Page 114 of Shadows of Stardust

I shut up, and she does.

She tells me things I don’t want to hear about how lonely she was, how reckless it made her. She tells me about the bad choices that led her to a male who seemed to have the answers she was looking for. Or at least the ones she thought would be enough to numb everything else. She tells me about how quickly she fell into his orbit, how she saw the red flags from the beginning but couldn’t quite find it in herself to care.

But she also tells me about the kind, handsome, emerald-scaled male whose ship malfunction brought him to the Severin port. She tells me about a whirlwind romance, about falling hard and fast and learning that the life she was leading might not be the only one out there for her.

“Xelan found out about Arrik,” Savvie says softly. “Xe and I weren’t a thing anymore at that point, but he took it as a personal insult that I would even look at another male after him.”

Her laugh is short, bitter.

“He would have killed me.”

Savvie meets my eye, then, and even if I didn’t already trust my sister implicitly, I’d see the truth of it on her face.

“We fought over the blaster. I shot him.”

The way she says it—like that’s all it was, like it was so simple and straightforward—is a knife to my heart.

And even though I’m still not sure where things between us stand, what she’s thinking, what she’s feeling, I reach over and put my arm around her.

Savvie goes stiff for a few seconds, but then she melts into me. When she speaks again, that cool matter-of-factness is gone from her voice. In its place is stark, shaking honesty that chips a few more pieces off my already shattered heart, but I’d take these truths a hundred times over if it means she still trusts me enough to give them to me.

“Xe’s crew would have killed me,” she whispers. “They wouldn’t have stopped until they got their revenge.”

“But Arrik was there?”

She sniffles and nods. “Arrik was there. And he didn’t need to take such a risk smuggling me here. But he did. He did that for me.”

Something about the idea of that makes me uneasy. The idea of some male she barely knew sweeping her away to a planet where she had nobody, knew nobody, would be under his thumb. And, like she can immediately sense that unease, Savvie laughs.

“It’s not like that. You should have seen him when we first got here. It’s like he couldn’t give me enough space.”

You should have seen him.

The reminder brings me crashing right out of Savvie’s story and into the cold, stark truth of it all.

I wasn’t there to see him. I wasn’t there to help her. I wasn’t there to keep her away from Xelan. I didn’t know how bad things were and I wasn’t there to pull her off that ledge before they got bad enough that she had to kill someone in self-defense and flee the planet.

God.

My head spins, and for a moment I’m not certain I’m going to be able to keep down the pastry I ate for breakfast.

Savvie went through all of that. Alone.

And where was I?

Off on some stupid outpost moon, stuck in a building that was trying its damnedest to come down on my head. Nearly dying while she was back home fighting her own battle.

But I’m here now, aren’t I? We can still fix this. We can figure it out.

We can leave here and start over. Together.

The thoughts are still tumbling over faster in my mind than I can fully make sense of them, faster than I can come up with any kind of plan for how we’ll make it happen, when Savvie puts an end to my short-lived dream.

“Ros,” she says—quiet, but firm, slipping out from under my arm and putting some distance between us. “You can’t be here.”

As gentle as the words are coming out of her mouth, they feel like a slap.

“It’s like,soillegal for me to be on this planet,” she continues. “If anyone ever found me here, I’d be arrested. Or worse, sent back. And you coming here, finding me, for us to be in contact at all makes that so much more likely.”

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