Born of Fire (27 page)

“The Mothers taught me how to pray and how to forgive. They showed me that some people spend their lives trying to help others and that helping people wasn’t stupid or weak. That not everyone was a user.”

“That’s why you’re pious now?”

“Yeah. It’s the least I can do. I owe them everything.”

“So they raised you in their chambers?”

“Not entirely.” He moved his hand down the line of her jaw, sending waves of pleasure through her. His fingers trailed over her lips, her closed eyelids and then down the side of her neck. She drew a ragged sigh of pleasure.

When Syn continued, his voice was a full octave deeper. “The High Mother found me and had a conniption. Men aren’t allowed to take holy vows and she considered my presence a desecration to the temple.”

“What did you do?”

“I moved back into the catacombs.”

She cringed at that. “No, you didn’t.”

“I had no choice. But this time, I at least had blankets and a pillow. The Mothers would bring me a hot meal at night and they helped enroll me in the local school.”

She became distracted by his touch as he trailed his
fingertips back across her lips and under her hair. “Did you use your real name?”

“Hardly. I quit using Wade the day my father was executed.”

She still didn’t know where C.I. Syn came from. “Was it the Mothers who named you Syn?”

He laughed, his lips dangerously close to her own. “No. For an obvious reason, they refused to ever use it.”

“Where did it come from then?”

“Given my parentage and youthful occupation, it seemed to be the only appropriate name.”

She shook her head at him. “You’re worth so much more than that.”

He moved to kiss her.

As much as she wanted his kiss, she didn’t want to distract him. Not while he was actually telling her about his past.

Pulling back, she asked, “So what does C.I. really stand for?”

Disappointment flickered in his eyes and he sat back with a sigh. “Certifiably Insane.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Why won’t you tell me?”

“It’s too embarrassing.”

Crossing her arms over her chest, she sat back and looked at him from under her lashes. “It can’t be any worse than Gildagard.”

He frowned. “Gildagard? What the hell’s that?”

She snorted at his disdain. “It’s my real name, you goob. After my maternal grandmother,” she said with a smile. “My father hated the name so much, he started calling me Shahara when I was still a toddler.”

His rich laughter warmed her. “Gildagard Dagan. You have to admit it’s pretty gruesome.”

Yes, it was, but she wouldn’t admit it to him. “Now that I’ve confided my greatest embarrassment . . .”

He shook his head. “I’d sooner turn myself over to the Rits.”

“How bad can it be?”

“
Real
bad.”

With that, she knew she’d never get a straight answer out of him. So she changed the subject. “Okay, if the Mothers were taking care of you, then how did you get back into filching?”

“How many questions are you going to ask?”

She shrugged. “How many hours did you say we—”

“Good Lord, woman. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that men have a specified word count set aside each day and if I don’t stop talking, my tongue will explode?”

She snorted. “Did you get that from Caillen or he from you?”

He smiled a smile that sent a rush of excitement through her. “I told you it was universal.”

She gave him the little pout she used on Caillen to swing him around to her way of thinking. “Please finish telling me your story.”

He kissed the tip of her nose, then pulled back to a safe distance. “School was expensive and the Mothers were misappropriating funds on my behalf. I began to fear that they’d get caught and punished. So I decided to use the one
gift
my father had given me.”

“Filching for major companies?”

He nodded.

“Shame on you.”

“I know. But if you knew the High Mother, you’d understand why I started. Had she ever caught them, she’d have tossed them into prison without a second
thought. And from personal experience, I can assure you, they wouldn’t have survived five minutes.”

“But you did.”

“What can I say? I’m a tough bastard.”

Yes, he was.

And maybe it was his story or maybe their close proximity, Shahara wasn’t sure what had made her suddenly so bold. But before she could stop herself, she reached out and touched the stubble on his cheek that still held a faint discoloration from his beating.

He nipped playfully at her fingers.

Embarrassed, she dropped her hand and thought to distract herself. “So how did you meet Nykyrian Quiakides?”

He picked her hand up and toyed with her fingers. The circular motion of his thumb against her skin sent electrical waves up her arm and straight to the center of her body. “He was wounded from a mission gone awry and I went to pick his pocket. He started to kill me and then when he realized I was just a starving gutter rat, he tossed his wallet at me and told me I looked like I needed it more than he did.”

She scowled at what he described. Nykyrian was a trained League assassin—someone not known for any kind of compassion. All assassins killed without remorse or hesitation. “You’re messing with me again, aren’t you?”

“No. I swear. I knew he was dying from his wounds and I started to leave him to it, but I couldn’t. Not after he’d been kind to me—the Mothers had taught me not to turn my back on people, especially those who helped me. Before I could think better of it, I helped him back to where I was staying and tended his wounds.”

“An assassin?”

He nodded. “Because I saved his life, he paid for me to go to school.”

“Out of the goodness of his heart?”

“Yes and no. I also worked for him.”

“And what did you do?”

“Helped him gather information on targets. Provided a few toys for him to use while tracking and fighting. All legal.” He lifted her hand to his mouth and began to suckle the pad of her forefinger. His tongue slid sinfully over her flesh, doing terrible things to her will. “And he paid a damn good salary.”

“Which kept you off the street.”

He inclined his head.

“So tell me about Sheridan Belask. How does he fit into all of this?”

His entire body turned rigid. His eyes returned to their normal frigid state and he pulled her hand away. “What?”

A wave of embarrassment consumed her. “I saw your surgeon’s certificate.”

His breathing intensified with the anger that flickered in his eyes. “Why were you searching my things?” And before she could speak, he answered for her. “That was a stupid question. You were looking for a weapon.”

Shahara nodded. “So how did you become Sheridan Belask?”

Something strange passed between them then, a shared flickering heat that she couldn’t define. Shahara realized then that she was probably the only person he’d ever told about this part of his life.

It made her feel so . . .

She didn’t know what the word was. All she knew was that in spite of how they’d come together and what
might happen in the coming days, she was glad she was here with him at this moment.

He lifted her hand again and brushed a kiss along her fingers before nipping her fingertips with his teeth. “I was always interested in chemistry and biology, so I started taking courses in that. One day one of my professors suggested I think about a career in medicine.”

“And you became a doctor.”

“Well, it wasn’t quite that easy.” He took a deep breath and swapped her hand for her braid.

She watched as he brushed it against the palm of his hand, then twisted his fingers in it. “I knew I didn’t want to be a filch the rest of my life. For one thing, my activities had a way of getting back to the Rits and I had to stay on the move. And besides that, filches have very short life expectancies. So after a while I started thinking about what the professor had said.”

He touched her braid to the tip of her nose. “It started looking like a great opportunity. All my life, all I’d ever craved was respectability.”

“And doctors are always respected.”

“Exactly.” He raised her hair to his face and ran the tip of her hair across his chin. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he was savoring it.

“How did you get into school? Don’t they require birth certificates or records?”

“Nykyrian forged everything I needed. He used his League contacts to give me a whole new identity.”

“Ah. So what happened that you left it all behind?”

He dropped her hair. “I was found out.”

“By?”

“It’s not important.”

And though she longed for an answer, the note in his
voice told her that he was through confiding in her. He’d exceeded his word count.

She started to point out that his tongue had yet to explode, but she thought better of it.

Besides, he would just come up with another smartass retort.

Even though it was probably more than he’d ever told anyone, it still left her feeling on the outside of him. She wondered what it would take to breach his defenses, to make him trust again.

But then, trusting her would probably be the worst thing he could ever do.

“Now that I’ve dumped my sordid past on you, I want you to answer a question.”

She lifted her brows. “Okay.”

“How did the daughter of a fifth-rate smuggler end up as a trained seax? I thought seaxes followed a strict bloodline.”

“They do. My uncle on my mother’s side was a seax and he marked me for training when I was just a toddler.”

“Why not Caillen?”

She stopped just short of confiding a secret not even Caillen knew about his birth. Even though Syn had told her so much about himself, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him that Caillen was a foundling they’d adopted. Her brother had no memory of it and to their family it had never mattered that he wasn’t theirs by blood.

Except for the matter of seax training.

So she told him that alternate truth. “He didn’t think Caillen had a warrior’s spirit.”

He laughed. “No, I guess he doesn’t. He is a bit of a fly-by-the-crotch kind of pilot.”

She joined his laughter. “He is indeed. I swear I
should have gelded him when he hit puberty. Gah, he’s been unbearable since the moment he discovered girls were good for something other than throwing rocks at.”

“Darling’s pet name for him is manwhore.”

“So is ours.”

He started to reach out for her again, but something made him pull his hand back. “So what made you decide to be a tracer?”

Shahara thought back to her childhood and sighed. “I think I did it in part to spite my father. He always hated tracers. Said they were too full of themselves for his tastes. And too, out of all the occupations open for me at the time of his death, it not only allowed me to uphold my oath as a seax, but also paid the best. And it gave me a loose schedule that allowed me to be home when Tessa and Kasen needed me.”

He nodded. “I used to envy the way the four of you pulled together to survive. But the last few years of Tessa’s gambling debts have made me realize how lucky I was that I never had anyone else to look out for.”

It bothered her that he knew so much about her family already. It put her at a terrible disadvantage. “I must admit that there were a couple of times when I seriously thought about running away from them. I was too young to have so much responsibility dumped on me, but I knew if I surrendered us to the government we’d be separated and I couldn’t stand the thought of them being abused the way I’d been. Not to mention, I couldn’t survive without them and while Caillen would have managed all right without us, I don’t think Kasen or Tessa would have survived on their own.”

“No, they can’t even survive
now
on their own.”

That was very true. “I think the hardest thing for me was watching Caillen drop out of school to help out.
He was so smart and made such good grades I know he could have gone on to university and done something great with his life. Instead he’s now a low-rate smuggler like our father.”

“He’s not low rate. He’s one of the best pilots I have.”

She smiled. “Thanks.”

He inclined his head to her. “Personally, I think you should have made Kasen get off her lazy ass and work.”

“That’s harsh,” she snapped with a frown. “You know she really likes you.”

“Yeah, well, considering I’m one of the extremely few people she can stand for more than three seconds, that’s not saying much.”

Her frown deepened. “She’s had a hard time with it all, especially with her asthma and diabetes. There’s so much she can’t do and she has to be so careful not to overexert herself. Who can blame her for being a little difficult?”

“Difficult?” he choked. “She took Caillen’s last paycheck and blew it on a new dress and shoes.”

Shahara gaped. “Tell me she didn’t.”

“Yes, she did. I thought Caillen was going to kill her and I almost helped.”

Shahara rubbed her eyes as a dull pain started in her temples. Kasen would never grow up. And neither would Tessa. “I suppose it’s my fault. Tessa was only ten and Kasen eight when our father died. I was so afraid they’d be pushed to grow up too soon like I did that I overcompensated and allowed them to never take any responsibility at all.” She let out a tired breath.

He took her chin in his hand and forced her to look at him. “You should never apologize for loving someone too much.”

“No, but I fear I may have ruined their lives.”

“You shouldn’t take responsibility for their shortcomings. Those are their problems, not yours.”

Shahara offered him a timid smile, thinking about what he said. Maybe he was right. Maybe it was time she stopped covering for them all the time and allowed them to fall once in awhile.

For several seconds, they sat quietly.

Until Vik raised up and took flight. He buzzed past them. “There are footsteps approaching and they’re headed straight for us.”

“Footsteps?” Shahara repeated, grabbing his weapon from the ground and rising to her feet. “I thought you said no one ever came down here.”