You’re a selfish ass, Bastien! When are you going to grow up?
Furious, he’d gone to shower and relax. Everything had been normal. Just another day. He’d been planning to link up with friends to watch a game in his parents’ media room and bet on it.
But before he could finish rinsing out his hair, he’d heard a crash. The kind that left your heart in your throat because you knew it didn’t sound right.
Even so, he’d started to ignore it, thinking the guards would check it out, but something had told him to pull his pants on and go investigate it himself.
He’d been headed for Lil’s room when he passed by Quin’s. The door was partially open—something Quin never did. Since childhood, his brother had always acted as if an open door would make for the manifestation of some hallway monster that would come in and devour them all. It was something they’d fought over repeatedly.
Bastien had seen his sister-in-law’s body on the bedroom floor first.
Then his nephew’s.
Quin had looked up from where an assassin had him kneeling on the ground to meet Bastien’s gaze as Bastien reached for his blaster, only to remember he was unarmed.
“Run!” Quin had shouted an instant before the assassin pulled the trigger.
While Bastien had seen a number of bodies in his career and had been standing next to friends who’d been killed in battle—had taken countless wounds himself—it was not the same as the pain that racked him that night. The pain that went screaming through his soul when he heard that blaster fire and his brother fall silent.
As he turned to run to his room and arm himself, he collided with someone and was knocked unconscious.
When he awoke, he was in a room with Lil and her husband. He was on one side. They were across from him, near the bed. Bound and gagged, he’d struggled as hard as he could to reach them while Lil begged for mercy for her unborn child.
They’d shot her right in front of him.
Bastien had expected them to kill him next.
They didn’t.
Instead, they’d released him. Unbound his hands and gag and vanished before he could recover from the horror. When he did, he grabbed the blaster they’d left at his side without thinking and went to find them.
That was when he’d found his parents.
Agony had torn him asunder. He’d dropped to his knees, then crawled to his elegant mother, who was covered in blood. Unable to speak or even process it all, he’d pulled her into his arms to hold her.
“Ødie? Speak to me, please!” Even as he’d said the words, he knew she was gone. But he kept hoping and praying for a miracle that never came.
He’d been cupping her cheek, trying to warm her cold skin, when the League enforcers had stormed in and taken him into custody. Of all the stupidity, he’d thought at first they were there to protect him.
It wasn’t until they’d brought him to the Trigon Court headquarters on Gondara and processed him through lockup that he realized he was under arrest for his family’s murders.
In an act of complete denial, he’d actually tried to call his father for bail like he always did, thinking that it was some kind of cruel hoax.
Until Barnabas had picked up his father’s link to answer it.
Then he knew. His father would have had it on him when they killed him. He was never without it.
Never.
Only his killer would have been able to pry it out of his possession. Only close family would have known where he kept it.
Jullien had been right, after all.
Bastien blinked back tears at the nightmarish memory. As the reality that his uncle had just slaughtered his entire family slowly sank in, he’d stood there in the processing center unable to move or breathe, watching the monitors as the news mercilessly played gory images of his parents’ remains without regard for the fact that those were human beings with family members who loved them. That the news agencies were banking ratings off the tragedy of his life.
God, he hated them all for their lack of compassion. Their lack of human decency that they wrapped up in their lies, and masks of moral superiority and hypocrisy as they condemned him for something he hadn’t done.
Not a single one of them had bothered to contact him to learn the truth. Yet they all lied, saying they’d tried, when they knew better.
