“It can’t be.” Desideria scowled. “Kara wouldn’t have…” Her voice trailed off as the young woman took her aunt’s hand and pulled her closer before she answered a reporter’s question.
Leran’s next words made all of them suck their breaths in sharply. “My mother and I are committed to honoring my father’s work. I’ve already spoken to my cousin Narcissa who is acting regent for the moment until a new Qillaq queen can be crowned and she’s put her best people on helping us to track down our parents’ killers and to bring them to justice as swiftly as possible. Blood or no blood, Desideria and Caillen will pay for their crimes.”
Desideria went cold as she realized who the woman really was. “That’s not Kara. It’s her twin sister, Karissa.” The one who’d married an offworlder…
“Your aunt married my uncle?” Caillen’s tone was low and sinister.
“Yes, she did,” Chayden confirmed. “I had no photo of her, and never thought much about it, but I remember it now.”
Hauk’s voice spoke through the intercom. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Yeah,” Fain said wryly. “We’re screwed.”
It took Caillen a full minute before he could answer that question. His thoughts whirled through his mind with a dizzying effect. “Karissa paid to have me killed as a kid.”
Hauk cleared his throat. “Yeah, we’re thinking alike.”
Desideria’s scowl deepened. “Why?”
Pausing at her question, Caillen rubbed his brow as everything came together and he finally understood a lifetime of weirdness. Things that had seemed like coincidences now made total sense to him. “Don’t you see? With me out of the way, her daughter would be in line to inherit my father’s empire.”
Desideria shook her head in denial. “Look at her. She’s younger than I am. Her daughter wouldn’t have even been born at the time you were kidnapped.”
Chayden cursed. “Not this one, but…” He pulled up an obituary and put it on the screen beside Karissa’s photo. He turned his attention to Caillen. “She had another daughter. An older one who, as a teenager, died in an accident about the time you would have been three.”
“Not long after I was kidnapped.”
Chayden gave a curt nod. “I never realized Kara had a twin sister. All I’d ever seen was that the queen had another sister who was married off. There was no record of their birth or of them being twins because the Qills don’t think of births as significant. They don’t register them the way we do. They only register when someone becomes an adult which the two of them didn’t do simultaneously because of Qillaq law.” He smacked himself on the forehead. “I can’t believe I never thought to double-check the identities of the women in the pictures.”
But who could blame him? As he said, if you didn’t know they were twins, there was no record.
Desideria let out a long sigh. “It wouldn’t have mattered if you had checked. Karissa’s entire history, like yours, would have been erased the moment she left Qilla for Exeter. Likewise, no one ever told us what planet she’d gone to. To our people, it’s irrelevant.”
Chayden’s expression said he thought he was an absolute imbecile for not seeing through it. “Since I didn’t know they were twins, I assumed Kara was the one who’d hired me on my mother’s behalf to start the war. But now I’m going to bet it was Karissatrying to wage war on them. Frame the Trimutians and then strike while the queen is preoccupied with a war. What an effing idiot I am…” his voice trailed off as his brows came together into a fierce frown. “Unless…”
“Unless what?” she asked.
“We’re assuming Karissa was working alone with her daughter. What if she wasn’t?”
Desideria went cold as she realized the full extent of this nightmare and her overheard conversation came back to haunt her. Chayden was right. The more she thought it over, the more it made sense. Why would Karissa be working alone? “She and Kara could have been plotting this coup for years.” Her mind raced with implications as she replayed a lifetime of abuse at her aunt’s hands.
What if Kara hadn’t volunteered to train them out of the goodness of her heart? What if she’d volunteered to murder them and shred their egos so that they wouldn’t be fit to take their mother’s place? Yes, it was Narcissa who’d been there, but Kara had set the scene for those deaths. Maybe Cissy was just her instrument.
“What if Karissa is working with my aunt Kara too?”
Why hadn’t she thought of this before?
Fain made a low whistle. “Twins to rule dual empires. Together, they’d be one hell of a force to be reckoned with. No one would be able to fight them. Not even the League.”
Chayden shook his head. “Especially with Trimutian resources to call on if they’d taken over their empire too. They’d own the entire Frezis sector.”
Desideria raked a tired hand through her hair as reality tore through her. “But how do we prove this? No one will ever believe us.”