The Belter's Story (BRIGAND) by Natalie French, Scot Bayless

of where one ended and the other began.
    When it came, our climax was a white hot singularity that burned away everything with savage release.
    Leaving nothing behind.
 

CHAPTER TEN
    The moment it happened we knew. We felt it. Of course we did. Even if we'd wanted to, we couldn't have stopped it. But we hadn't want to. Not for a millisecond.
    At the instant of our transcendence, the connection broke and rapture turned to horror.
    Just like that, she was gone. Memory spun back through us, fueling heartbreak with every captured moment. Her eyes. Her fingers. Her breath on our cheek. Her humor. Her acceptance.
    Gone.
    Laena was dead. Killed by the ones she had trusted most. The ones who loved her. The ones who sucked her dry.
    The Jase raged and wept in the dark spaces of our shared psyche. The Cromley withdrew into crippled silence. Perhaps because they had no way to comprehend what we felt, the Su and the other were mute. With nothing holding us together, we shattered into helpless inaction.
    We had been cradling Laena on the bed for so long. Her body had gone a little blue at first, drifting toward gray as silent hours passed. No hint of her magnificent glow remained. She was as pale and lifeless as the surface of Europa a hundred meters above us. We sat and we held her, never noticing the ping of the comm or, later, the pounding.
    The jerking squeal of the door being pried open finally roused us and we looked up at Kittar, Laena's sire, the man who fathered her. He held a pry bar in one hand and we thought for a moment he intended to use it on us. His glow projected anger, but at what wasn't clear.
    "What happened?" His square jaw was clamped tight, forcing the words between his teeth.
    "We killed her. It was our fault. Please tell someone. They need to arrest — They should do something."
    Neeshta, Laena's mother, slipped into the room behind her husband. She was beautiful, like her daughter, but more delicate. Same hair though. Same eyes. A fresh wave of grief broke over us and an involuntary sob ravaged the back of our throat.
    Neeshta moved to kneel by the bed. She touched her daughter's lifeless gray hair and then looked at us intently. "Cromley, it's important that you tell us what happened. Every detail. Don't leave anything out."
    And so we told them. All of it. While we clung to the withered husk of the woman who had loved us.
    Neeshta listened silently, prompting only now and again when we lost momentum and, as we told her our story, we saw, as if from a long way off, how deeply tragedy had cut — until Laena. She had been the fleeting spark in a lifetime of darkness.
    "Tell me again about the glow. Do you see it now? Around me? Kittar?" Neeshta's gaze was focused, like she was looking into the glare of the sun.
    "Yes. We can see it, but it's more than that. We can feel it too. You're curious and tense. You're a little afraid of us."
    Neeshta's pheromones spiked suddenly. Danger… And, in that moment, we realized there were things here that we weren't seeing, things we were failing to comprehend. She had lost her only child. Where was Grief…   or Rage… or Retribution… ?
    We glanced up at Kittar who still stood impassively in the broken doorway. His glow seemed muddy and we could smell his tension. From meters away, he was radiating Combat…
    Without knowing why, we knew something was wrong. Deeply. Terribly. These weren't the grieving parents of an innocent girl killed by her lover. They felt clinical.
    We rolled poor Laena's corpse from our lap and leaped, naked, toward the door. Focused as we were on the tool in Kittar's right hand, we never even saw the crippler in his left until it hit us in the ribs.
    All the skeletal nerves in our body fired at once, sending every muscle into a spasm that tore fibers and strained ligaments to their breaking point. Clenched in incomprehensible agony, we toppled to the metal floor, hitting hard and tasting blood. No doubt a facial bone or two had succumbed to the