Page 52 of The First Spark (Dynasty of Fire #1)

He needed air. Real air. It could be rank with the stench of sewer for all he cared, but he couldn’t take another second of the noxious smoke and acrid flames.

His legs wouldn’t move. He slumped against the cool metal control box, as useless and helpless as he’d been that day on an Oppallese battlefield.

Soft footsteps crept towards him, bringing back memories of thumping boots. Go, he wanted to say, leave me alone .

But his mouth wouldn’t move, and the footsteps wouldn’t stop.

“What happened, Zane?”

He hated Kalie’s voice at that moment. Hated the soothing cadence he didn’t deserve, hated that she was seeing him like this. Like the miserable, broken failure he truly was.

“Tell me about Lysa.”

“What—” Zane’s jaw fell open as he scanned her solemn face. “How…?” He’d been so careful. For all their late night talks, all the times he’d called her after nightmares, all the things he’d confided, he’d never mentioned Lys. She couldn’t have known, unless… “Mira told you?”

“No. I figured it out. ”

His muscles were so rigid that he couldn’t move if he tried. “How?”

Kalie’s eyes shifted away as she crouched beside him. “You, um… you talk in your sleep.”

The realization hit with painful clarity.

On the flight to Etov, he’d woken up with Kalie curled beside his bunk, clutching his hand.

When he’d gone into the bathroom and seen the tears crusted on his cheeks, he’d known.

She hadn’t said anything, so he’d let himself think she’d heard nothing, just a scream or a shout…

“How much do you know?” he croaked.

Kalie traced a pattern in the dirt coating the cement. “She was your best friend, the one you learned to dance for. And she was an Oppallese Marine. In your squad, I’m guessing. And you… you wish you could’ve gone in her place.”

Her last words were strained, and her features were clouded. Damn nanotech, with its noxious odors burning his eyes.

Zane sniffed. “Yes.”

There was no point in denying it, not anymore.

“You loved her.”

Loved. Zane flinched. That was the hardest part about loving someone—that the love didn’t die when they did, that he had to muddle through the rest of his miserable life hearing the word loved , as if it was in the past. As if it was over now.

His eyes stung. And damn it all, it wasn’t from the nanotech’s odors.

“I’m sorry,” Kalie murmured, rising to her feet. “I shouldn’t have?—”

Zane caught her arm, avoiding the sight of those awful crimson stains. “Stay. Please.”

She sank down beside him.

Wind whistled past, and the crisp fall breeze chased away the stench of burning flesh. A whiff of it lingered in the air, turning his stomach, but a second breeze gusted past and swept the last of the artificial odors away.

Like a drowning man resurfacing, Zane gasped in mouthfuls of air .

Kalie’s fingers curled around his.

Usually, when he wound up sitting beside her with nightmares of Lys still seared into his mind, the comfort of being near her could calm him. Even on nights that they didn’t talk much, it was good to not feel so alone.

But now, the warmth of her touch wasn’t enough to chase away the icy fear coiling around his heart.

He breathed in her cherry perfume, tangled with the musty scent of cut grass and the fresh air surrounding them.

He listened to the rhythm of her breathing.

He memorized how soft her fingers felt against his calloused skin.

All of it, he committed to memory. He knew how quickly it could be gone. How quickly it would be gone, when Carik came for her.

He was trembling, and he couldn’t do anything to stop it.

Kalie’s thumb brushed across his knuckles, tracing circles into his skin. “My best friend died the day before you met me.”

Zane froze.

Her eyes were glassy, as if she was somewhere else entirely. Probably there.

He’d been an ass back then, hours after she’d lost her family. And he’d never considered, even all these weeks later, that she’d lost others when her fleet was destroyed. That she knew the pain he’d felt as he screamed over Lysa’s body.

“We had this stupid saying. ‘From crib to crypt.’ Because she was a cl—because she was—” Kalie’s brows creased. “I guess it doesn’t matter if I say it now. She was my clone.”

Zane’s jaw dropped. There were rumors that the scientists on Vak’shad had developed tech for cloning, but those were recent. He’d never heard anything about Kalie having a clone.

“Well, not clone , not really,” Kalie said, the words hesitant and halting. “She was a gemod double—genetically modified to match me, before either of us were born…”

Her throat bobbed, and she let out a shuddering breath.

“It’s a long story. Too long to get into.

We grew up together, and she was my best friend.

The only person who really knew me, the other half of my soul.

I loved her. But she… a Soror Res is sworn to lay down their life for the royal family.

And… the day of the attack…” Kalie’ s eyelashes fluttered as she blinked away tears.

“That’s why I don’t want anyone else to die for me. I can’t—can’t live with that.”

Zane followed her gaze to the grass stains on his dirty outfit.

He looked away, but her eyes lingered on him.

She wouldn’t push if he stayed silent. It was one of the things he liked about her.

She was willing to listen on the rare occasions that he talked about his squad—not Lys, never Lys—but she didn’t force him to talk.

She didn’t try to solve his problems with booze and sex, either, like Mira had on Santursi.

That had been fun, but it hadn’t changed anything.

It’d only made it worse. Kalie, though… She was light and warmth like the sun god she was named for, and talking to her, even if it was painful, made the weight on his shoulders a little lighter.

Zane took a shaky breath.

“I’ve loved Lysa since we were six cycles old.” He ran the beads of her military tag through his fingers. “I used to dream that I’d get Avington back and make her my baroness. We’d escape to a world free of war. Just her and I. Happy.”

He let go of the beads. The softness on Kalie’s face made his vision blur.

“I never considered that she didn’t know.

I mean, she gave me chances to tell her.

But I never did. I was a stupid, arrogant fool, and when she told me she was engaged, I…

I couldn’t believe it.” A hot wave of shame burned in his chest at the memory of shattering glass.

“I would’ve found a way to live with it.

But at the engagement party, I got wasted.

I told her I loved her, and her fiancé and I fought. ”

He hated himself for it, but a vindictive thrill burned in his veins at the memory of her fiancé’s smashed-up face.

The memory of Lysa’s fury sobered him.

“She refused to talk to me. A few weeks later, our squad was ambushed. I told them all to run, I’d hold them off, and…” Zane wiped his eyes. “I got shot. She came back for me.”

As Kalie traced gentle circles across his knuckles, he took a shuddering breath.

“They shot her. She died in my arms.”

“Oh, Zane…”

“I left Oppalli. Ran to Santursi. ”

Kalie’s voice hissed in his memory: coward, deserter . Zane flinched, but then came the softer echo of her voice: “You are the furthest thing from a coward.”

He could trust her with the truth.

He closed his eyes, and he was sitting on a stool in that filthy bar, holding a bottle of pills. “I just felt so guilty. And the morning of the anniversary, I decided that… that it’d be better if I ended it all.”

Kalie seized his hands. “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me.”

“I had a bottle of pills in my hand when I heard a crash down the street. I almost didn’t go, but someone was screaming.

I wanted to make sure everyone was okay.

” Zane cleared his throat. “It was a hovercraft collision. Hit and run. I chased after the driver, cornered her about the crash. She was wounded. Told me she was on a mission and had to escape. The Feds came looking for her. I got her back to the bar and saved her, but if she hadn’t been there… ”

“Mira saved your life.”

As he nodded, his gaze caught on her stained shirt, and his blood ran cold.

It played out in his head with horrible clarity.

Light glinted off onyx armor as legionnaires barged into the palace.

Dozens of pulsers fired as one. Red lasers screamed down the marble hall, tearing through her head, her chest, her legs.

She would fall, gasping, as blood bubbled from craters in her chest.

Zane shuddered. He would die before that happened, but it wouldn’t be enough.

“I tried to talk Lys out of joining the Marines, but she was like you. She believed in the cause. And that’s why I’m so scared.

” He pressed the back of his hand to his nose.

“She’d been fighting for four cycles. She was good .

Could hold her own with the toughest of them.

It didn’t matter, in the end. And I just think…

if I couldn’t protect her… how am I supposed to protect you? ”

Kalie hooked her arms around his neck and leaned closer. Their foreheads were practically touching. “I don’t need saving.”

He glanced at the scarlet stains on her shirt, but she caught his chin and raised it.

“That won’t happen to me. You don’t have to protect me, Zane. ”

Their shallow breaths quivered between them.

Her flushed face was so close that he could make out every fleck of sapphire in her shining blue eyes, every line on her glossy lips.

All other sounds faded away as the world fell silent.

The rustling trees, the roar of a transport soaring overhead, the hum of a mower slashing through damp blades of grass—it all disappeared as he moved towards her.

He’d been trying to keep his distance. She was different, and he couldn’t bear to risk their friendship when she was the only person he could really open up to.

But this time, she didn’t pull away.

She wasn’t like the others. This mattered. She mattered.

She alone existed in the world—her rapid breaths brushing his skin, her cherry perfume he’d come to love, her arms hooked around his neck.

Zane threaded his fingers through her silky hair. Her tongue skimmed her lips, and as his pulse pounded in his ears, flutters of heat danced in his stomach. He leaned in and Kalie did too, and then?—

Then she put her hand on his chest. Her chin dropped.

“We can’t.”

He let go.

Her shoulders curled in, and she ducked her head, averting her gaze.

“I overstepped,” Zane muttered, rising to his feet. Again . She’d pulled away that night in his room, and she’d pulled away a second time now. He was an idiot to keep pushing. “I’m?—”

“Princess Hannover!”

A stocky Praetor bustled down the yard’s rocky path. Zane stiffened, glancing at the distant palace. If her father had seen that, he was screwed.

The Praetor didn’t spare him a glance as he skidded to a halt. Kalie lurched to her feet.

The man’s face was ashen.

Zane shifted in front of her, searching the distant sky. No black shadows, no ships. Not yet. He squinted at the palace. The looming walls of red marble jutting out from the rocky island were an ominous sight, but there didn’t seem to be an immediate threat .

“You must come at once, Your Highness.”

“What happened?”

The Praetor flicked beads of sweat off his forehead. “They’ve decrypted the message from your informant on Dali.”

Zane went rigid.

“In five days, a Federation fleet will arrive to take the planet.”