LEGACY BETRAYED by Rachel Eastwood Read Free Book Online

too.
    “She’s probably hiding. That’s what Dyna says anyway, isn’t it?” Dax answered sharply, his own eyes beginning to glimmer with a touch of aggression. “After all, the duke’s probably looking to pin the whole coronation catastrophe on her, isn’t he?”
                  “Not all the duke’s looking to pin on her,” Liam muttered.
                  “What?”
                  “Nothing.” Liam’s eyes panned down to the notice, skimming. “I just –I just want to know where she is, and if you’d cut the shit, it’d really . . .”
     
    COMPANION REASSIGNMENT
     
                  “. . . help me out,” Liam murmured. “What is this?”
                  “Well,” Dax said. “It looks like Leg’s legal issues have made her ineligible, is my guess.” There was a pause in which Liam continued staring at the words on the page, suddenly illiterate. “You never ran that story,” Dax said. The words seemed to penetrate from a great distance, and Liam glared up, pulled back into reality.
                  “What?”
                  “The story about Leg and the earl,” Dax elaborated. He was maintaining eye contact with a stony significance. “Dyna never ran it.”
                  Liam took a breath. So Exa had told Dax. That was weirdly admirable of her. It figures. Just when I want to picture her as a villain, she does something of virtue. “I didn’t give her the pictures,” he answered, omitting mention of the past few minutes. “Didn’t want to get Exa in trouble, even if –even if she’s –not going to be my Companion anymore.” He also omitted that Exa hadn’t been his Companion for a long time now, regardless of the CCSS mandate.
                  Dax still stared, the hardness in his gaze unchanging. “She’s–” He cleared his throat, glanced around, and stepped closer, tilting his head toward Liam’s ear. “Glitch’s, at Groundtown,” he whispered. “But if I go back there, and anything has happened to her?” He stayed where he was, intruding on Liam’s personal space, but tilted his head again so he was no longer whispering in the other man’s ear, but was now boring directly into his eyes. “I will kill you.”
                  Liam opened his mouth to respond, a likely antagonistic retort, paused, and Dax patted his shoulder twice and stepped to the side. What an annoying, condescending gesture. “Later,” he called over his shoulder, advancing to the lift without a backwards glance.
     
                  Meanwhile, back in the broadcast studio, Dyna Logan rushed through her mid-afternoon report with a memorized recap of the weekend’s events, and then rushed to her personal automaton assistant: a delicate, silver-wrought rose pin which fastened her bun together. Shaking out her long, crimped tresses – a subconscious gesture of victory – Dyna ordered her automaton to direct a message to the young duke. This was not, of course, her only automaton, but it was her favorite. It was so . . . discreet.
                  Rather than being relayed to a recording, however, the duke himself answered.
                  “Yes, Miss Logan?” the unmistakable baritone inquired.
    “Kaizen, Kaizen, Kaizen,” Dyna purred. Although her voice was normally quite grating, there were times when it assumed an almost silken quality. Those were the times when something for which she’d relentlessly longed had finally fallen into her talons. “I’ve got something sitting in front of me which would be of great value to you.”
    “. . . What is it?” Kaizen replied.
                  Dyna sighed. There was such predatory satisfaction in a good interrogation. Especially one which was weighted to her advantage. “A series of pictures.” She idly scanned the frames. “Taken here at CIN-3. Of you. You, and a suddenly