Cora followed Kira. “I am afraid I must insist you leave your oshota out here.”
“You can insist all you want. Doesn’t mean I’ll listen. Last time I trusted one of your lot to act honorably I paid the price. That won’t happen again.”
Kira left Cora behind, reaching Finn seconds later and stopping in front of him. He avoided looking at her, staring past her with a set expression.
A perfect, emotionless robot.
Well, damn.
Quillon hadn’t been exaggerating. She wasn’t the only one who’d walked away from the crash and subsequent confrontation with injuries. Though Finn’s were the sort that were invisible to the eye.
It made them no less dangerous, however.
Kira moved to his side, putting her back to the wall and leaning against it as she watched Alexander and the others file inside the room.
Graydon paused, shooting her a look that asked if she needed help.
She shook her head at him.
She did this. It was up to her to fix it.
“I wasn’t at your father’s side when he died. He’d ordered me and the others to help defend the fortress,” Finn said into the resulting silence. “Then he felt the attack on your mother and raced to her side, not giving us a chance to follow.”
Kira paused, not entirely surprised at the statement. She’d suspected as much from the few hints that had been dropped.
“He was like you. Brave. Foolhardy. He didn’t think he could be defeated,” Finn confessed. “When he died—the way he died—I was angry for a long time. At myself. At him. After I recovered, I promised myself that I would never let someone I protect die ever again. I think that’s the reason I chose Brianne for my next sword. A part of me knew she wasn’t the person she presented herself as, but I didn’t care because she wasn’t going to throw herself headfirst into danger. That ended in a disaster of an entirely different nature.”
“And then Graydon assigned you to me.”
Of all the shitty luck. Kira didn’t know whether to sympathize or laugh.
“And then he assigned me to you,” Finn agreed. “Someone who wasn’t like my second sword at all. Someone who I would be proud to serve. Someone even more foolhardy and death-seeking than my first sword.”
Kira supposed she deserved that.
“Did you agree to be my oshota as atonement?”
“That was part of it,” Finn admitted.
Kira let out a sigh as she looked up at the details on the ceiling. Architecture had never been part of her knowledge base, so she didn’t have the words to describe the features to someone else. All she knew was that the design was complicated—and beautiful.
“I was very young the first time I saw someone die,” Kira confessed. “I was the one who killed them.”
If they were going to play bare their souls, it was only fair Finn received a piece of information of equal value to what he revealed.
“It’s not my first memory—or the second.” Kira thought about it. “Maybe the third. But I remember everything about that moment. They were one of us. One of the Tuann’s lost children.”
Kira kept her gaze fixed on the ceiling as Finn’s shock colored the air between them.
“Is that why there is tension between you and the other two?” Finn asked in a hushed voice.
Kira gave a humorless laugh. “No. They have their own fair share of blood on their hands. All any of us cared about was surviving back then—though why we were fighting to stay alive, I have no idea.”
Those days had been dark. Hope a word that held no meaning.
It would have been easier to give in. Some did.
Kira pushed off the wall and faced Finn. “To be honest, I’m tired of being the one to survive. I have no intention of outliving you.”
