Adraas’s trachea collapsed in Malgus’s grip. There was no final cough or gag. Adraas died in silence.

Malgus rose and stood over Adraas’s body. He pulled on his gloves, adjusted his armor, his cloak, and walked out of the manse.

THE RISING SUN PEEKED over the mountains on Dantooine, and the thin clouds at the horizon line looked to have caught fire. Shadows stretched over the valley, gradually receding as the sun rose higher. The trees whispered in a breeze that bore the scent of loam, decaying fruit, and the recent rain.

Zeerid stood in the midst of the damp dirt and tall grass, under the open sky, and faced the fact that he had no idea whatsoever about what he should be doing.

Probably sowing seeds, he supposed, or grafting vines, or testing the soil or something. But it was all a guess. He glanced around as if there might be someone nearby whom he could ask for assistance, but the next nearest farm was twenty klicks to the west.

He was on his own.

“Same as always,” he said to himself with a smile.

After getting clear of Coruscant, he’d flown to Vulta, scooped up Nat and Arra, and fled deeper into the Outer Rim. There, he’d sold Razor and its cargo on the black market and, with the credits he’d earned, bought Nat her own home and bought him and Arra an old vineyard—long unused for growing—from an elderly couple.

He’d become a farmer, of sorts. Or at least a farm owner. Just as he’d told Aryn he would.

Thinking of Aryn, especially her eyes, made him smile, but the smile curled down under the weight of bad memories.

He had never seen her again after leaving Coruscant. For a time he’d tried to learn what had happened to her, but a search of the HoloNet turned up nothing. He knew, however, that Darth Malgus had lived. He presumed that meant Aryn had not, and he’d been unable to tell Arra why Daddy sometimes cried.

And he still secretly hoped the presumption was wrong, that she’d escaped somehow, remembered who she was.

He thought of her every day, her smile, her hair, but especially her eyes. The understanding he saw in them had always drawn him to her. Still did, though he was drawn only to her memory now.

He hoped she had found whatever she’d been seeking before the end.

He looked around his new estate, at the large home he and Arra rattled around in, at the various outbuildings that held equipment he did not know how to operate, at the row upon row of trellises that lined the fallow vine fields, and he felt … free.