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  “Why do you care if I never see you again?” he demanded. “You heard what the Widow made me admit to. And it had the fuckin’ effect she wanted too—I saw your eyes when I said what I’d done. You didn’t want anything else to do with me and I don’t blame you!”

  “Stop it!” I shouted. “Just stop.”

  Okay, this was getting us nowhere. Time to take it down a notch. I took a deep breath and raked a hand through my hair.

  “Of course I was shocked when you…said what you said,” I told him, trying to keep my voice even and calm. “And I don’t feel like you can blame me for that—anyone would feel at least some concern after hearing that. But—” I held up a hand to keep him from talking before I was done. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want anything to do with you. Talk to me, Grav.” I let my voice drop to the soft, coaxing tone I used with my students back home. “Tell me what happened—make me understand. Please.”

  “You want to understand? Fine.”

  He got up from his chair abruptly and started pacing. There wasn’t much room for it in the control area—especially not for someone as big as him. He made me think of a tiger I’d seen once in a circus, pacing in a too-small cage.

  “I was young and stupid—hot-headed,” he said, looking at the floor as he paced. “Well, most Braxian males are. I was living on Vorn Five with my parents—my father was Vornish and my mother was Braxian but I looked a hell of a lot more like her than him, which my father didn’t like very fuckin’ much. He married her for love while he was out traveling the galaxy but they never were able to form a proper bond—it’s difficult, sometimes, between two different races of the Twelve Peoples.”

  “And a bond is really that important?” I asked quietly.

  Grav nodded. “Hell yeah, it is. With a bond you feel connected to your mate—you can sense their emotions. Some couples even catch each other’s thoughts or feel each other’s physical sensations. Or so I’m told.” He sighed. “Not that I’ll ever get to experience it. But anyway…without a bond, you feel nothing. Disconnected. You don’t know what’s going on with your mate and they don’t know what’s going on with you. It’s not good.”

  I thought of my marriage with Gerald. Disconnected was a mild word for the way our relationship had twisted itself into such a tangled knot of misery. Would we have gotten along better—would he have stopped before he hit me—if we had been able to form the all-important “bond” Grav kept talking about?

  Somehow I doubted it.

  Gerald was a bad person—I could see that now that I had some distance from him. He was selfish and controlling and jealous. All the things Grav wasn’t. And yet Grav was a murderer—why?

  “Tell me more,” I said softly, hoping to get an answer to my question. “What happened?”

  He sighed and ran a hand through his hair.

  “He beat her,” he said bluntly. “My father beat my mother and my mother, well…” He sighed again. “She was everything to me. Everything.”

  “I think all boys idolize their mothers to a certain extent,” I said quietly.

  “She was the only other Braxian there—the only one who looked like me. I had friends—other half-breeds mainly. But my mother was the only one who was always there for me.”

  “Did your father always hit her?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I never thought so but you realize things as an adult you don’t see as a child. The way she was always “running into doors” and getting black eyes or bruises on her cheeks. The way she wore long sleeves even when it was hot.” He made a face. “And let me tell you, Vornish summers are Hell. The time she “fell down the stairs” and broke her leg. And usually after she turned up with a bruise or a break, my father would come in the next day with flowers or some kind of treat. He would beg her forgiveness—although I never knew for what until I got older.”

  “So how old were you when…when it happened?” I asked softly.

  His face went hard. “You mean when I killed him? About sixteen cycles old, I guess. Old enough to be judged as an adult by the Council of Justice, anyway.”

  “So…you finally found out what…what he was doing?” I asked. “You saw it?”

  “I saw it, all right,” Grav growled. “I saw him in the middle of beating her—the way your mate was beating you.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how I kept from tearing that bastard apart—the way I did my father.”

  “So you really did…tear him apart, I mean?” My voice sounded faint and breathless but somehow I couldn’t seem to make it more normal.

  “I did,” Grav said somberly. “We had a summer residence—one that was meant to let in the light but withstand the vicious storms they have on Vorn Five sometimes. It was mostly made of chiva-glass, supposedly strong as iron but clear enough to see through.”

  “So…you lived in a glass house?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Vorns like a lot of sunlight, and we let down the shades at night for privacy. The shades were already down that evening when I came home from a friend’s house—I remember the blue and purple shadows on the vr’nfi shrubs and the way the air smelled like ussl blossoms.”

  His white-on-black eyes had gone far away and I realized he wasn’t just telling me about the night in question—he was actually reliving it. I wondered if I should stop him—it had to be traumatic after all. But I had a feeling he needed to tell me this. And to be perfectly honest, I needed to hear—needed to understand.

  “And then?” My voice was barely a whisper—afraid of interrupting the trance of memory he had fallen into.

  “I walked up and saw shapes moving behind the glass,” he murmured. “They were jerking around—I remember wondering what in the galaxy was going on. I went a little closer and looked through the glass and then I saw him—saw what he was doing to her.”

  He paused for a long time and I waited…just waited quietly until he continued.

  “I saw him hitting her—not just hitting, fucking pulverizing her,” he said at last, his voice hoarse with emotion. “I don’t know what set him off or why he wouldn’t stop. All I knew was what I saw—my mother, the female I cared for most in the world—crouched in a corner sobbing and trying to protect her face while my father rained down blows on her, doing his best to kill her as far as I could see. He…” Grav took a deep breath. “He’d already broken her nose and one of her arms was dangling by her side—I could tell that was broken too. She was crying—begging for him to stop. But he wouldn’t.” His face grew grim. “So I fucking made him.”

  I spoke one word. “How?”

  Grav’s face was like stone.

  “I reached down, found a good sized rock on the ground. Then I broke through the glass and dragged him off her.”

  “You broke through the glass?” I asked. “Why not just go in through the door?”

  “You don’t understand.” He looked at me briefly, the spell suspended. “My Braxian side has always been dominant and Braxian males have berserker tendencies.”

  “You’re right—I don’t understand.” I shook my head. “What does that mean?”

  “Means we have a point of no return. In violence and in love—there’s a certain point we reach where we can’t stop, no matter what the consequences,” he growled. “I’ve learned to control it a Hell of a lot better now—or that fuckin’ mate of yours would be dead. But back then I was just a kid. Not that it’s any excuse for what I did.”

  “What did you do?” I said, feeling like he needed to get it all out.

  “I ripped him apart,” Grav said bluntly. “Fists, teeth, horns—I used everything I had to make sure he never got up again.” His face grew grim. “Fucker never knew what hit him.”

  “But Grav…” I put a hand on his arm. “That’s completely understandable. What you went through—what you saw—anyone might react that way.”

  “That’s not how the Council saw it—or how anyone on Vorn Five would see it,” he said. “They saw it as