshtoch now?” I asked, my voice gentle. “There’s a possibility I could have been found by them, instead of you. If one of them was my master, I would be looking at you and thinking you were the oppressor. The same way you’re looking at the Nwandu.”
His face paled and he rocked back on his feet. “Fuck,” he muttered. He seemed to stop breathing for a moment. “Oh, fuck me,” he said, shaking his head.
“The Culrads said we can domesticate them,” I reminded him. “If that leads to peace, then it’s something we should certainly look at.” He didn’trespond, and I was concerned that I’d just created some kind of existential crisis for him. “Aiden?”
“Is that moral?” he asked, cringing at the idea. “Manipulating them into doing what we want by bribing them?”
“Isn’t that what you do with domestic dogs?” I asked. “You train them and reward them with treats and games. And you’re entirely unsurprised when they decide they love you for it. The Geshtoch seem to be on the border between people and animals. The Alliance has been treating them as people, with fairly devastating results. Would it necessarily be worse to treat them as animals, if it means we stop needing to kill them?”
“Shit,” Aiden muttered, turning away from me and pacing across the room. “Well, there’s the reality check for the day.
I snorted. “I think we’ve had about five of those.”
Aiden rubbed a hand over his face, then collapsed backwards onto the sofa. “Since when have you called me Aiden?” I’d done it about three times today, but this was the first time he’d noticed.
“Since I rescued you at the winery,” I informed him. The shift in my own mind had been sudden and noticeable – to me, at least – though the change in my behaviour had perhaps been more subtle. I still called him ‘sir’ on a regular basis, after all. “You asked me to call you Aiden back when you first met me. I just couldn’t get my head around the idea then. But that still is what you want, isn’t it?” I wouldn’t have been doing it if I hadn’t believed it was what he truly wanted.
“Yes,” he replied. “Why now, though? Why after the winery?”
