Bastien shrugged nonchalantly. “No idea. But he was fully convinced of it.”
Jullien snorted. “Anyway, I love my grandmother as much as you do your uncle, for about the same reasons. Had my father ever bothered to have a conversation with me, he’d have known that. And if I don’t stop her, she will find some way to kill my mother and brother, and retake her throne. I didn’t wipe out an entire portion of my family to put my mother in power to watch that happen.”
Bastien scowled at a version of this story he’d never heard before. “No. Wait … what?”
“You heard me.”
He’d heard him, but that wasn’t what he’d been told about the coup on Andaria that had cost Jullien his inheritance. “WAR and your aunt put your mother in power.” WAR had been a rebel sect who’d been working actively against Jullien’s insane grandmother who’d been a complete tyrant no one had wanted to deal with.
“Yes,” Jullien said slowly, “with the information I gave them over the years. And particularly at the end. Trust me. No one else could have brought down Eriadne. It’s why I’m the only one she put a hit on.”
Bastien’s jaw went slack at the injustice. And at a fact he hadn’t known. Jullien had a League warrant out on him? Damn, that was harsh. Especially if half of what he said was true. And he had no reason to doubt it. “Do they know that?”
“They never bothered to ask. But one would think, with their brilliant intellects, they’d have discerned it by now. Again, doesn’t take much to figure it out, since I’m the only one from the coup my grandmother has come after with a vengeance. Everyone else was spared her wrath. Kind of makes you wonder why, huh?”
Indeed. ’Cause Eriadne wasn’t known for her mercy or forgiveness. That alone told him that Jullien wasn’t lying. “Damn, brother. You got screwed.”
“Don’t we all?”
Bastien nodded in total agreement. “So why you want to help them?”
Jullien shrugged nonchalantly. “Cairie’s still my mother. Nyk’s still my brother. My grandmother’s done them enough harm in their lives. I’m not about to let that bitch do any more. Be damned if I’m going to let her win, after everything else she’s done. I’m a bastard that way.”
Bastien grinned at something that could easily define them both. “And here all this time, I thought you were nothing but a vindictive asshole.”
“Oh, you were not wrong about that. I am a vindictive asshole. This is all about payback to the whore. Just the whore, in this case, isn’t my mother.”
Ouch … As they entered the room where he kept the electronics, Bastien sucked his breath in sharply at an insult he’d have never leveled at his own mother, and one he’d have killed anyone else for making against her. “That’s harsh.”
“I am the callous bastard they raised me to be.” Jullien scowled at Aksel’s system. “It’s booby-trapped?”
Bastien stepped around him to enter his password so that Jullien could use it. “Yeah … sorry about that. First thing when I found this place and moved in was secure everything so that if one of the League bastards happened upon it, they couldn’t use anything to figure out if it belonged to me or not.” He opened the files Jullien was looking for to make it easier for him. “There you go.”
Bastien drifted back so that he could eat while Jullien and his crew went through the data in search of something they could use.
And as he watched Jullien searching through Aksel Bredeh’s database with an expertise he’d never realized his cousin possessed, he was impressed. This was not the useless piece-of-shit prince his Triosan uncle had railed against. Bastien couldn’t count the hours he’d listened to his father and Uncle Aros as they discussed what they needed to do to block Jullien’s inheritance.
Had Jullien wanted to, he could have seized the Andarion throne and then taken his father’s empire in the blink of an eye. Hell, with the turmoil that rapidly followed on Kirovar, Jullien could have even made a play for theirs, too. Since Bastien’s mother was the younger sister of Jullien’s father, Jullien had as much blood right to it as Barnabas did.
More so, really.