Nemesis Games

“It is. It’s more than you or I could have done at his age. Filip’s smart and he’s a leader. Give him another twenty years, he could run the solar system. Maybe more.”

Naomi walked over and turned off the exercise sequence. The wide bands in Marco’s hands went slack with a barely audible hiss. “I wasn’t done,” he said.

“Tell me that isn’t why you brought me here,” she said. “Tell me that you didn’t abduct me in order to show me what a good father you’ve been and how well our boy turned out. Because you betrayed him.”

Marco’s laugh was low and warm and rolling. He started unwrapping his hands. It would have been so easy to hurt him while he did it that she was fairly certain he had a hidden way to defend himself. And if not, the impression that he might was defense enough. She wasn’t here to kill him. She was here to push him into saying something.

“Is that what you think?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I think you did it to show off. I walked away from you, and you’re such a little boy that you still can’t stand it. So when your big moment came, you had to have me here to see it happen.”

It was true, as far as it went. She did see a pleasure in him that came from having power over her. Even her weird half-status in the crew was a part of that. Locking her in a cage would have been a tacit admission she was a threat. He wanted her to see that she was powerless, to make the prison walls herself. There had been a time it would have worked. She was betting that he didn’t realize that time had passed.

And she was betting that it had passed. When he narrowed his eyes at her, shaking his head, she still felt the tug of humiliation in her throat, familiar as an old habit. So perhaps the truth was more complicated.

“I brought you home to the winning side because you are the mother of my son, and always will be. Anything beyond that is happy coincidence. That we have the chance to find some sense of closure between us —”

“Bullshit. Closure? You lost. It’s closed. You only say it wasn’t finished because you hadn’t won yet. I left. I sacrificed everything because having nothing away from you was better than having it all and being your puppet.”

He lifted his hands, palms out, in a mocking gesture of peace. It wasn’t working. Not yet.

“I hear that you would have done things differently. I don’t blame you for that. Not everyone has the strength to be a soldier. I thought you did. I thought I could count on you. And when the burden bore you down, yes, I took our son someplace I knew he’d be safe. You blame me for keeping him away from you. But you’d have done exactly the same to me, if you’d had the power.”

“I would have,” she said. “I’d have taken him with me, and you’d never have seen either of us again.”

“So how different are we?” Sweat dewed his skin. He took a towel from the rack, dabbing at his face and arms. She knew intellectually that he was beautiful, the way the iridescent wings of a carrion fly would be. She felt the weight of her disgust with herself for letting this man be what he was to her, and knew that was part of what he intended. The dark thoughts stirred in her brain stem. They didn’t matter. She was here to solve a puzzle.

He put down the towel. “Naomi —”

“It’s Holden then, isn’t it? You brought me here as… what? Insurance against him?”

“I’m not afraid of your Earther fuck buddy,” Marco said, and Naomi heard the roughness in his voice like an animal scenting a distant fire.

“I think you are,” she said. “I think you wanted him off the board before you started this, and I was supposed to lead him into the trap. Because you couldn’t imagine that I would come alone. That I wouldn’t bring a man to be strong for me.”

Marco chuckled, but it had more of an edge to it. He walked across the exercise mat, scooping up his dark robe and shrugging into it. “You’re trying to talk yourself into something, Knuckles.”

“Do you know why I’m with him?”

If Marco were wise, he wouldn’t rise to that bait. He’d walk out, leave her alone among the machines. If she’d managed to make him angry, even just a little bit angry, though…

“I assume you have a kink for powerful men,” Marco said.

“Because he is what you pretend to be.”

She saw it land. She couldn’t even say what it was that changed in him, but the Marco she’d seen since being brought here – the smooth, world-weary, self-assured leader of the greatest coup in human history – was gone, dropped like a mask. In his place was the rage-filled boy who’d almost destroyed her once. His laugh wasn’t low or warm or rolling.

“Well, just wait around, and we’ll see how much that does for him. Big Man Holden may think he’s unkillable, but everyone bleeds.”

There. That was a datapoint. It was working. It might only have been the rhetoric of the squabble, an empty threat. Or he might have just told her that his plans still involved the Rocinante.

“You can’t do anything to him,” she said.

“No?” Marco said, his teeth bared like a chimp. “Well, maybe you will.”