Heart of Iron (Heart of Iron #1)(23)

Ana wished she could explain it. She wondered, often, if he would feel the same about her if he was programmed to have emotions.

Talle leaned over to the old engineer beside her. “Riggs, I think you’re up, sweets.”

“And get your damn leg off the table and play,” Barger grouched.

Riggs, fiddling with a ball bearing in his mechanical leg, grumbled a reply and heaved it off the table, setting it on the bench beside him. He’d lost his right leg to the Plague twenty years ago—cut it off himself right above the knee. He lost his family to the disease on Eros, and kept a photo of his daughter in a silver locket around his neck. Sometimes at night, Ana heard him talking to her in his dreams. He picked up his cards, fanning them out, and set three down. “Three fives—”

“Wicked!” Lenda roared.

Barger threw up his hands. “You gonna call it all night?”

“Sorry,” she muttered sheepishly. “I’m just real jumpy. I don’t like Palavar.”

“No one does,” rumbled Wick, who had a habit of being quiet. He listened, and that made him a talented communications specialist. He absorbed languages like a sponge, so many that Ana could only hope to wrap her tongue around a quarter of them. He was Cercian by birth, the markings under his eyes so faded Ana couldn’t tell which clan he hailed from, and he never told, having left that life years ago. His skn was a shade darker than Siege’s, with a warm hue to it—like the dawn. “This is dangerous.”

“My leg’s hurting, too,” Riggs added. “It always hurts before a fight.”

“Your leg always hurts,” Talle replied dryly.

“Yes, but it hurts more,” the engineer said defensively, and Wick nodded in agreement—but he always agreed with Riggs. They’d spent years in a Cercian mine together. “Palavar is dangerous.”

“Palavar will be easy,” Siege assured them. “We’re on the quietest ship in space, and we’ve got the best crew in the kingdom.”

“Yeah, but what about that Ironblood?” Barger jutted his chin toward Robb, who went still in his chair. The Ironblood hadn’t touched his food, potatoes sitting congealed on his plate. “What if he sends out our coordinates? Tattles?”

“Well, then we can space him,” Jax replied, reorganizing his hand.

The Ironblood choked on a sip of ale.

“We’re not spacing him,” Ana said, tossing two cards down. “Two tens.”

Barger took two cards out of his hand. “Two queens—”

“Wicked,” Robb called.

Barger shot him a look that Ana could only have described as death incarnate. The table was quiet until Wick leaned forward and flipped Barger’s two cards over for him. A nine of spades and a three of hearts. Wick shoved the stash of cards in Barger’s direction.

Smoothly, the Ironblood leaned forward and dropped his last four cards onto the table. “Four queens.”

Jax gave him a side-eye. “I think I’m going to call you.”

“Then do it,” Robb replied.

“You can’t have four queens. You can’t be that lucky.”

“Technically, I can— OW!” Robb gave a cry and clutched his right wrist.

The captain leaned forward worriedly. “Something else hurt?” she asked, Jax and the rest of the crew echoing the concern.

Ana didn’t like the way the Ironblood turned pale. Or the way he straightened up again, a rigid set to his eyebrows. “No—no, I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine,” said Jax.

Robb’s blue eyes turned cold. “I said I’m—”

“Captain,” interrupted D09 through the intercom. His voice cut through the noise of the galley like a knife scraping against metal.

The captain finished her tankard of ale in one gulp and called up to the ceiling, “What’s it, metalhead?”

“The Grand Duchess is transmitting live from the palace. She is speaking about the events on Nevaeh.”

Ana’s heart plummeted into her toes.

Cursing under her breath, the captain left for the cockpit in a whirlwind of bright fiber-optic-tipped hair, the rest of the crew scrambling after her. In the cockpit, Wick quickly slid into his chair at the communications console, pulling up the vid.

Ana elbowed her way through the crew to stand beside Di, lacing her fingers through his.

He slid his expressionless gaze to her, and she met it, swallowing the lump lodged in her throat. No one could have possibly identified them on Nevaeh. There was nothing to be worried about. Nothing.

But her heart pounded anyway, calling her a liar.

The Grand Duchess’s delicate face stretched across the starshield. “At sixteen hundred hours, a terrible act ravaged our beloved Nevaeh. A Metal and its accomplice attempted the assassination of my heir, Erik Valerio.”

Ana felt all the blood drain from her face.

“Thankfully, he was unharmed, but his kin was not as fortunate. As of four hours ago, we have it on good authority that the younger son of the Valerio family, Robbert Mercer Valerio, was taken captive by the assassins.”

A photo of a young man with curly hair and sky-blue eyes appeared in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. A cold chill curled up Ana’s spine. She knew that face—sat across from it at dinner.