Heart of Iron (Heart of Iron #1)(102)

He jabbed the dagger at her, but he was slow, and she was full of rage and heartache, and it made her blood pump fast as she dodged the attack and wrapped her fingers around the hilt of the dagger.

“There’s nothing to fight! There’s no war,” she snarled.

“I have the will to save this kingdom from the Great Dark,” Rasovant declared, “and you will not stand in my way!”

She twisted the dagger out of his grip and slammed her foot into his gut. He fell back onto the floor, and she pressed her knee against his sternum, the dagger at his throat.

He looked up at her with wide, unblinking eyes, as if he’d never thought she had that sort of anger. “Mercy . . . ,” he gasped.

“Mercy?” She pressed the dagger deeper. “You killed my family for nothing. You killed Di for nothing!”

“Mercy,” he repeated. “Goddess, have mercy . . . The Great Dark is coming—”

“Then we’ll defeat it with iron, not blood!”

Her hand holding the dagger shook.

If she let him go, he would keep hurting people. He would keep taking Metals away until the only ones left were ones run through with the HIVE. He would keep preaching his fear of the Great Dark, a sort of fear that ensured that the only thing that burned bright was fire, consuming everything it touched.

But in the corner of her eye she could still see Riggs, and she couldn’t bring herself to shove that extra inch into this horrid man’s neck. Because if she did, then she was no better than Rasovant.

Then she would be like him, too.

And Di had saved her from those sorts of monsters.

Slowly, she eased the dagger away from his throat.

“You will tell the kingdom what you did,” she said, getting to her feet, trying to make her voice as strong as she could. “You will tell the kingdom what Metals are—who they are. You will tell them what happened the night of the Rebellion. That you killed the Emperor, and that your HIVE set the fire.”

Lord Rasovant staggered to stand, rubbing the thin cut from the dagger at his throat. He gave her a sharp, dark look.

“And then you will end the HIVE, and you will never be seen in this kingdom again,” she finished. “Do you understand?”

For a moment, the Adviser didn’t say anything at all. Until his lips twisted into a scowl and he said, “She was right. You should have burned!”

Then he reached into his robes for the outline of a Metroid at his side and she was turning her dagger on him.

Captain Siege told her to count her bullets. A dagger wasn’t a bullet, but no bullet aimed as true.

Goddess bright, she prayed the moment before her dagger sank into Lord Rasovant’s stomach, give me a heart of iron.





Jax


An explosion ripped through the left sail, sending the Dossier spiraling out of the moon’s orbit. Letting Siege and Talle off in the garden was the easy part. Getting out of Luna’s orbit—now there was the magic trick.

He pulled up on the helm, ignoring the half dozen warning signs. Yes, he knew the left sail was punctured. Yes, he knew he was losing power to the bottom level of the ship. Oh yes, and he definitely knew he was being fired on by three Messier fighters. It didn’t take a surgeon to figure out he was being followed.

Accelerating the right thruster, he leveled the ship with a lurch. Lenda hung on for dear life at the communications console, looking like she was about to vomit all over the incoming messages ordering them to surrender.

“Hey! Lose it to the side of the console!” Jax snapped at her. “And pay attention to the messages! I need to know when the captain has Ana.”

“I’m trying,” Lenda moaned. “Can you please make it stop spinning?”

“Yeah sure, love, if you want us to die.” A warning signal blipped up—two incoming missiles. Another hit to their sails and they wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon, but the Dossier’s thrusters weren’t powerful enough to dodge the attack.

Think, think, he urged himself, trying not to listen to the voice in his head that said, I told you so. You can’t change your stars.

But to be honest, when he looked out of the starshield at the millions upon millions of lights, swirling in their nebulae of purples and blues and greens, he couldn’t think of a better view. His father would never have approved, but his father had never approved of anything Jax did.

So when his father commanded him, a child of eight, to read his stars, Jax wanted to do one thing right. Just once. Besides, one never disobeyed an order from a C’zar.

What Jax had not known at the time was that while the stars were infallible, his father was not. In his father’s stars he found out the true fate of the Solani who could read them. Why they never lived long, and why they never fathered children.

Because nothing—not even a glimpse into the future—came without a price.

“I’ll die,” he told his father, his hands still shaking after the reading, chilling him to the bone like nothing ever had before. “I’ll die if I keep doing this. I’ll die if I keep—”

“What did you see?” his father had interrupted. “Did you see who the next Emperor will be? Did you see the Holy Conjunction?”

In their tiny bungalow in the city of Zenteli on Iliad, Jax had stared at his father with a growing horror. “You knew. That every time I used my power I’d shorten my life. You knew and you want me to keep doing it?”