Raw unmitigated fury ignited inside Bastien. Before he could catch himself or think better of it, he slammed the pack down and started for the Trisani, only to have the b.a.s.t.a.r.d throw him against the wall again with his powers.

"Put him down, Thrix!"

Aghast, Thrix glared at the man Bastien was even more convinced was his cousin Jullien. "You would really spare a snake this treacherous?"

"I didn't do it!" Bastien roared, sick of being accused of something so grisly it gave him nightmares every time he closed his eyes.

Thrix scoffed. "That's what they all say."

Jullien exchanged a glance with the woman, who was remaining oddly stoic and silent through all of this chaos. "I believe him. They never had any real evidence against him, other than the word of his own uncle, who now sits on the throne he inherited after he testified against Bastien. And Bastien's ex-wife, who inherited everything they took from him."

Thrix laughed bitterly. "Oh, okay, 'cause the younger son never murders the older one for a throne."

The expression on the Andarion's face would have made a sane man shrink back in unholy terror.

Obviously Thrix wasn't sane.

Nor did he value his life or b.a.l.l.s.

Jullien curled his lip. "Yeah, and sometimes the second son just makes a ready-made patsy for others to pin their own crimes on. Because everyone but that second son is smart enough to figure out that when the entire family dies, he's going to be blamed for it. Funny, he's creative and ambitious enough to remove the direct obstacles to his succession, yet doesn't ever consider that in the obvious chain of suspicion, he's suspect number one and that either jail or death is a much more permanent hurdle against his ruling. Yeah, right.... That thought never occurs to him, until it's too late. Now, put him down."

Oh yeah, that overly defensive explosion about being a second-born royal son had to be from Jullien. Like Bastien, Jullien had been equally screwed over by his family, because they'd both been misjudged by everyone around them.

Bastien hit the ground with a solid thud that was even more painful than the one before it. Son of a ... he was going to feel this for the next few days.

"Really?" Jullien said to Thrix in the same tone an irate parent would use with a petulant toddler.

Thrix smirked. "You didn't specify 'gentle' as a condition of his release."

Sighing, Jullien growled in the back of his throat while Bastien pushed himself to his feet to confront them. With an agitated grimace, he started back for the stairs. "Aksel's office was on the second floor. What we need, if it's still intact, should be up there." He led them away from Bastien.

Yeah, that's definitely my boy.

And there was one way he knew he could prove that Andarion's real ident.i.ty.

As they left the room, Bastien called out to him. "Paktu, mi kyzi."

"Estra, mi pleti." No sooner had those words been spoken than the Andarion froze as if silently cursing himself for the automatic response that meant, Anytime, my blood.

It was something Jullien had taught him when they were kids and Bastien had been trying to make Jullien feel welcomed and wanted in a palace and family that had made it abundantly clear they all resented his foreign presence there.

Holding the pack that Jullien had given him to his chest, Bastien stayed back from the group as his cousin turned slowly around to face him.

His breathing ragged, Bastien swallowed hard. "Tell me I'm wrong. But it's you, Julie, isn't it?"

He watched an impressive debate play across his cousin's face. Obviously, Jullien was desperate to deny it with everything he had.

Yet after a long pause, he slowly nodded. "Yeah."

Unable to believe that something good had finally happened to either of them, Bastien stared at him as if he were a ghost. Then he laughed and reached out to pull him in for a hug. "d.a.m.n, if you don't look good, cousin! Running looks much better on you than it does on me. You wear banishment well."

"You wouldn't have said that two years ago. Trust me."

Clapping him on the back, Bastien released him. "Thanks for not cringing when I touched you. Believe me, I know I'm disgusting and it's more than I deserve."

"It's all good, m'drey."

Bastien knew better. "No, it's not. And for what it's worth, which isn't much, I tried to get my father to harbor you after you were cast out. It sickened me how they did you. I'm really sorry."

Jullien gestured at him. "I'm sorry for this. What happened to you after I was exiled?"

That was a long story he didn't want to even begin to relive. So he shortened it to the pertinent facts only. "League. I'm a Ravin. Been running since Barnabas murdered my family and stole our throne."

Jullien cringed in sympathetic pain. "I figured you were dead by now."

"Same here. Thank the G.o.ds for my Gyron Force training." He narrowed his gaze on the new lean and trim Jullien, who looked like he could take the Iron Hammer in a Ring match, instead of his old foppish cousin who'd relied heavily on his servants for every task. Which probably had included wiping his nose and chin.

This was definitely an improved version. "So how the h.e.l.l have you survived?"

To become a Tavali officer, no less. That had to be one h.e.l.l of a story there.

Jullien smirked. "Thank the G.o.ds for Gyron Force training. Had your uncle and father not been such b.a.s.t.a.r.ds those times I visited, I wouldn't have lasted a week on my own."

Bastien snorted. "Ain't it a b.i.t.c.h? Barnabas had no idea he was doing us a favor. One I pray I get to return to him by planting my Gyron axe in the center of his skull."

"Gealrewe!" Jullien clapped him on the back as he finally smiled. "Well, since you know who I am, you want me to drop you somewhere? Get you off this rock?"

More than Jullien could imagine. But that was only a pipe dream. Sadly, this was where he was safest.

He let out a long, tired sigh. "Yes-but no. Not unless you know how to pull a League chip out of me."

"No." Jullien glanced at his friends.

"Sorry," the woman said. "Not a clue."

Thrix shook his head. "Beyond my abilities. I could try to do it with my powers, but it's as likely to explode the chip, which could cause internal damage, and depending on where it's located, that could paralyze or kill him."

Eyes wide at the mere prospect that shriveled his gut, Bastien held his hands up and backed away. "Rather not chance death. My life sucks enough without a maiming or fatality."

Thrix nodded. "Figured you'd feel that way."

Which made him wonder something about the Trisani ... "Were you really going to kill me?"

"Had you not been his cousin? Yeah. Still might. If you give me any reason to." Thrix headed for the stairs with the woman.

"Duly noted." Bastien opened the pack and ripped into one of the meals as he followed after them. "So what brings you here. Really?"

Jullien glanced at him over his shoulder. "Looking for the files Bredeh ran on my family back when he was trying to kill Nyk. I'm hoping I can find something to lead me to my grandmother and the rest of my cousins who've sided with her."

Interesting ... Nyk, or Nykyrian, was Jullien's twin brother, who was supposed to be dead. From this conversation, Bastien would presume that those old rumors had been right and Grandma must have been the one to put a hit out on Nykyrian all those years ago. Somehow the boy had survived. Made sense, actually. The Andarion queen had killed off most of her family. But why she'd have it in for her own grandkid, he could only imagine.

Then again, she was an Andarion queen. That tended to go with the crown.

"To what end?" he asked Jullien.

"Theirs, I hope."

Bastien chewed, then swallowed the nasty dehydrated bar as he considered that unexpected declaration. "I thought you and Grandma were always tight?"

Jullien froze and gave him a bone-chilling glare that caused him to take two steps back. Obviously, he'd been wrong about that and had struck one h.e.l.l of a nerve.

"Sorry," Bastien said quickly. "That's what your father always said whenever he came around. He thought it showed an utter lack of judgment on your part."

"What in the Nine Worlds could ever make him think that? I never could stand the old b.i.t.c.h."

Bastien shrugged nonchalantly. "No idea. But he was fully convinced of it."

Jullien snorted. "Anyway, I love my grandmother as much as you do your uncle, for about the same reasons. Had my father ever bothered to have a conversation with me, he'd have known that. And if I don't stop her, she will find some way to kill my mother and brother, and retake her throne. I didn't wipe out an entire portion of my family to put my mother in power to watch that happen."

Bastien scowled at a version of this story he'd never heard before. "No. Wait ... what?"

"You heard me."

He'd heard him, but that wasn't what he'd been told about the coup on Andaria that had cost Jullien his inheritance. "WAR and your aunt put your mother in power." WAR had been a rebel sect who'd been working actively against Jullien's insane grandmother who'd been a complete tyrant no one had wanted to deal with.

"Yes," Jullien said slowly, "with the information I gave them over the years. And particularly at the end. Trust me. No one else could have brought down Eriadne. It's why I'm the only one she put a hit on."

Bastien's jaw went slack at the injustice. And at a fact he hadn't known. Jullien had a League warrant out on him? d.a.m.n, that was harsh. Especially if half of what he said was true. And he had no reason to doubt it. "Do they know that?"

"They never bothered to ask. But one would think, with their brilliant intellects, they'd have discerned it by now. Again, doesn't take much to figure it out, since I'm the only one from the coup my grandmother has come after with a vengeance. Everyone else was spared her wrath. Kind of makes you wonder why, huh?"

Indeed. 'Cause Eriadne wasn't known for her mercy or forgiveness. That alone told him that Jullien wasn't lying. "d.a.m.n, brother. You got screwed."

"Don't we all?"

Bastien nodded in total agreement. "So why you want to help them?"

Jullien shrugged nonchalantly. "Cairie's still my mother. Nyk's still my brother. My grandmother's done them enough harm in their lives. I'm not about to let that b.i.t.c.h do any more. Be d.a.m.ned if I'm going to let her win, after everything else she's done. I'm a b.a.s.t.a.r.d that way."

Bastien grinned at something that could easily define them both. "And here all this time, I thought you were nothing but a vindictive a.s.shole."

"Oh, you were not wrong about that. I am a vindictive a.s.shole. This is all about payback to the wh.o.r.e. Just the wh.o.r.e, in this case, isn't my mother."

Ouch ... As they entered the room where he kept the electronics, Bastien sucked his breath in sharply at an insult he'd have never leveled at his own mother, and one he'd have killed anyone else for making against her. "That's harsh."

"I am the callous b.a.s.t.a.r.d they raised me to be." Jullien scowled at Aksel's system. "It's b.o.o.by-trapped?"

Bastien stepped around him to enter his pa.s.sword so that Jullien could use it. "Yeah ... sorry about that. First thing when I found this place and moved in was secure everything so that if one of the League b.a.s.t.a.r.ds happened upon it, they couldn't use anything to figure out if it belonged to me or not." He opened the files Jullien was looking for to make it easier for him. "There you go."

Bastien drifted back so that he could eat while Jullien and his crew went through the data in search of something they could use.

And as he watched Jullien searching through Aksel Bredeh's database with an expertise he'd never realized his cousin possessed, he was impressed. This was not the useless piece-of-s.h.i.t prince his Triosan uncle had railed against. Bastien couldn't count the hours he'd listened to his father and Uncle Aros as they discussed what they needed to do to block Jullien's inheritance.

Had Jullien wanted to, he could have seized the Andarion throne and then taken his father's empire in the blink of an eye. h.e.l.l, with the turmoil that rapidly followed on Kirovar, Jullien could have even made a play for theirs, too. Since Bastien's mother was the younger sister of Jullien's father, Jullien had as much blood right to it as Barnabas did.

More so, really.

But that wasn't the cousin Bastien remembered from his childhood. While they hadn't been close, the Jullien he recalled had always tried to stay low and in the shadows. Off everyone's radar. True to Aros's words, his studious and portly Andarion cousin had been sullen and quiet. Extremely reserved, and at times rude. Bastien had a.s.sumed it came mostly from the language barrier and Jullien's frustration with their strange "foreign" customs, which were seldom explained to him until after he'd unknowingly violated them and he was mortified and ridiculed when his father or another relative made a grand show of publicly correcting him for it.

It was why Bastien had attempted to learn Andarion. That had given him a whole new appreciation for Jullien's intellect. G.o.d knew, Andarion was one screwed-up language. Hard to p.r.o.nounce and harder still to comprehend if you weren't born to it.

Their grandfather had been even more critical and cold toward the boy. Mostly because he couldn't stand the Andarions, and he'd been infuriated that his grandson and future heir was one of their dreaded breed. Furious at Aros, he'd taken his rage out on Jullien. Every time Jullien came to visit, Quinlan had gone to war on both Aros and Jullien, making both their lives h.e.l.l until Jullien was returned to Andaria.

Now Bastien shook his head in sympathy as he watched his cousin searching through files.

Yeah, Julie knew an entirely different Triosan grandfather than the doting old man who'd bounced Bastien and his siblings on his knee. And that made him saddest of all. As with his uncle, Bastien had a hard time reconciling how his grandfather could be so kind to him and so hard on Jullien, who'd never deserved such harsh treatment. It'd really screwed with him as a kid to see those different sides of his family.

Made him extremely suspicious of people in general.

Sadly, not suspicious enough. If he'd been a bit more, he might have seen Barnabas's treachery coming before it was too late. But in all the attacks that had come right before his uncle's coup, he'd never once suspected Barnabas.

Or Jackson.

That level of treachery and maliciousness had been beyond his experience or comprehension.

Jullien scooted the chair back from the desk for Thrix to lean in. "This is it. But it's not really helpful. Venik has a secured base that's unknown to The Tavali outside of his Nation. He had it built for my cousin as a precaution should something happen to him, so that Malys wouldn't be able to kill Nyran or Parisa in a jealous rage. I will lay odds that's where my grandmother is."

Thrix studied the schematic. "That's so deeply in their territory ... and Phrixian. We go near that, they'll know."

Jullien raked a frustrated hand through his hair. "We've got to do something. I can't let them kill my family. She's not going to stop trying for my mother's throat."

The woman with him rubbed his shoulder. "At least your immediate family is safe from them."

"That's not good enough."

"You know..." Bastien moved forward to access another database of old smuggler routes he'd once used. "There are some ancient trading wormholes that aren't in use anymore in that sector. They don't really appear on most maps." He showed it to Jullien. "I stumbled across this one back when I went through a teenage phase we won't talk about."

Jullien snorted. "I remember that phase."

"We're not talking about it."'Cause basically, he was lucky he hadn't gone to prison for some of the stunts he'd pulled. It was, however, how he ended up in the military against his mother's protests. His father had insisted on it to keep him out of trouble.

And out of prison.

Bastien pointed to one of the routes that paralleled the station's...o...b..t. "That would drop you in, clear of their surveillance."

Jullien nodded as he studied the map. "Mind if I take a copy?"

"It's all yours."