She scoffed at his bravado. “I think you’d find that extremely hard to do. I’ve seen him fight. If there’s anyone better, I haven’t come across them.”

Drake held his hand up and laughed. “Are you sure we’re talking about the same person? Darling never fights. He hates it.”

“And again, I’m telling you that I have seen him in battle. Many times. Bloody and fierce. He never hesitates. Your brother is a major badass with a capital ‘B.’ He’s a fully trained assassin with all the skills that entails. How do you think he took your uncle out so easily and held the guards at bay?”

Drake still looked like someone had sucker punched him. “I’m such a stupid bastard,” he breathed. “How could I have missed seeing it?” He winced as if some bad memory had slapped him. “Damn, the shit I’ve said to him over the years for…”

Whatever it was, he didn’t finish naming it.

She rubbed his arm comfortingly. “Don’t beat yourself up, Drake. Siblings fight. It’s what we do.”

“No,” he breathed. “Not like I did. Until I was fifteen, I was a total asshole to him, in ways you can’t begin to imagine. I honestly don’t know why he even speaks to me, never mind tolerates my presence, now. You know how he got that long scar on his face, don’t you?”

“He fought with Ryn.”

“Yeah. Because of me.” The pain that one word betrayed was so deep that it put an instant lump in her throat for him. The self-loathing in his eyes was hard to look at. “That fight would never have happened had I not been a first-rank bastard.”

“I don’t understand.”

Drake ground his teeth so viciously that his jaw muscles protruded. “I was only eight when my father died, and honestly, I barely remember the man. Still, I didn’t want to go back to school after the funeral. I wasn’t ready. I needed my family around me, especially my mother, but Darling made me leave. He literally picked me up and carried me out of my room and forced me onto the shuttle without any explanation other than I was better off at school.”

She felt terrible for Drake. It had to be awful to be so young and alone after something so tragic. She knew how lost she’d been when her parents had died. The only thing that had kept her going after her father’s death had been Sorche.

“He was trying to protect you.”

Drake pierced her with a cold glare. “That’s not what he said to me. Ever. All I heard from him was that I needed to keep my grades up and stay at school. Every time I turned around, he stopped me from coming home on holidays and at breaks. He’d arrange for me to stay in the campus dorms or with people I barely knew, and I hated him for it. I kept trying to call my mother, but she wouldn’t talk to me either. In one heartbeat, I was an orphan no one wanted, and I had no idea why my entire family had abandoned me and left me to the care of strangers.”