“Fine,” he hissed between clenched teeth. “Take your stupid file.”

Robb extracted the holo-pad, putting it into his own pocket, and then let go of his brother’s coat with a shove. He went to retrieve his lightsword and sheathed it onto his back. “Elara,” he said into his comm-link, “I’m leaving.”

“You can’t beat it,” said Erik as he left. “Whatever that thing is—whatever the Emperor is. I had to watch that monster sit on my throne, and command my kingdom, and tell everyone to praise him—and he isn’t even human!”

No, Di wasn’t human.

Then Erik said, “He’s a monster.”

Robb slowed to a stop with his hand on the front doorknob. “He isn’t.”

“You’ve never even met him—”

“He isn’t a monster,” he insisted, and in the stained glass of the front door, he watched his brother come up behind him and take something out of his pocket—silver and glinting. His knuckle rings. “I fear you are.”

Then he spun around and slammed his metal fist into Erik’s pretty face so hard he was out before he even hit the floor. Erik was right about one thing—Robb wasn’t a Valerio. He was someone else altogether, and it was high time he started acting like it.

“Sorry, swung too hard,” he told his unconscious brother, before he tied Erik’s hands and dragged him out of the house by his feet. A skysailer came up the front drive to meet him halfway.

Elara lifted her goggles. “Robb!”

He dropped his brother in the snow. “What’s wrong?”

“I just got an emergency call from the Dossier. Siege is calling in her debts. All of them. I think something happened at the shrine.”

That did not sound good.

“They want us to meet at a waystation in the ass end of nowhere— Is that your brother?” she added, giving Erik, groaning on the ground, a pointed look.

“Sadly,” he replied. He knew Siege well enough to know that if she was calling in debts from her career, then things were dire indeed—and the sooner she got the information on the holo-pad, the sooner they would know what they were fighting. “Help me get this sack of shit into the skysailer. We can take my family’s ship out.”

She helped him heave Erik into the back of the sailer. “The Caterina? You sure they’ll let us on?”

“One way to find out.”

Erik didn’t wake up until Robb and Elara almost had him on the Caterina, and then he flew into a raging spittle-infested fit about why the militia needed to listen to him. “He’s a traitor!” Erik screamed. “I am the one true Valerio!”

But by a strange connection of coincidences, the same guard who Robb had paid time and again to keep his mouth shut about Robb’s . . . escapades (the last being on Nevaeh) was now the captain of the militia, and he didn’t much care for Erik.

None of them did.

“So where to, Sir Robb?” the old guard asked.