Born of Shadows (5 page)

What should he say to that?

Thanks?

Yeah, no, that was stupid. For the first time in his life, words failed him.

It was so surreal. Things like this didn’t happen to people like him. Kicks in the groin. Imprisonment. Clients turning you into the authorities. Collectors shooting you dead in the street… that was what happened to third-generation smugglers.

They didn’t wake up from an execution to become a prince. It just didn’t happen.

Caillen tried to reach for the photo wallet and cursed at his bound hands. “Why am I restrained?”

The doctor came forward to free him. “Sorry, Your Highness. It was only a precaution. We didn’t want you to wake up and hurt yourself.”

Right… more likely they were afraid he’d wake up and attack them.

As soon as his arms were freed, Caillen rubbed his wrists and stared at his father. “This isn’t some weird-ass joke or prank one of my friends is pulling on me, right?”

There was no feigning the sincere offense on his father’s face or in his stance. “I would never joke about something like this.”

No, he guessed not. Still, it was a hard fact to accept. Everything he thought he knew about himself was now brought into question. It was such a strange, lost feeling. Everyone he’d ever trusted had lied to him. His parents. His sisters.

He wasn’t who and what he thought. Everything he’d been told about his family and his past was a lie…

Everything.

But for one freak event that’d happened at a point in his life he couldn’t remember, his entire childhood and past would have been completely different.
He
would have been completely different. There would have been no poverty. No hiding.

He wouldn’t have had any of his teen trauma. He wouldn’t have been there to help his sisters…

It was overwhelming to contemplate that he was now someone else.

Someone he didn’t know.

I have a father…

Caillen glanced to the doctor before he returned his gaze to his father’s. “So what does this mean exactly?”

His father smiled. “This means you’re about to have a whole new world, my boy. You’re finally going to live the life you were born to.”

Caillen wasn’t sure that was a good thing. In his experience, change came in with a furry harbinger that usually sprayed crap all over him. Seldom was change for the better.

But at least he wasn’t dead.

Yet.

One second more though, according to the doctor, and he would have been.

I’m a prince
. That reality kept circling in his head.

You thought you had enemies before? Buddy, you ain’t seen enemies yet.
This kind of money made people stupid. Most of all, it made them mean. Angry. Jealous and cruel. Everybody wanted to take rather than earn. When they couldn’t do that, they just wanted to spew venom and animosity.

Yeah, he was definitely cursed and things were going to get ugly.

Fast.

4

Two Months Later

“Sit up straight in the chair.”

What am I?

Five?

Grinding his teeth to keep from lashing out, Caillen did as instructed. A little belligerently, granted, still he did obey as he’d promised his father he would. But it was hard to sit up straight when what he really wanted to do was give the pompous ass in front of him a goblet enema. He felt like he was drowning in nine million layers of heavy fabric. Honestly, how could any aristocrat be fat if they carried this much clothing weight on their bodies all the time? How much food would you have to eat to gain weight? Forget the gym, he felt like he was bench-pressing a ton.

And it wasn’t even weight you could use to blow shit up.
That
he could understand hauling around. This? This was ridiculous. He rubbed at his neck where hives were forming from the high starched collar.

At least you still have your head.

Yeah, but that wasn’t as appealing right now as it’d been a few months ago. He glanced over to two of his best friends who watched him and the cultural advisor with a stoicism that didn’t match the amused gleam in their traitorous eyes. Little bastards were enjoying every minute of his misery.

Eat it up, assholes. My vengeance will come. And you will bleed.

But he knew the truth. He’d never hurt either of them. He’d only imagine the strangulation. They’d been through too much together for him to hold something like this against them.

Lean with dark red hair, Darling Cruel was as reserved and regal as any monarch could be which made sense since he was from one of the oldest aristocratic families. He was immaculately dressed in a black suit trimmed with white that was covered with a lightweight, flowing black dignitary robe. The son of a royal governor and a high prince himself, he was used to crap like this. Yet for all of Darling’s breeding, Caillen knew the truth of his renegade friend—a rebellious side no one would ever suspect of him. Darling’s shoulder-length hair covered one side of his face and hid a bad scar that Darling never spoke about. Caillen was one of the few who knew how he’d gotten it.

With perfect, unblemished features that would make any woman proud, Maris Sulle was much more flamboyant. His long black hair was tied back and braided with silver beads running through it. He wore a vibrant orange-and-yellow robe that trailed on the ground and pooled in a graceful mess around his red-booted feet. Obviously Maris wasn’t concerned about mobility ’cause he’d never had to run a day in
his
extravagant life. Rather he ordered other people to run for him.

Maris’s and Darling’s friendship went back to early childhood. Caillen had met Maris about ten years ago and had hated him at first because of that spoiled arrogance that bled out of every gesture he made and from every piece of expensive fabric he wore. But Maris was like Gondarion spiderweed—he clung to you and after a while you learned to appreciate the strange beauty that was his quirky sense of humor and his uniquely skewed take on the world around him. Now Caillen treasured his friendship as much as he did Darling’s.

The two of them were a vivid contrast to the stone-faced, drab-dressed cultural advisor—Bogimir—who glared at him with open disdain. The man didn’t think much of Caillen which was okay by him. He didn’t think much of Boggi either.

Bogimir cleared his throat. That sound was really starting to tread Caillen’s last nerve into hash meat. “Are you paying attention to me, Your Highness?”

Caillen let out a long breath of annoyance. “Yeah, yeah, Boggi.” It was a moral imperative that he use the nickname he knew drove Bogimir insane. “I’m with you.”

Bogimir narrowed that beady little gaze that made Caillen want to put his foot in a highly uncomfortable plae on Boggi’s body. “You mean to say, yes, I see.”

Caillen ground his teeth before he corrected his enunciation and words. “Yes, I see.”
Asshole
.

Boggi gestured to the table. “Now take a sip of your wine.”

His biceps screaming over the weight of his clothes and his gall begging him to toss the contents into Boggi’s contemptuous face, Caillen reached for the cup and picked it up.

Instantly, Boggi started that agitated dance that would only come in handy if walking barefoot on coals or trying to stomp out a nest of fire snakes. “No, no, no. The correct way to hold your goblet is like this.” He snatched it from Caillen’s hand to demonstrate the proper use.

Caillen rolled his eyes. Damn pathetic when even drinking something was a production. What the hell was wrong with these people? Did it really make a difference how he picked up a krikkin cup and drank out of it? Was that really all they had to worry about in their worthless, overprivileged, overindulged lives?

Boggi set the cup down and glared at him. “Try again.”

Caillen curled his lip. “Ah screw this shit.” Yanking his blaster out from under his robes, he shot the cup. He laughed as it spun up from the table so that he could shoot it again three more times. On the last round, it shattered and rained fragments all over the floor before the bowl landed upside down at Boggi’s feet.

Now
that
was entertaining.

But Boggi didn’t think so. He huffed and puffed, then scurried for the door no doubt to tell on him like one of his sisters had done when they were kids.

Whatever. With three older sisters, Caillen was used to being bitched at. And honestly, his father was an amateur compared to his sisters.

Darling didn’t make a sound until they were alone with Maris. Once the room was clear, he and Maris burst out laughing. “You are evil to your worthless rotten core.”

“Abso-krikkin-lutely.” Caillen blew across the hot tip of his blaster before he bent over and divested himself of the stifling clothes by twisting them off his body to land with a thump on the floor. Bare except for his black pants and boots, he holstered his weapon, then met Darling’s amused expression. “How are you people sane? Really? I grieve exponentially for the childhood you must have had.
Don’t touch this. Don’t do that. Hold the cup like this,”
he said in a high-pitched, mocking tone as he crooked his hand into a claw. Then he dropped his voice to its usual baritone. “Never thought I’d be grateful for poverty. But you know what? I pity the rich. Y’all don’t know how to live.”

Darling smiled. “There’s a reason I hang out with riffraff like you.”

Maris shook his head at both of them. “Your father’s going to have conniptions over this.”

Leave it to Maris to use a girl word like conniptions.

“Maris is right, Cai. You only have two days to master this before your debut into society. God help us all and especially you.” Darling pulled his lightweight robe off and handed it to him. “Trust me, you can’t be shooting defenseless goblets at the dinner table in front of emperors and governors. You could cause an interstellar incident.”

Caillen snorted. “Didn’t realize goblets were a protected class of species. Fine. Can I shoot tableware or is it protected too?”

Darling laughed again, but didn’t respond to his sarcasm.

Caillen shrugged the robe on so that Boggi wouldn’t call him a savage… again. “This”—he gestured to the ornate palace room that was bigger than most of his former apartment building—“isn’t my style. I don’t belong here and we all know it.” He belonged on his ship, running through blockades and giving cardiac arrests to authorities. Most of all, he belonged in the bed of a woman who was more into keeping rhythm with him than not messing up her hair.

He wanted to leave this place behind and go home so badly he could taste it.

But it wasn’t that simple. He actually liked his newfound father.

And worst of all, he’d made a promise to the man that he’d try this for a year before he made up his mind about leaving.

Why did I pick a krikkin year?

Much like that thirty minutes in his cell, it hadn’t seemed all that long at the time. Now it stretched out into infinity and he hated it. He barely saw his father and when he did all they talked about was how unacceptable his behavior was.

Suck it up, Cai. You signed on for the mission.
And he would see it through.

Even if it killed him.

“I told you, Sire. He’s an animal that doesn’t belong here. I realize he’s your son, but honestly, you need to send him back to the gutter that created him.”

Evzen shook his head at Bogimir’s condemnation as he watched in front of the monitor bank in his office. Caillen laughed with his friends while he stood with his hand on the grip of his blaster as if ready to defend at a hair’s notice. It was a cocky stance that belonged to a rogue outlaw. Not a prince.

But a prince he was…

And it was
his
job to make his son realize that destiny.

“He’s not an animal, Advisor. And you would do well to remember that he is a prince of this empire and as such deserving of a deferent tone when you refer to him.”

While Bogimir blanched from overstepping his position, Evzen glanced at the monitor where Caillen was still grinning with proud satisfaction over the destruction he’d wrought. He, too, was amused by his son’s aim. Rude but impressive though it was. “Granted he’s a little rough around the edges—”