Their Fractured Light (Starbound #3)(67)

LaRoux’s brows draw in, his sculpted features settling into an expression of thoughtful scrutiny. “You look familiar, now that I see you.” He tilts his head a little, and then, as though referencing some cocktail party or charity function, remarks, “Didn’t I have you killed once?”

The sound that comes from Gideon’s throat, tangled and full of pain, is what unfreezes me. My voice comes back. “You—you son of a bitch, you piece of…” This time I have no problem lifting the gun, holding it steady, thumbing the safety aside.

Time slows. I hear Gideon shout my name, feel the air shift as he turns to lunge for me. I see Tarver moving, instincts razor sharp, reaching for Lilac. I see his fingers miss her arm by a breath as Lilac whirls toward her father, hair flaring out like a flame. I see her face, the panic there, her heart in her eyes, and despite everything, despite my finger tightening on the trigger, despite my hatred and despair and pain, I find myself wondering if that was the look on my own face in the moments just before my father blew up the barracks.

Then my hand explodes into fire, the fragments of the plas-pistol slicing my chin, my shoulder, peppering the wall behind me. The force of the gunshot knocks me over, and when I try to lift my head it’s like I’m drunk, my ears ringing, my movements slow and too fluid, muscles like putty. LaRoux staggers and my heart sings—but he’s staggering because Lilac pushed him aside, and it’s Lilac’s voice I hear crying out pain, and it’s Lilac’s blood spattered against the display behind her, and it’s Lilac who drops to the floor. It’s Lilac.

“You could have brought her back.” The blue-eyed man knows I can hear him, cut off in my prison of steel and electricity. “You could have brought back my Rose, but you let her rot because you hate me.”

When he comes, he sends away the scientists studying my existence. Sometimes months pass without a visit, and sometimes he comes every day, but his hatred for me, for my kind…that never changes.

“You don’t know what hate is yet,” the man whispers, his words a promise. He turns his back on my prison.

Hate. If hate is what he wishes…then hate is what he will get.

MY EARS ARE RINGING, THE sound of the gunshot bouncing around inside my head and blinding me. My momentum as I lunge for Sofia sends me sprawling to the ground, and it’s not until I realize she’s moaning, half screaming, that I shake away the fog and crawl toward her.

Her hand is covered in burns where the plas-pistol exploded, and she’s bleeding from cuts on her neck and shoulders where the fragments caught her. There are a dozen reasons why these weapons are banned, the least of which is that they outfox even state-of-the-art security systems—the main reason is that you’ve got a greater chance of killing yourself when it goes off than of actually hitting your target.

I gather Sofia up into my arms, panic shooting through my system and washing away everything else—my anger that she’d been planning this, my fear about what will happen to her when she’s arrested, the bitterness lingering on my tongue after speaking to Lilac LaRoux. I pull Sofia against my chest, and she doesn’t resist, pain overcoming everything else she feels toward me right now. She’s swallowing hard, choking against the need to cry out, cradling her wounded hand against her chest.

“Shh, it’s okay,” I murmur, my lips against her hair. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

Cormac drops to his knees on her other side, his horror all over his face, in his voice. “Oh God, Sof.”

As if the sound of his voice opened the floodgates, suddenly other sounds start to register. Voices shouting, someone gasping, a roaring surge of whispers on the still air. I lift my head, expecting to see LaRoux on the floor, and find him bent over someone else, speaking frantically.

“Darling,” he’s saying, that too-cultured voice choked with emotion. “Look at me—it’s Daddy, look at me.”

Tarver’s ripping the lining out of his tuxedo jacket, his face white, jaw set and determined. He eases the figure on the floor up—it’s Lilac—so that her head rests in his lap. “It’s just her shoulder,” he’s saying in a shaking voice, starting to bind the wound with the strips of silk. “She’ll be fine, it’s just—”

LaRoux snaps something back at him, face transformed in that instant by such fury, such hatred, that I can’t tell what he’s saying.

Tarver, however, remains calm, meeting that icy-blue stare with his own. “You want her to bleed to death?”

Jubilee’s beside him, pulling off her belt and handing it over to help strap the makeshift bandages in place, fixing LaRoux with a look that seems like it should do to him what the bullet didn’t.

LaRoux draws in a shuddering breath, reaching for Lilac’s hand and cradling it between his own, drawing it up to press it to his lips. “Hang on, darling girl.”

Sofia stirs in my arms, voice shaky with pain as she mumbles. “She wasn’t supposed to…Why, why did she do that? I never meant to—”

“Because he’s her father,” Flynn says softly. “Because she loves him, and you were trying to kill him.”

“He’s a monster,” whispers Sofia, struggling to sit up on her own power, some of the shock from her injury starting to ebb.

“And he’s her father,” Flynn replies.