Lindsay Cummings - Nexus

His tone was teasing, but Andi could see the underlying sadness and worry in his eyes. She tried to keep her voice light as she asked, “And would you have actually listened?”

Dex ducked his head, but not quickly enough to mask his pained expression. “Probably not. You know I’ve never been very good at that.”

A pang of remorse filled her chest, adding to the gradually worsening ache from her wound. “Me neither,” Andi admitted.

He looked up at her incredulously, hope filling his face. Andi tried to smile at him, but it turned into a grimace as a stabbing pain coursed through her. She sucked in a breath through her teeth as Lon stood and hurried to her side.

“You both need to rest,” he said sternly, steering her back toward the bed she’d woken up in. “And you likely need some new stitches. But I think you might try to stab us with something worse than a dose of soduum if you don’t get some answers soon.”

“You’re not wrong,” Andi replied weakly, easing herself onto the mattress with Lon’s help. Dex clambered to his feet and made his way to her bedside while Lon peeled away the blood-soaked bandage on her chest. Andi glanced down and hissed at the sight of the angry-looking gash.

“Another scar to add to my collection, courtesy of that bastard Valen Cortas,” she said darkly.

“That description of him is truer than you might imagine,” Dex said, settling into a chair next to Andi’s bed as Lon hurried to fetch the supplies he needed to tend her wound. “Considering he’s not the son of Merella and Cyprian Cortas.”

Andi stared at him, certain she’d misunderstood. “Come again?”

“Well, Cyprian is —or rather, was—his father,” Dex clarified. “But his mother...his mother was Klaren Solis.”

Andi’s jaw dropped. “What?” she yelped. “But...that means...”

Dex nodded. “That he’s Queen Nor’s half brother, yes.”

Before she could fully process the horror of that thought, Lon returned with a needle, some surgical thread and bandages. He coaxed Andi back onto the pillows and began repairing the damage she’d done to her wound as Dex filled in the rest of the story, telling her what the general had revealed during his dying moments.

How Klaren had somehow bewitched him during the years she’d lived on the Cortas estate as his prisoner. How she’d become pregnant with his child—a son he’d always feared would someday inherit his mother’s strange abilities. A son he could never trust, could never name as his heir.

A son who was half–Xen Pterran—or perhaps something else entirely.

“So Valen and Nor have some kind of compulsion ability?” Andi asked as Lon finished smoothing the new bandage into place.

“Judging from what happened during the Ucatoria Ball, I’d say definitely,” Dex said, his expression darkening. “All those people who were shot... I thought they were dead. But they weren’t bleeding. The room should have been full of blood, but there was hardly a drop. And then...” He shuddered, as if he were reliving the memory in his mind. “They started to rise. And when Valen told them to bow to their queen, they just...did. Without question.”

“The girls, too?” Andi whispered.

Dex nodded jerkily, and Andi looked away, her eyes welling. She breathed in deep, once, twice, holding back the tears that threatened to fall.

Tears wouldn’t save her crew. Tears were a weakness she couldn’t afford.

“We have to go back,” she said. “We have to free them.”

“It’s not that simple,” Lon interjected, shaking his head. “We have no idea how Nor and Valen are controlling them. How they’re controlling everyone . We can’t just go flying back to Arcardius and hope for the best. We need more information. We need a plan.”

“They want to be there, Andi,” Dex added, taking one of her hands in his. “Or at least they think they do. They’ll likely fight us if we try to take them away from Nor.”

She didn’t want to believe their stories of that night. But their faces were haunted, as if, even though they wished it weren’t true, they could not escape the reality of it.

The thought of leaving the girls in Nor’s clutches broke her heart. Valen and the Xen Pterran queen could be torturing them right now, or forcing them to do the most horrific things. But Dex and Lon were right—they’d never be able to rescue her crew if they got themselves killed in the process.

Andi squeezed Dex’s hand and nodded decisively. “So we find a way to free their minds and come up with a plan to get them out.”

“And then?” Lon asked.

Andi allowed an icy smile to spread across her face. “And then the Bloody Baroness will go hunting.”

VALEN —THREE WEEKS LATER

Valen’s fingers twitched as he paced the floating garden that had once been the favorite haunt of his younger sister, Kalee.

Half sister , he reminded himself. Now that he was back on Arcardius, Valen found it all too easy to get lost in the memories of his past. A past in which Kalee had been the only bright spot; the only person he’d truly cared about. Merella, the woman he’d once believed to be his mother, had always been distant with him, never quite embracing him with the same warmth she’d given Kalee in abundance. And his father...

Well, now he knew the truth. Now he knew why Merella had never loved him, and why his father had always hated him.

The air was crisp today, a reminder that the cold season was approaching. With the first frost, the verdant plants and jewellike flowers of this garden would turn a frothy blue, a sign of hibernation. They would spend the five months of the cold season frozen between life and death—held in limbo, just like Valen had felt for his entire existence.

Until Nor.

The only reason Valen stayed on Averia was because he loved his other half sister. The floating mountain that was home to the Cortas estate had always felt like a prison to him, and even now, with the Cortas family gone, his memories of them continued to hold him captive. But Nor had rescued him from his false life. She had saved him by giving him a name.

Not Cortas, but Solis.

He owed her everything, for the way she’d allowed him to see the truth of who he really was: a man with compulsion in his blood, with a rightful claim to a life that was so much richer than the one he’d always known, but never truly felt part of. And even though he held control of the minds across Mirabel... Nor was his true queen.

With every moment that passed, with every new soldier that set out across Mirabel to spread the Zenith virus, more minds were added to Valen’s nexus of connections. At first, he’d felt the exact moment when each silver bullet hit its target. The bullets contained a serum that Nor’s two-headed scientist, Aclisia, had perfected back on Xen Ptera. She’d somehow replicated strands of Valen’s DNA and used them to create a virus that forever linked the minds of its victims to his own, leaving them vulnerable to his compulsions.

The noise had been too much to bear at first.

The first few connections during Valen’s training on Xen Ptera had nearly overcome him. Nor had supplied traitors and criminals for him to practice on, and he’d often lost himself to their dark thoughts in those early days. Darai, the ancient adviser who’d served Nor all her life, had assisted with Valen’s training in the beginning, but Valen hadn’t been able to tolerate his condescending nature for long. Nor had taken over then, and eventually, Valen had learned how to control his power.

Over time, he discovered a way to quiet the minds, to lock them away in their very own realm, so that when a new mind was added, it was simply background noise. He’d strengthened the mental boundaries around that realm, building walls around those other minds, until they were contained in an impenetrable fortress that rivaled the obsidinite prison he’d once been trapped in on Lunamere.