Born of Silence

  And as Darling cut through them with an ease that was scary, the nobility around them panicked more.

  "He is insane!"

  "You see! He has no right to rule."

  "Where did he learn to fight like that?"

  "Did you see him throw the assassin and his own guard?"

  "May the gods help us with him in power."

  "We're doomed!"

  "No wonder Arturo kept him in institutions. He must have been terrified of him since he was a kid."

  As their comments and anger against Darling built, she knew she had to do something.

  Fast. But what?

  Suddenly, a stupid idea came to her.

  Before she could think better of it, she grabbed Darling's arm as he went for Giran again.

  He turned around, his hand raised to strike her, too. Just as she thought he'd put her through the wall behind her, he caught himself. His breathing ragged, he stared at her and lowered his hand. The agony on his beautiful face hit her like a blow. He cupped her head in the palm of his hand, then gently pulled her into his arms.

  She hugged him close as his heart pounded fiercely against her breasts. He continued to cradle her head and hold on to her like she was his lifeline.

  Maris approached them slowly. "Are you better?" he whispered to Darling.

  His eyes started jerking. "No. I didn't get a chance to kill the bastard." He turned in Giran's direction. "No one insults my lady. No one."

  Nykyrian wiped the blood from his lips as he neared Darling with a look that said he craved retaliation. Luckily, he didn't give in to his anger. "We need to get you both out of here. And whatever you do," he said to Darling, "say nothing else." That last sentence came out as a fierce growl.

  Darling inclined his head to him.

  As they started walking, the gerents noticed Darling's eyes.

  "He's blind?"

  "No wonder he had on sunglasses."

  "How can a blind, insane man lead an empire as powerful as ours?"

  "I wouldn't trust him to lead a herd of dogs to water. Never mind lead us."

  His jaw locked to keep from responding to their erroneous speculations, Darling allowed his friends to escort them from the room. He kept his arm around her waist as if he was afraid of letting her go.

  Once they were clear of the building, Caillen released a low whistle. "That was a strategic blunder the kind of which I normally make. You know, Dar... the ones you usually crawl my ass over when I do them?"

  "Yeah," Ryn agreed. "That little explosion of temper just cost us every nano-inch of ground we'd taken."

  Darling glared at Ryn. "I don't care."

  Ryn scoffed. "Hope you feel that way in the morning."

  "I will. Trust me."

  Hauk tested his teeth with his thumb. "I forgot how hard you punch, you little bastard. If I lose a tooth, I'm taking it out of your hide."

  Kiara cast Darling an evil grimace. "Better be glad I'm pregnant. I'm not exactly fond of seeing my husband thrown into walls, especially since we were only trying to help you."

  Drake sighed. "I understand why you did it, Dar. But damn... this is one ugly mess."

  Darling glanced at her. "You want to pile on here with your opinion against me, too?"

  Zarya shook her head. "Not at all. I totally get why you did it. I just wish I'd punched a couple of them for what they said about you. It seriously pains me that I didn't. Can I please go back and break on them?" She started back for the building.

  Smiling, Darling caught her against him and turned her around to keep her moving forward.

  Damn him. It wasn't fair that he got to pound on them when she was the one who really wanted a piece of their hides.

  "We all get why he did it," Syn said. "There's not a one of us who wouldn't have done it had it been our better half they insulted. Honestly, I'm only surprised you kept him from killing them."

  Nykyrian put his arm around Kiara. "Me, too."

  "But," Ryn inserted, "it doesn't change the fact that it was a political blunder on an epically stupid scale."

  And by the time they made it back to the palace, the extent of that blunder was making itself known. The gerents had called a press conference the moment they'd left the CDS, and were using videoed outtakes of the fight to show Darling attacking Giran for what appeared to be no reason whatsoever.

  Darling cringed every time Zarya pulled up a feed to view it. If I'm not deposed over this, I'm banning all mobiles from the meetings from here on out.

  The commentator smirked at the camera. "As everyone can clearly see, the new governor is out of control. We have reports that he drove the League High Command out of the meeting and threatened to go to war with them, as well as his own gerents. Senator Giran has been released from the hospital. According to witnesses, he was blindsided by the governor for making a passing comment to a friend that had nothing to do with politics. The governor and his staff have refused to take any of our calls or to comment on the matter in any way..."

  Zarya shut the newsfeed off. She couldn't take any more of their one-sided slant. Dear gods, the journalists didn't care at all about the truth. They only cared about persecuting an innocent man.

  Darling lay on his bed with the heel of his hand pressed against his jerking eyes. Wearing only a pair of pajama bottoms, he held a bloodied cloth in his other hand from the nosebleed that had finally slowed down.

  She crossed the room to sit beside him on the bed. "I'm so sorry, Darling."

  He removed his hand from his head to pin her with a grimace. "Sorry for what?"

  "Causing this awful mess. I should have stayed here and let you go alone."

  Darling hesitated at the catch in her voice. The last thing he wanted was for her to think that any part of this was her fault when it wasn't.

  Or worse, for her to think that he blamed her for it when he was more than aware of who the moron was.

  Pulling his palm away from his eyes, Darling laid his hand against her cheek. "Baby, you didn't do anything wrong. I was the dumbass who let his temper get the better of him when I knew better. The only thing I regret was that you had to hear them insult you."

  And he hated the fact that she'd heard the ugliness about his past. Why couldn't people just let it go? Why did they have to use a past mistake as a weapon against him to...

  Is that not what you've done to Zarya?

  He froze as that realization slapped him hard across the face. Zarya had made one mistake in their relationship--granted it was a doozy, but... he was still judging her for it and occasionally, holding it against her.

  For the first time, he saw things through her eyes. What would he have done had he been their leader, and she the one who was missing-in-action while he had no idea where to search for her? Right now, his soldiers could be torturing someone and he'd have no knowledge of it whatsoever.

  My office isn't across the room from them.

  Still...

  Even if it was, he wouldn't know. He got that now. Fully.

  I'm such a krikken idiot...

  "Z?" He pulled the cloth away from his nose to make sure it wasn't bleeding anymore.

  Zarya sat next to him with his computer on her lap. "What, baby?"

  "Can I ask you something?"

  Zarya looked up immediately at his change of tone. There was a note of such seriousness, that it made her heart pound. Had she done something to hurt or offend him? "Sure," she said while every part of her dreaded whatever was on his mind.

  "Why didn't you ever check on me while your men held me?"

  Not that again... Her anger snapped to the forefront that he wouldn't let this go, but she forced it down. He wasn't accusing her this time. In fact, there had been a note of pain in his voice and it was the first time he'd asked this question.

  Biting her lip, she searched for the best words possible. Please, God, help me find a way to make him understand that I hadn't meant to hurt him. Ever.

  She knew he couldn't see her or her reaction,
not while his eyes were jerking. So she set the computer aside and took the cloth from his hand so that she could clean the remnants of blood from his face.

  As she did so, her gaze dropped down to his chest where the scars from his torture screamed their own form of accusation at her. The worst ones were the burn scars on his nipples and groin. It was inhuman what they'd done to him. Who could blame him for holding it against her?

  Tears blurred her vision."Honestly Darling, I was so consumed with looking for Kere, that you as the prince never entered my mind. Not even as a passing thought. Every day I didn't hear from Kere, I panicked more because it wasn't like you to not have any contact with me for days on end. All my attention was spent trying to get the Sentella to tell me something about Kere's whereabouts. I left hundreds of voicemails on your mobile and with the Sentella. Did you never get them?"

  "No. Syn cleared them while I was in the hospital." Darling fell silent as he tried to reconcile what she said with his memories of being in Resistance custody. "You never sounded like you were looking for me." She'd sounded happy every day. Like she didn't have a single care in the world.

  "That's because you heard the voice of the Resistance leader--the soldier who couldn't afford to let anyone know her weaknesses. No matter how I felt, I couldn't let them see it. But I swear to you, Darling, I was screaming and crying inside for fear of your death--you can ask my sister, if you doubt me. Or Ture. They'll tell you that I wasn't human. My mental state was so bad that they came over every weekend to stay with me so that I wouldn't hurt myself."

  She traced the scar on his chest where Timmon had branded him with a hot chain. "And I know I shouldn't have left you there without checking on you. I hate myself every time I think about you in that room, starving and suffering at the hands of the people I entrusted you to. I know it's not the same as your having gone through it, but I promise you, you're not alone in that hell. A part of me dies every time I see a scar on you that I could have... that I should have stopped." Her voice cracked. "You are the most important person in my life. The only one I can depend on and when you needed me most, I wasn't there for you. I--" Her words broke off into deep, heart-wrenching sobs. "Why didn't I just open that damn door? Why?"

  Darling pulled her against him and held her tight. "It's all right."

  "No. No, it's not." She was crying so hard now, that her entire body was shaking. "I let them hurt you. I did. And now--"

  "Shh baby," he said, hating himself for upsetting her like this. "I swear I will never, ever bring it up again."

  Zarya believed him, but it didn't change the fact that when he slept, if he slept, he still had horrifying nightmares over it.

  I failed him in the worst way imaginable.

  "I'm so sorry, Darling."

  Tightening his arms around her, he kissed her cheek. "You want to know the truth?"

  No. Not if it was worse.

  But before she could speak, he continued. "I would gladly suffer all of that and more if at the end of it, I knew you'd be waiting for me."

  She cried even harder. How could he feel like that? How? They'd torn him up so badly that Syn had barely been able to piece him back together.

  "I was trying to cheer you, Z. Not upset you more."

  "I know." She hiccupped. "I just... how did you survive it?"

  Leaning back, he pulled her into his lap and held her with her head tucked beneath his chin. The warmth of his body soothed her more than anything. "At first, I thought you'd recognize me. After all the times that damned scar showed through my hair when I didn't want it to, the one time it could have served me, it didn't show at all. You got to love irony, huh? Anyway, once they chained me, I kept thinking you'd come in, see the scar and know me."

  "And when I didn't come?"

  "In the beginning, I clung to my anger--the same way I survived the mental institutions. I told myself that I was going to get out and then I'd have the throat of everyone who'd hurt me. But the bad thing about anger is that it's not sustainable. Eventually it burns out and the pain swallows it until there's nothing left but a hollow shell. All you want is to die and when you know you can't, you find this fucked-up place inside you where all you do is survive. Minute by minute. Second by second. You try not to think about anything or feel anything. You just get through it one heartbeat at a time, as numb as possible."

  "You so didn't deserve it."

  "No one does, Zarya. But sooner or later, no matter who you are, life uses everyone as its whipping boy. You didn't deserve to lose your family or be given to a slaver. You damn sure didn't deserve to have your brother die in your arms."

  No, but it wasn't the same. While Gerrit still haunted her, none of those had been the unrelenting hell of excruciating pain he'd lived through. He'd had no let up at all. And that was what amazed her about his strength.

  "I love you, Darling."

  He nuzzled her hair with his cheek. "I love you, too."

  Zarya savored the feeling of his fingers brushing through her hair as his heart thumped slow and steady beneath her cheek. And as she inhaled the warm scent of his skin, she understood what he'd meant. She, too, would walk through hell itself so long as she knew he was on the other side.

  She never wanted to hurt him again. But as her gaze went to the computer that had begun to play another news segment, she cringed. While they weren't physically flogging him, this was every bit as unrelenting.

  And it, too, was because of her. Why do I have to cause him so much pain? Shouldn't love be easy?

  Suddenly a whiny voice filled the room. It was a tech worker being interviewed by a reporter. "I think the governor is insane and shouldn't be in power. While I was never fond of the Grand Counsel, he didn't scare me. This new governor terrifies the daylights out of me. What with all that happened tonight, I'm afraid to let my family out of my house. We can't go to war with everyone. Someone ought to tell the governor that. We need a leader who isn't crazy."

  Darling groaned out loud before he reached to close the computer. "I'm thinking I should blow up the CDS building to give them something else to focus on."

  She snorted. "Call me whacky, but I don't thinking killing more people is going to allay their insanity fears where you're concerned."

  "I can wait until the building's unoccupied... or better yet, call in Giran and Nylan, then set it off."

  She laughed in spite of her tears. With his warm hand, he wiped them from her cheeks.

  "Don't worry about this, Z," Darling said, grateful that her tears had finally stopped and that she was calm again. "If I've learned nothing else in my life, it's that we will get through it." Eventually.

  And compared to the whole Nylan scandal and some of his other traumas, this was mild. At least the gerents were afraid of him now. They were no longer laughing in his face.

  They were still trying to depose him, but they weren't laughing while they did it. That made all the difference...

  Yeah, right.

  "How do we fix this?" she asked.

  "Hell if I know. At this point, I think the best thing for me to do is to keep my head down. At least then I can't screw up anything else."

  "You're not funny."

  "Really not trying to be." He sighed. "I knew, given what Arturo had done to me and my reputation, that this would never be an easy transition. I always expected the gerents to protest my governorship and to mudsling to the point I contemplated murder."

  But what he'd never considered was coming to power after he executed his uncle... with his bare hands. And what that would do psychologically to the people who hated his uncle as much as he did, and with a lot less reason to do so.

  He'd hoped to have at least some of the gerents back him, and he'd relied on the mistaken belief that the people would welcome him in after living under Arturo's greedy fist.

  However, after tonight, that wasn't going to happen. So much for allaying the gerents' fears.

  Now, everything was so much more complicated than he'd ever anticipated
. While he'd known Caronese people didn't like him, their unreasoning animosity was slowly shredding what little confidence he had.

  And that could ultimately tear the empire apart.

  One match, and the gerents would now ignite the fires of rebellion against him.

  I swear, Dad, I will protect the things you love most... That naive promise haunted him.

  "Maybe I should abdicate and let Drake take over." Everyone loved his brother...

  She pushed herself up to give him a scowl that resonated, 'are you stupid?' "You can't. Drake's not old enough to rule, and Ryn won't take on guardianship for him. The rest of the gerents... they're selfish bastards out for themselves. They don't care how their decisions affect other people. You're what this empire needs. Not them."

  Her loyalty touched him deeply, especially since he knew what she truly thought of the Cruel family and their elongated reign. Over the years, she'd ranted against all of them repeatedly. "The best thing that could happen for this empire would be a gas leak in the palace that took all of them out at once."

  Yeah, those words had been hard to swallow. But he'd more than understood her malice, and he'd never held it against her.

  Still unsure of what would be best, he turned on the wall monitor. Immediately, it showed Giran being interviewed. Through his shifting vision, he saw that Giran's eyes were blackened and his nose taped. There was a white bandage wrapped around his entire head. He looked awful.

  I should have hit him harder...

  Giran licked his bruised lips. "We have to remember that Governor Cruel comes from a long line of unstable genes. Why do you think all of them have been assassinated? Our latest leader is the worst of them. I've released his medical file for public review. Right here"--he held up the mobile reader in his hand--"the psychologist says that Governor Cruel had to be restrained due to his violent outbursts, and this while he was sedated..."

  He glanced down at his mobile so that he could read the report verbatim. " 'Patient Cruel is showing no improvement or remorse for his past behavior, whatsoever. He continues to be belligerent, lunging out against the staff and cursing all of us. He's resistant to our best efforts to rehabilitate him. Yesterday, he broke the arms of two guards. When asked how he felt about putting them in the hospital, he responded that he not only enjoyed it, but that he'd gladly do it again. And that if he was able to, he'd harm me as well.' "