My brow furrowed.

“The Kaazor broke their agreement about ten years in,” Azur added when he saw my confusion. “But Aina at least gave the Kaalium peace during that time. She was my mother’s opposite. Aina was bold and brash. Her laughter filled these halls, loud enough to make Zaale scowl.” Azur’s lips quirked before the brief smile died. “She taught us how to fight from the time we were young. How to use swords and blades. Daggers and bows. But mostly how to defend ourselves.”

“Even Kalia?” I asked softly.

“Never sneak up on Kalia,” Azur told me, shaking his head. He wasn’t touching me, and I found that I missed his heat. “She’ll have you pinned on your back before you’ve realized it.”

I could believe it.

“What happened to her?” I asked, my voice edged in uncertainty. “What happened to Aina?”

Azur’s wings twitched.

“She died,” he said flatly. “Seventeen years ago.”

Seventeen years ago?

“On Pe’ji.”

My breath whooshed out from my lungs and I turned to face him. My heart gave a mighty thump, and then it sped and I couldn’t stop it.

“On Pe’ji?” I whispered. “But that’s…”

“You know that we were their allies. The Voperians had no authority to take the planet from the Pe’ji. They tried anyway. Then the United Alliance got involved. That was how the New Earth forces were called in. Soldiers used to claim a planet that never should have been invaded to begin with,” Azur told me softly, his jaw ticking.

Father had never talked about the war or the politics of it. Though he’d been a decorated hero, though I knew that the Pe’ji had been overthrown, that the Voperians had been successful in their war campaign, partly with the help of human soldiers.

During the last battle of the Pe’ji War, my father had led his unit past Pe’ji’s defenses while the Kylorr had been distracted on the opposite side of the field. It had been my father to slaughter their war general, bringing panic and chaos to the fight until the soldiers had picked off the stragglers, one by one.

And the Voperians had paid the United Alliance well for their assistance. And then the United Alliance had paid my father well, giving him the estate in the Collis, giving him fame and glory—and money. More money than he’d known what to do with.

Until that money had been gone.

“The Kylorr failed the Pe’ji,” Azur told me. “The Kylorr of the Kaalium failed the Pe’ji in that war. But we nearly won it, if not for that last battle.”

“Aina was fighting in the field?” I guessed, my throat tight.

“No,” Azur said. “Aina was a peace ambassador only. She was brought in after the final battle to negotiate on Pe’ji’s behalf with the Voperians and the United Alliance, for at least partial claim to their land.”

My lips parted. “I don’t understand.”

“Aina was murdered,” Azur told me, making my breath hitch in shock. His eyes turned to me, bright red in the darkness. “She was killed by your father. Rye Hara. Leader of the Fifth Unit of the New Inverness forces.”

“No,” I said immediately, thinking of my father’s wide grin, his red, ruddy cheeks. Shaking my head, hearing his words sink into my brain but twist and morph until they didn’t feel real. “No, you must be mistaken.”

But there was a burn that started deep in my nostrils and in my throat and in my belly. A burn that made nausea roil in my belly until I thought I would be sick all over the roof.

“No,” I whispered, looking at Azur. “No, why would you say something like that?”

Azur’s expression was grim. There had been a time in our brief marriage when he might’ve delighted in telling me this. Where he would’ve enjoyed seeing the horror and the turmoil and the realization slowly begin to contort my features until my eyes stung and tears dripped down my cheeks.

But not now.

Azur reached out to touch me, but I recoiled, pressing my hands to my face.

“We never knew what happened to Aina,” Azur told me softly, continuing. “We were told her death was undetermined. That she went missing a week into the peace talks and no one had seen her. She just disappeared. Our family traveled extensively to Pe’ji to try to find her. My father hired every single investigator he could find to search for her. But Pe’ji is a wild planet. Its jungles are dense. It was a month later when we realized that we would likely never find her.

“My mother was broken after that. And she knew what had happened. She said she could feel it the moment Aina’s soul was released. She woke up my father in the middle of the night, crying hysterically. Her face was stained silver from her tears for weeks. She said she could feel the emptiness. That she could feel the emptiness where Aina had been. And I know what that feels like because I can feel it with Kythel.”

Azur’s voice was ridden with angst and despair. My shoulders were shaking, my knees beginning to bounce, my hands clenched into my dress. I could still feel the stretch and imprint of Azur inside my body. It felt like too much.

“We knew the United Alliance had something to do with her death, but we had no way to prove it,” Azur said after a long silence. “Still, we brought charges against them in the high courts. For sheer negligence and lack of protection for a peace ambassador in a time of war. They were fined heavily. Laws were written so that every future ambassador has a fully armed unit traveling with them. But none of that brought Aina back to us. Nor did it give peace to my family and especially to my mother. She never stopped looking for Aina’s body. The body is important to the Kylorr. We burn our dead and compress the ashes of their bones to create their soul gem, where their soul lives and is protected in Alara. But we never found Aina. Whether she was buried or burned or hidden or transported off planet, we never knew. Her soul has no vessel within our family’s shrine, and seeing it empty left my mother broken because she knew that they would never be reunited in the next realm.”

A sob left my throat, and I looked up at the night sky, the stars shimmering through my tears.

“My mother died seven years later, but in those seven years she never knew a day of peace. She searched endlessly. Tirelessly. Consulting countless investigators, reviewing every scrap of video feed she could find off Pe’ji, of which there was little. But I promised her that I would find Aina. I made my vow to her. I made my vow to our family,” he said, his voice guttural. “And then…two months ago, a black feed was recovered in an United Alliance storage facility on Voperia. I’d had investigators working in the background for years, waiting for anything at all, anything scrap of news that might give us direction. One of the investigators was on Voperia at the time. He broke into the storage facility and stole the video feed. When he unscrambled the code…there she was.”

Two months ago.

“Azur,” I whispered raggedly.

“The video showed Aina. On Pe’ji. With a human male who we later identified as Rye Hara, Lord of the Collis, and his unit. Four human males and two human females.”

My gut twisted.

Azur looked at me as he said, “Aina was a fighter. She fought them as best as she could. But the soldiers swarmed her and they sliced her wings so she couldn’t fly away. And your father took his plasma gun, he raised it to her chest, and he blew a hole straight through her heart. They dragged her body away, off feed, and we never saw her again.”

I was shivering on the roof. The world turned upside down, and I felt like I was thrashing and drowning, trying not to sink, as Azur’s words flooded my body.

I felt raw. Like my chest had been split open and everything was leaking out of me. Until there would be nothing left.

Azur took my face in one of his palms.

“And I vowed right then and there that I would destroy Rye Hara and everything he held close,” he told me softly as big, fat tears tracked down my cheeks. “I would begin with his eldest daughter. I would do everything I could to have her, to possess her…and then I would break her will, her spirit, her hope, just like my mother’s had been broken. Just like ours had been broken.”