Fated Blades, page 1
OTHER TITLES BY ILONA ANDREWS
The Kinsmen Universe
Silent Blade
Silver Shark
A Mere Formality
Kate Daniels World
Blood Heir
Kate Daniels Series
Magic Bites
Magic Bleeds
Magic Burns
Magic Strikes
Magic Mourns
Magic Dreams
Magic Slays
Gunmetal Magic
Magic Gifts
Magic Rises
Magic Breaks
Magic Steals
Magic Shifts
Magic Stars
Magic Binds
Magic Triumphs
Hidden Legacy Series
Burn for Me
White Hot
Wildfire
Diamond Fire
Sapphire Flames
Emerald Blaze
Innkeeper Chronicles Series
Clean Sweep
Sweep in Peace
One Fell Sweep
Sweep of the Blade
Sweep with Me
The Edge Series
On the Edge
Bayou Moon
Fate’s Edge
Steel’s Edge
The Iron Covenant
Iron and Magic
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2021 by Ilona Andrews, Inc.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781662500435
ISBN-10: 1662500432
Cover design by Faceout Studio, Lindy Martin
Cover illustration by Luisa J. Preißler
CONTENTS
START READING
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Of all the families in New Delphi, beware the secare the most, my son.
We are kinsmen. Our ancestors have enhanced our bloodlines to help humanity spread across the stars. All of us have trained for the art of individual combat. We are faster and stronger than an average human. We are duelists, but the secare were bred to slaughter. They excel at mass murder. That is the sole reason they came to be. It is our saving grace that the two secare families hate each other more than they detest the rest of us.
Avoid conflict with the secare at all costs. Should an opportunity to compete with them present itself, let it pass you by. Do not become their enemy, and better yet, do not become their friend, for there can be no peace between the Baenas and the Adlers. Sooner or later, they will clash again, as their foreparents have done generations ago, and if you ally with one of the two, you will find yourself facing the bloodred glow of the seco blade.
Should you ever encounter two secare who move as one, abandon your pride and run, my son. For your life is more precious to me than any treasure in this galaxy.
Henri Davenport Letters to Haider Davenport Planet Rada, Dahlia Province, City of New Delphi
CHAPTER 1
Rituals brought order to the chaos of life. Order was something Matias Baena deeply cherished, and so every Monday, at precisely 7:00 a.m., he entered his office on the top floor of the twisted blade that was Baena Tower and spent the next three hours sorting through the issues that had accumulated during the weekend. He read everything, organized it in order of priority, and formulated an action plan. At precisely 10:00 a.m., the small team of his top people entered his office to offer their insights and receive their marching orders.
Monday morning was sacred. The office door remained shut, the vid display refused incoming calls, and visitors were told to wait, no matter who they were. Nothing short of an attack on the building would warrant an interruption, so when Solei slipped through the door, Matias raised his head from R & D’s progress report and braced himself.
The chief security officer looked unperturbed. Of average height, with the lean, powerful build of a combat athlete, sandy skin, and pale-blond hair, Solei had been a civilian for six years, but his composure had been tempered in hundreds of space battles. He would report a small leak and a planetary invasion with the same controlled calm.
“Yes?” Matias asked.
“Ramona Adler is here.”
He must have misheard. “Define here.”
“She’s waiting in conference room 1A.”
“Waiting for what?”
“She would like to speak with you. Privately.”
If Solei had announced that his dead father had risen from the grave and was waiting outside the door, Matias would have been less surprised.
Of all the kinsmen families Matias disliked in the city of New Delphi, and he detested most of them, the Adlers were the only ones he hated. It wasn’t a personal hate. It was generational. He had inherited it the way he had inherited his father’s black hair and his mother’s hazel eyes. Both the Baenas and the Adlers had arrived on the planet at about the same time, settling in the same province and inevitably doing business in the same city, both possessed about the same amount of territory and resources, and more importantly, both were secare.
The two families had clashed repeatedly over their first 150 years on Rada. The last outburst of violence had taken place when his grandfather was young and ended without any formal ceasefire. The two sides had nearly wiped each other out and simply couldn’t continue to fight. Since then, the Adlers and the Baenas had settled into icy hostility, always watching each other, always ready for the feud to flare into raging violence. The animosity was mutual and deep. And now Ramona Adler waited in his conference room.
What was so important? Their policy of avoidance was working well so far. When forced to be in some proximity in public, he and Ramona painstakingly pretended the other didn’t exist, and the kinsmen society, which had a long memory, enthusiastically supported their strategy of evading a bloodbath. They were never seated near each other. They were never formally introduced to each other. They never had a conversation.
Ramona could have called. Instead, she marched into his den and demanded to see him. She knew he could react with violence.
Normally, he might have called this reckless, except Ramona Adler was anything but. He had studied her since he was in his teens because she was a potential enemy, and he knew her as well as he did his own family. Ramona was like one of the smoke-furred foxes that inhabited the deep woods in the north, careful, calculating, and subtle. She struck only when she had complete confidence in her success, and she was lethal.
He had to know why she was here, and there was only one way to find out.
Matias rose and strode out the door. Solei turned with crisp precision left over from his military days and followed him, a vigilant, silent shadow.
The conference room lay at the other end of the tower, separated from Matias’s office by a hundred meters of hallway. The Baena building borrowed its shape from the unfurling seco blade that gave the secare their name. It began as a wave, a low curve of plastisteel wrapped in panes of dark solar glass, dipped, then suddenly surged upward to the height of seventy meters, expanding into a hard vertical plane. A not-so-subtle warning.
The glass brightened as it climbed, and here, at the very top of the building, the panels were a deep, vivid red. The tinted light flooded the hallways through the translucent ceiling. Normally, he found it soothing, but today the air above the black floor seemed drenched in blood.
Most kinsmen didn’t know where their unique abilities came from. Their beginnings had been lost to centuries of galactic expansion. The secare were different. All of them traced their origins to the Second Outer Rim War, when two budding interstellar empires clashed over a resource-rich cluster of planets. The brutal conflict lasted for sixty-two standard years, and the secare had been genetically engineered for that war.
While massive spaceships collided across the star systems, spitting energy and missile salvos, the secare fought in close quarters with seco weapons embedded in their bodies. A tool like no other, the seco technology allowed its owners to project short-range force fields from their arms that could become a shield or a blade in an instant. A seco shield could absorb an energy blast and stop a stream of projectiles. A seco blade could slice through solid metal like it was warm butter.
The secare had developed their own martial art, shifting between assault and defense in the blink of an eye. They were the silent dagger to the blunt hammer of the space armada, and the Sabetera Geniocracy used them again and again to bleed their opponents dry.
The war was long over, and the few remaining secare had scattered through the galaxy. Once comrades in arms, now the secare avoided each other at all costs. It was one of the universe’s great ironies that after running halfway across the galaxy to get away from each other, both the Baenas and the Adlers ended up in the same sector, on the same planet, and in the same p
The Baena family was guarded by state-of-the-art security. Matias oversaw it personally, and he hired only the best. All his guards were seasoned veterans with combat implants and skills honed by training and battle. They were well armed and ready. And if he felt like it, he could kill everyone in the building in minutes. It would be a massacre. They would know that he was coming, and all their experience and weapons would do them no good.
If he could do it, so could Ramona. The secare were killing machines, and the six generations separating them from a long-forgotten war had done nothing to change that. If she snapped, he would be the only barrier between her and the slaughter of his people.
Why was she here?
“How did she get into the building?”
“She walked in,” the CSO said. “Our security intercepted her, and she told them that she’d come to see you. They called me. It seemed prudent to control the situation by escorting her to a secure room, away from civilian personnel.”
They both knew that Solei’s control of the situation was an illusion. Ramona could leave that room any moment she wished. And Solei’s people would sacrifice their lives to keep the other employees safe until he got there.
“Good call.”
“Thank you.”
They reached an ornate double door. It whispered open at their approach, and Matias entered a large crescent-shaped room. The wall opposite the entrance was curved red glass, presenting a distant panorama of New Delphi. Between him and the glass wall stood a large oval table, carved from a single massive chunk of Gibirus opal. The mineral inclusions within the stone reacted to light, fluorescing with shifting ripples of color—fiery red, glittering gold, and splashes of intense emerald—setting the table aglow from within. Ramona sat at the table, her back to the window, her face lit up by gem fire.
He had never observed her from this close.
Twenty-eight years old, average height, athletic build of a practicing martial artist, long brown hair, features most people would find attractive. All things he already knew from images, recordings, and occasional cursory glances during the handful of times they had found themselves in relative proximity at formal events. None of it had prepared him for her impact at this range.
The difference between her images and reality was shocking. Like seeing a recording of a brontotiger taken with care under perfect lighting versus turning around in the middle of a hike and finding a pair of golden eyes staring at you from the brush.
Her hair was a warm chocolate brown. She hadn’t bothered to put it up, and it spilled over her white jacket down to the curve of her breasts. The red light from the windows played on the dark strands, coaxing auburn highlights from the mass of loose waves. Her face was a soft oval, with a small but full mouth and high cheekbones. Her nose had a tiny bump on the bridge.
A narrow white scar, about two centimeters long, traced the curve of her bottom lip, stretching just under it to the corner of her mouth. She had killed the kinsman who gave it to her. She’d cut him in half, from right shoulder to his lowest left rib, with a single strike. The recording of it made the rounds. No other family dared to attack the Adlers after that.
Her eyes, a bright, startling blue, looked at him without fear or apprehension. She sat with a calm assurance, her body supple and elegant in a simple white pantsuit. She knew she was strong and fast, and that confidence showed in the tilt of her head, in the line of her shoulders, in the way she held herself. She could jump onto the table in a fraction of a second and dash toward him, her forearms releasing the seco and shaping them into lethal blades. A part of him would’ve welcomed it. He had never fought another secare outside of the family training hall.
He wanted to keep looking at her.
He wondered how fast she was.
He wondered if he was faster.
Ramona raised her eyebrows slightly.
He had to say something or do something. He couldn’t just stand there, gawking like an idiot.
Matias took the closest chair and waved his hand. The ten guards positioned along the wall lowered their weapons and walked out. Solei lingered. Ramona looked at the CSO with her disturbing eyes and then looked back at Matias. He felt a sudden urge to do something dramatic and impressive.
He needed to get ahold of himself. She was in his territory, in the building he owned. He already had her undivided attention.
Matias dismissed Solei with a nod. The CSO withdrew, giving Ramona one last warning look. The door shut behind him.
Matias fixed her with his stare. “To what do I owe the horror?”
“I came to ask two questions.”
Her voice suited her, a rich, smooth contralto.
“Very well. I’m all ears.”
“Do you know where your wife is?”
His brain skipped a beat, then kicked into high gear. It wasn’t a threat. If the Adlers had kidnapped Cassida, the ransom demand would have been delivered via a message. There was no reason for Ramona to put herself in danger.
He accessed his implant. A translucent interface overlaid the vision in his left eye. He selected Cassida’s name from the contact list and waited.
A second passed.
Another.
A third.
She should have answered. Her implant would have recognized his call and linked with his even if she was unconscious. Either her implant was removed, which meant Cassida was dead, or she had deliberately blocked his calls.
“No answer?” Ramona asked. Her tone was perfectly neutral, but somehow, he felt mocked.
“Fine. I’ll play. Where is my wife?”
“I wish I knew.” She slowly reached into her jacket, withdrew a small tablet, and placed it on the table. “But I think he does.”
On the screen, Cassida ran across a small, paved lot, her bright golden dress flaring around her, her auburn hair flying, as she sped toward a blond man waiting by a late-model aerial. He opened his arms, and Cassida jumped onto him, wrapping her legs around his hips.
A wave of ice splashed Matias and evaporated into intense, furious heat. His left hand clenched into a fist under the table. His wife was cheating on him.
Their marriage wasn’t perfect. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t loving or passionate, but it was perfectly amiable. He had remained faithful to her since their wedding almost three years ago. It never crossed his mind that she wouldn’t do the same.
Ramona was looking at the screen with an odd expression. Not pain, but rather resignation. “The unbridled joy seems unfair.”
“What is the point of showing me this?”
“That’s the wrong question. The right question is, Who is the man she’s climbing?”
She zoomed the recording with a flick of her fingers, and he saw the man’s face—golden tan, square jaw, glowing with health and that particular polish that came with wealth and too much grooming. Recognition punched him.
“Your wife is having an affair with my husband,” Ramona said.
For a moment they shared a silence as he came to grips with Cassida licking the inside of Gabriel Adler’s mouth.
Ramona spoke first. “That brings me to my second question. Have you experienced any security or data breaches in the last few weeks? Go ahead. Check. I will wait.”
Matias surged off the chair and out the door. In the hallway, the guards saw his face and flattened themselves against the walls.
“She does not leave,” he growled. “Solei, with me.”
Thirty minutes later Matias marched back into the conference room, and this time he didn’t bother to sit down.
Ramona offered him a bitter smile. “She took everything?”
He didn’t answer. The humiliation was too deep, and his rage burned too hot.
For the last two weeks Cassida had used his credentials to log into their files from his home office. He had no idea how she’d obtained his password, but with the proposal deadline approaching, he had worked from home with increasing frequency, logging in after hours. Her activity hadn’t raised any alarms. She’d copied the entirety of their seco research.
“Gabriel has done the same,” Ramona said.
They were sharing a rapidly sinking boat.
Until three years ago the technology of the seco had been lost. The seco weapon was a marvel of bioengineering. In its initial form, it was a hair-thin glowing strand visible only under strong magnification. When examined through nanoscale imaging, the strand turned into an ethereal narrow ribbon knitted from a million nanobots. It floated in the buffer solution, undulating and shifting, waiting for its host. When the time came, it and its twin would be implanted into the forearms of a newborn from a secare bloodline.
