Dex shook his head, trying to figure out a way to fix things between them. “He chose you, Andi. It was his dying command.”

Andi slammed her mug down on the bar, sloshing some of the blue liquid onto the icy surface. “Cyprian Cortas was among the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in this galaxy who wish me dead,” she hissed at him. “I’d even be so bold to place him as the one person who wanted it most. And yet you expect me to believe that his dying act was to hand over control of his precious planet to me?”

“I hardly believed it myself when he told me,” Dex admitted. “But the system leaders are free to choose whoever they wish to be their successor. And his wish was to have you.”

He ran his knuckles over a carving on the edge of the frozen bar top. Initials, likely those of lovers who weren’t quarreling in this way. It was the kind of hopelessly romantic thing Dex and Andi would never do. Their lives had never been normal enough, and likely never would be. But he wished for it, sometimes. A chance to be together, away from the chaos of their real lives.

“Why me?” Andi wondered.

The anger was gone from her voice, replaced by disbelief. As if she’d been told a loved one had died, and didn’t want it to be true.

Dex shrugged. “The short answer? Because you were the only Arcardian-born citizen on that ship.”

Andi huffed a laugh into her mug.

“But I think it was more than that,” he said, daring to reach for her hand, now that she didn’t look as if she would gut him for it. “Yes, Cyprian may have had very dark feelings toward you. But I also think he believed you had the strength to handle the responsibility. He told me his entire story, Andi. About Valen, and Nor, and their mother. He talked about the things Klaren could do—the things that all of them can do. The compulsion was strong in Klaren, and weaker in Nor, but somehow it was too strong in Valen, just like Klaren said.”

Dex swallowed hard. “And once he saw them together in that ballroom, once he realized that Nor and Valen were planning to use their powers to rule... I think Cyprian knew that the terrors soon to come would be so great, that maybe you were the only person strong enough to give Arcardius—and apparently, now all of Mirabel—a fighting chance.”

“The Bloody Baroness,” Andi said darkly. “The most wanted space pirate in Mirabel, now General of Arcardius. Keeper of the keys to some great arsenal of nuclear weapons.”