by Natalie Grey
“Oh, come on.” Harry was laughing as he nudged Dess. She was so much shorter than him that he had to work not to catch her in the head.
Their parents strolled ahead of them, arm in arm, their happiness practically radiating from them. Harry could not remember having seen them so happy before—at dinner, they had not even seemed to notice the wine or the food. They had been too caught up smiling at Harry and Dess.
“Come on,” Harry repeated, giving Dess an annoyed look. “Tell me. What’s his name?”
“I’m not telling you! We’ve had one date.” She was blushing, but he knew from the resolute tilt of her chin that she wasn’t going to give up the secret. She narrowed her eyes slightly in thought. “Well, not exactly a date. We got locked in a room together.”
He gave her a suspicious look and she shrugged, holding her hands up with an airy, innocent look. “I don’t know what you’re accusing me of, but I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“Uh-huh.” He strolled along at her side, enjoying the fake sunshine and birdsong of Tian Station. “I’ll be watching all of them very carefully, just you wait. I’ll figure out which one it is.”
“Oh, no.” Dess put a hand over her face. “Harry, don’t.”
“I’m your brother, there are certain conventions.”
“Harry.” She was laughing, but he could tell she was serious. “Don’t screw this up for me!”
“All right, all right.” He put an arm around her. “But Mom and Dad would be happy, you know.”
“I know. And if it gets to—well, I’ll tell them if it goes somewhere. We’ll see.” She was smiling up at him, though, her happiness belying her casual tone. “And you? Anyone in your life?”
“Oh, ha ha. Did you think I fell in love with one of the shipyard robots?”
She gave a snort of laughter. “I don’t know. I just wanted to ask. I know it’s only been a few weeks since we saw each other….”
“No,” Harry said firmly. “There isn’t anyone.” Too late, he realized that Dess was trained in spotting lies. He froze, and then looked down to find her staring at him very interestedly.
“There is someone,” she said, quietly pleased. “Who?”
“It’s not—we haven’t—look, he doesn’t even know I exist, all right?”
“Who? Come on, tell me.” She grabbed his arm and grinned up at him.
“You wouldn’t tell me who you were dating.”
“I’ll introduce you. Tell me!”
“He’s, ah….” Harry thought of the warm brown eyes and the gorgeous features. He didn’t even know if the guy was interested in men. He’d gotten used to being disappointed on that front. “He’s one of the Dragons on the crew that rescued me. I was all shut up in the infirmary, but I saw him once on the way here. He didn’t see me.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, which Dragon?”
Harry smiled. He’d said the name to himself what felt like a hundred times in the past couple of days, and it always made him smile. “He’s called Loki.”
The hotel park on this level of Tian Station had several advantages. It was clean, for one thing, meticulously so. It also opened only into the hotel, affording a certain amount of security. Last but not least, every corner of it could be seen from any other, which meant that Rhea could run and play as much as she wanted without her father panicking.
He was trying to be reasonable about all of this, but it was going to be a very long time before he could watch her go out of sight and not feel a wave of fear.
Of course, he also felt a nearly choking wave of love when he looked at her, and it hadn’t abated in the past few days. He hoped it never did. He hoped that every time he looked at her, for the rest of his life, he was as aware as he was now of how much he loved her.
He hadn’t even made it to the negotiation room. Bullets had started flying at once, designed to drive his small group into a trap down the corridor and abduct him, too. He’d nearly charged headlong into it, too, when he heard his daughter yelling for him. As soon as the Dragons had given him clearance to do so, in fact, he had.
And there he’d found Regina Samuels in custody as well.
She had defected upon realizing that Ghost no longer held her in any favor. Hugo had put together that much from speaking with Dess and Talon—and from the fact that none of Ghost’s soldiers had so much as moved to help Regina.
She’d made the best of it that she could. She had grabbed Rhea from the ship and made her way back into the fray, hoping to negotiate for clemency. The woman had been so assured of her own victory, and the unexpected trump card of having Rhea to play against the Dragons, that she’d forgotten to ask herself the very important question of whether she had fast enough reflexes to keep hold of a squirming four year old and not get outflanked by Dragons at the same time.
She didn’t. Furthermore, she’d forgotten to account for the second important thing: this wasn’t her territory and she could not manipulate it the way she would on any of Ghost’s stations. She couldn’t close doors behind her when she ran. She didn’t even know the layout of the hallways.
She had accepted at once that it was over. He’d give her that. And she’d looked him in the eyes without regret as she bit down on a poison capsule and crumpled to the ground.
A waste, but he wasn’t going to lose sleep over it. Not with Rhea back.
“I wonder what her demands would have been,” he said, shading his eyes as he watched Rhea take a running leap and jump over a bed of flowers. “Careful, sweetheart, these gardens aren’t ours.”
“I didn’t ruin them!” she called back. Her jumpsuit was another matter, already entirely covered in grass stains, but all Hugo could see was her smile as she took off again for another leap.
“Just information, I think,” Lesedi said at length. “She has enough people woven through the fabric of the Alliance that she could have arranged anyone’s assassination. All she’d need from you would be tiny pieces to put it all together.”
She was lounging in one of the deck chairs beside him, although she somehow still managed to look regal while she did it
Hugo let out his breath and settled back into his seat. He looked over to meet Lesedi’s warm brown eyes and tried to explain.
“They don’t need me right now, but I should be there.” He paused. “I want to be there,” he amended.
“On Seneca?” She looked uncertain.
He nodded. He considered what he should say, and at last decided to share his guess. Who better to share it with than L, after all? He still thought of her that way, even now that he knew her full name. If she thought he was right, he’d be surer—and if she argued, he knew she’d have good reason to do so.
“I don’t think she’d going to run,” he said. “She might send them ahead, but she’s not going to run. Not her. I told them as much and they’re planning—”
He didn’t say the words, trying to play it off as if ‘planning’ had been the end of the sentence, but Lesedi wasn’t fooled.
“The invasion,” she said softly.
“Yes.” He saw no point in dissembling. Her previous messages to him had shown how adept she was at learning classified information—and he could use her mind now. When it came to understanding Ghost, he would bet on Lesedi instead of the Alliance Navy’s top brass.
Her troubled gaze said she was even now thinking of what might come next. “A rogue supercomputer could kill thousands. She has the Ariane. Lord knows what she can do with it.”
“I’m surprised Talon’s not on the trail already.”
“He has his reasons,” Lesedi said mysteriously. She did not seem inclined to say more. “But waiting isn’t his strong suit, no.”
“How did you two first work together?” He was curious.
She smiled, really smiled. It lit up her face. She settled back into her chair and stared up at the false sky above them. “It was a year or two into his command. He was so young—well, he was almost thirty, but just in demeanor. He comes marching into my
office, which no one should have been able to find, mind you, and says he’s heard I’m the best information broker on Akintola Station.”
Hugo looked at her, mouth twitching. “And what did you say?”
“I told him he was wrong,” Lesedi said serenely. “I said I was the best information broker in Allied space and if he couldn’t be respectful, he could get out.”
Hugo laughed. It was one of the first belly laughs he’d given in weeks. He saw Lesedi chuckle with the memory.
“I liked him even then, though,” she said, “and he knew it. He had a way of charming people, that one.” She sighed. “Sometimes I think he must even have charmed Aleksandr Soras a bit.” Hugo looked over at her and she gave a little shrug. “Sometimes I speculate on things I can’t possibly prove or disprove.”
He smiled slightly. “You could go ask him.”
She snorted at that, then saw his look. Her brow furrowed slightly. “What is it?”
“You look nice today,” Hugo said, and then he looked back at the gardens, smiling slightly.
EPILOGUE
THE SHIP WOBBLED as it blazed through the darkness. Ghost sifted through its memories, through the hard banking and missiles, the shouts in the corridors, the golden-haired one and the crew chief, the captain and….
Aleksandr Soras’s daughter. That was interesting.
She found the Io. She found the conversations, some recorded, the voices blurred and indistinct: memories of little nowhere colonies, personal histories, Mala with her lies and Nyx with her evident forgiveness.
It was all in her in a way she could not easily shed. She knew the way they spoke, the way they moved. The systems of the ship, set up by that crew chief, gave her a window into his mind, one half methodical, one half given to leaps in reasoning and logic. He reminded her of her.
She hated that.
She hated all of them. In the hold, her cybernetic body lay stiff and cold. She didn’t want to return to it, not with the memories in her head of Talon’s blows. Between the biofeedback and her memories of what such hits might feel like, the body felt unsafe now.
But as a ship—as this ship—she was untouchable. She was better.
She sent the orders before she was even partway home; they could not wait for her to return.
What would have been the pride of her fleet, they had lost. But the bulk of it remained, and with it, her resolve. The Alliance might take Eternas….
But if they succeeded, she swore by everything she was that they would only take the shattered remnants.
Thank you for reading Dragon’s Nemesis! I can’t wait to bring you the conclusion of this arc with Book 8, Dragon’s Victory—but don’t worry, the showdown between the Dragons and Ghost won’t be the end of the series!
To be updated as soon as Book 8 is out, click here to be signed up for the mailing list!
For more reading material in the meantime, I suggest Bound Sorcery for a dose of ass-kicking mages and druids, with a side of romance and snark, and Daughter of Ashes, under my pen name Moira Katson.
Thank you to all of my readers and beta readers, to B for bouncing around ideas with me, and to L for bringing me joy I didn’t know was possible.
<3, Nat
Table of Contents
Title Page
Also by Natalie Grey
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue
