Shades of Dark by Linnea Sinclair

to ask me to come along on his ride toward self-discovery. Because it was dangerous?
    Yes, it could be. Gabriel Ross Sullivan was not a man who frightened easily. Yet the power coursing through him had brought tears of fear and shame to his eyes. That alone made me pause: both his fear and his willingness to show me his vulnerability. He’d never done that before.
    Now he was back to the joking, flirtatious Sully-the-rogue, the handsome bastard with the seductive smile. His usual role. I needed to know more about the man who’d dried his tears in my hair. But pushing, I knew from experience, would only make that part of him hide more deeply in the shadows.
    I logged off the Narfial data and brought up the Ragkiril research Gregor had done. I reread the articles but found nothing Sully hadn’t told me, nothing Philip hadn’t warned me about. The facts about Ragkirils were tightly interwoven with the legends of soul-stealers. The facts about the Kyi version of Ragkirils were even more cryptic.
    It worried me that Sully’s hit-and-miss experimentation as he tried to understand what was happening to him might have serious consequences. I needed access to the data Philip said his family had gathered for years. I just didn’t know what lies and promises I’d have to create in order to get that.
    Which led me back to the one subject I did not want to think about, the one I’d been avoiding thinking about. Thad. And my father.
    My brother had betrayed me. Part of me still wanted to believe Philip’s information was wrong, his conversation with my father a misinterpretation. I couldn’t reconcile the man who’d offered Sully and me sanctuary on Marker with the one who’d reveal Sully’s secrets to First Barrister Tage—and by so doing, put my life at risk. Under torture, under a Ragkiril mind-probe, yes. But not voluntarily.
    Yet put my father into the picture and everything changed. It didn’t matter that Thad and I now out-ranked him. Lieutenant Commander Lars Bergren, recently retired from the Imperial Fleet, Aldan First Battle Group, exuded an air of authority that admirals envied. To describe him as dedicated and unshakable was an understatement. The men and women he’d served with had nothing but praise for him. But he could also pin you with one glance and wither you with one word.
    Thad might outrank him, but Lars was in charge. Which was why I’d reassured myself he’d never let anything happen to Thad. Lars would do anything to save his son.
    Even kill his own daughter.

Exiting through the gate for Narfial, the Boru Karn performed flawlessly.
    Less so Gabriel Sullivan, her owner of record, though Ren and I were the only ones who knew that.
    Ren noticed after a few minutes in the ready room, but I knew more than an hour before Ren did because I was stuck in the captain’s quarters while Sully paced, fidgeted, and argued with me.
    No, for the last time, he would not tell the crew, especially because Gregor was now awake and back in the pilot’s chair. If anyone was bound to react violently to the word Ragkiril, it was Meevel “Gregor” Gregoran.
    I didn’t discount that. And the reality was, Sully was more concerned with the crew’s feelings than he was with his own.
    “I can handle their hatred,” he’d said. “They shouldn’t have to handle their fear.”
    And if someone downloaded the news—assuming Tage had released the information—before we hit Narfial?
    “That’s why I have Gregor on the bridge. He’s not going to check the news vids on duty.”
    That meant I was off duty along with Ren, Verno, and Dorsie, who was sleeping. Sully sat at the table in the ready room, two chairs away from me on my left, tension all but vibrating from his body.
    The Karn received the first packet of messages within five minutes of clearing the gate exit—proximity to the gate always muddied if not blocked transmits—but it would be a good forty minutes at sublight before we intercepted a data beacon. The