“I want to see her,” she said. “Let’s go.”

That was not the answer Zeerid had been hoping to hear.

MALGUS SAT AMONG THE RUINS, the fallen statues of his ancient foes, and pondered. The night breeze blew cool over his face. He replayed his confrontation with Aryn Leneer. Her power had surprised him. So, too, the anger that underlay it.

The anger he understood, even respected, but he didn’t understand how she’d come by it. She had known that he’d killed Master Zallow when they had fought on the ruins. But she had not known when they had first seen each other on the ship-to-ship holo over Coruscant, when Valor had shot down the freighter. He was certain of that. He would have felt the knife point of her rage if she had known then.

So she must have learned in the interim that he had killed Master Zallow.

Either she’d seen it somehow—a surveillance recording pulled from the rubble, maybe—or she’d interrogated a witness, a survivor who had escaped, or maybe a droid who had crawled out of the destruction.

Either way, she now knew the details of the attack.

It pleased him that she knew. The destruction of the Jedi Temple was the greatest achievement of his life. He wanted the Jedi—wanted Aryn Leneer—to know it was he who had done it, he who had left the corpses of so many Jedi buried in the rubbled tomb of their onetime Temple.

But something worried at the edge of his mind. She had not fled on the speeder out of fear. He would have felt that, too.

I am going to hurt you, she’d said.

How could she hurt him?

And all at once he knew. She knew the details of his attack on the Temple, so she knew Eleena had accompanied him. She might even have seen in Malgus’s behavior what Lord Adraas had seen—his feelings for Eleena. She would hurt him the same way Adraas and Angral would try to manipulate him.

The realization sent a rush of emotion through him, a rush it took him a moment to recognize as fear. He activated his comlink and tried to raise his lover on their normal frequency.

No response.

A flutter formed in his stomach. He raised Jard.

“Jard, has Eleena returned to Valor?”

“She has not, my lord,” returned Jard. “One of her shuttles has returned, but she was not aboard.”

A fishhook of fear lodged in Malgus’s gut and pulled him to his feet.

“When is the last time she checked in?” he asked.

“She has not checked in, my lord. Is there cause for concern? Should I send a team to retrieve her?”

“No,” Malgus said. “I will find her myself.”

There could be any number of reasons for Eleena to be out of contact. She could have simply turned off her comm.