“Maybe it’s genetic,” I said, still trying to find an explanation other than, well, magic. “Maybe you’re more predisposed to have a truebond because your parents did. Maybe there’s something in your blood . . .”
My voice trailed off, and I thought of how he’d gotten my blood on his fingers when he’d sliced the husher out of my wrist on the Imperium ship. And I’d gotten his blood on me too. First, when I’d dragged him across the lava field, and then just a few minutes ago, when I’d opened that cut on his cheek.
“If blood were a trigger, then I would have bonded with someone long ago,” Kyrion said. “I’ve been exposed to more blood than you can possibly imagine.”
This time, I couldn’t hide the shudder that rippled through my body.
Kyrion’s eyes narrowed in thought. “Besides, none of your half-baked theories explains why I would form a truebond with you.”
I stiffened. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Disgust filled his face, and his gaze trailed down my body, reminding me of how grimy and disheveled I was. “Look at you. Vesper Quill. You come from no Regal family, and you obviously have no connections, wealth, or influence. Not much common sense either, or you wouldn’t have ended up as a conscript. I doubt you’ve had any training, either combat or psionic, which means you probably don’t even know how to properly use the few scraps of power you have. You’re like a child flailing around in the dark, searching for a light switch. So very . . . inferior.”
The unmitigated arrogance, the sheer audacity, the smug condescension . . . More rage flared up inside me, and I stalked over to the glass so that I was standing right in front of him. “Me? I’m inferior? Please. If one of us is inferior, then it is most definitely you.”
He cocked a black eyebrow. “Explain.”
“First of all, your arrogance knows no bounds. It’s a wonder your ego hasn’t already used up all the oxygen and suffocated us both. Second, why in all the stars would I want to be bonded to you? Everyone in the galaxy knows that Kyrion Caldaren is a stone-cold killer. People fear and hate you. Why, some folks even say that you—” I cut off my words.
His eyebrow arched a little higher. “That I killed my own father,” he finished in a toneless voice. He leaned a little closer, his blue gaze as cold and hard as the barrier between us. “Those people are right. I did kill my father. I shoved a stormsword into his heart and watched the light die in his eyes.”
His words punched me in the chest, and all the air whooshed out of my lungs. Kyrion Caldaren had killed—murdered—his own father, and now he was claiming we had this . . . this connection. I wasn’t going to dignify it by calling it a bond, especially not a truebond.
I rubbed my aching head. Nervous energy surged through me, as though I had touched a live wire, and I started pacing back and forth again. “This is not happening. This cannot be happening. My karma could not possibly be this bad.”
“Oh, I doubt your karma has anything to do with it,” Kyrion drawled. “Although perhaps whatever gods are left in the galaxy are playing a cruel joke. If so, I hope they are getting a good, long laugh at my expense.”
His expense? What about my expense? But I ignored his snide words and kept pacing, trying to work through the problem the way I had so many times in the R&D lab. There was always a solution. I just had to be clever enough to think of it.
“Tell me about the truebond. Explain how it works.”
Kyrion gave another arrogant, careless shrug, a motion I was rapidly coming to despise. “It’s the same general principle as a chembond. The two people involved can share strength, speed, skills, thoughts, and the like. Although with a truebond, the connection is deeper, far more intense, and much more . . . intimate. It makes both people incredibly strong and exceedingly vulnerable.”
He sounded particularly unhappy about that last part.
“What do you mean, vulnerable?”
Kyrion held up his cut hand again, then gestured at my own. “This is how it starts. One person is injured, and the other person feels the sting of that pain—literally. It’s a warning that the bond is there, that it is forming. As the bond strengthens and deepens, the physical wounds vanish, but if I were to be injured, then you would feel my pain as if it were your own, and vice versa. That’s one of the reasons truebonds usually only occur between psions. Because our mental shields are the only ones strong enough to absorb those psychic blows, while our ability to compartmentalize and block out pain lets us sense an injury without being crippled by it.”
“So what are you saying? That if you die, then I . . . die?” My stomach churned.
Another annoying shrug. “That’s one theory. The more foolish, romantic notion is that the second person dies of a broken heart.”
I huffed at the ridiculousness of that idea, but my gaze locked onto the bloody gash in his hand. If he cut himself again, would I feel that wound too? Probably.
“But if you knew that you were going to experience the same pain as I did and suffer some version of the same injuries, then why did you attack me?”
“To get some answers,” Kyrion replied. “The separation is usually survivable in the initial stages, and since our bond seems to have formed sometime over the past few hours, it was worth potentially injuring myself to see just how deep it goes.”
There was no heat, no real anger or emotion in his voice, just a calm, clinical recitation of facts, which made his words even more chilling. He hated truebonds so much that he’d been willing to hurt me, hurt himself, to escape it. Another shudder rippled through my body.
Still, I turned his words over in my mind again, searching for flaws, gaps, and mistakes, the same way I would examine a faulty brewmaker in the R&D lab. “But the bond can be broken. How?”
“The quickest and easiest way to sever a truebond is for one of us to die,” he said in that same cold, clinical voice. “And that person will not be me.”
More and more horror shot through my body, much the same way the lava had rushed into all those cracks and fissures in the battlefield, and the enormity of the situation dropped on me like a meteor plummeting from the sky.
I was trapped on a broken ship with a man who wanted to kill me more than anything.
CHAPTER NINE
KYRION
I watched Vesper carefully, wondering how she would react to my words. The growing horror creeping across her face was oddly satisfying. At least, the severity of our situation had finally penetrated her stubbornness.
She started pacing yet again, muttering some rather colorful curses. After the better part of a minute, she stopped and whirled toward me again. “You said the quickest and easiest way to sever the bond is through death. That indicates there are other, less violent and fatal ways to get rid of it. How?”
I shrugged. “Some people believe the right chembond can overwrite and break a truebond. There are other theories, but I have no idea if any of them actually work.”
Her face scrunched up in thought. “But your parents had a truebond. What happened to them?”
And there it was, the question that always haunted me, that always made me want to shove my sword through a person’s chest when they so carelessly, thoughtlessly, rudely asked what had ended my parents’ tremendous love story.