Fated Blades (Kinsmen, #3)

by Ilona Andrews

Matias fixed her with his stare. “To what do I owe the horror?”

“Your wife is having an affair with my husband,” Ramona said. For a moment they shared a silence as he came to grips with Cassida licking the inside of Gabriel Adler’s mouth. Ramona spoke first. “That brings me to my second question. Have you experienced any security or data breaches in the last few weeks? Go ahead. Check. I will wait.”

The two of them, Cassida and Gabriel, thought they could simply take everything she’d worked for. They thought she would roll over. Ramona laughed. It sounded like a promise of murder. “We’ll catch them,” Matias said, his voice cold like the space between the stars. “I give you my word.”

As humanity had expanded across the galaxy, it had done so in bursts. A single habitable planet wasn’t enough to warrant establishing an outpost unless the settlers had serious separatist tendencies and could finance their own expedition. Instead, humanity looked for a cluster of star systems with habitable planets in relative proximity to each other. They would identify an anchor world, the place of initial settlement, build the warp gates, and funnel supplies to that world, from which humanity would spread in a starburst to all other planets within reach, forming a sector. The sectors varied in size. Theirs was one of the larger ones, with Tayna, the anchor world, in the center and twenty-seven inhabited star systems situated at random distances from it. Even with warp gates, it took months to travel from one edge of the sector to another. Most planets traded with their immediate neighbors and with the anchor world, but the longer the distance, the less they knew about the other populations. Only the spacers—merchant marines, convoy guards, and migrant worker crews like asteroid miners—understood the whole picture.

The Vandals aren’t the republic’s best fighters. They’re handpicked sociopaths, unburdened by morals and trained to obey their commanding officers without any hesitation. To be considered for this unit, one has to have a certain body count.”

Being kind to people and paying attention shouldn’t be done with the expectation of repayment. I helped them because I could, and it made me happy.”