Page 43 of Only Hard Problems

So had our conversation.

We’d exchanged barbs and insults, just as we had all the other times we’d talked to each other over the past few months, and Zane had been smug and infuriating, as usual—until he’d said what Beatrice had done to me was wrong.

He’d seemed so blastedsincerein that moment, as if his grandmother’s actions and all the secrets she’d kept had truly pained him. But even more surprising had been the way he’d looked at me, as if I were some marvelous creature that he had never encountered before.

I’d expected Zane to sneer at me, dismiss me as wholly unimportant and completely beneath his lofty notice, but I’d had his full, undivided attention, as though our familial connection had been weighing on him as heavily as it had been weighing on me.

And then he’d gone and ruined things by saying that Kyrion and I should turn ourselves in and surrender to him. Arrogant jackass.

I sliced my hand over the holoscreen. The gossipcast vanished, as did the image of the second, more vulnerable Zane that my seer magic had conjured up. I glared at the empty air a moment, then spun away from the table, slapped off the lights, and shut the workshop door behind me.

I strode down the corridor, heading toward a set of tight spiral stairs that would take me to the upper deck where Kyrion was waiting, but I couldn’t escape my troubled thoughts, and I kept replaying my conversation with Zane in my mind. His last words haunted me, especially since I couldn’t tell whether they had been a threat, a promise, or both.

See you soon, little sister, Zane’s voice whispered through my mind.

A sharp finger of unease jabbed into my heart. My long-lost big brother was going to be a problem. I just couldn’t see how much of one yet.