"He ran out of time, love," he whispered. "He got the three of them out, but he and Jeremiah were still in the limo when the blast front hit it."
Honor Alexander-Harrington had forgotten there could be that much pain in the universe. She knew it was a miracle her mother and her son had survived, and she knew she would never be able to express how unspeakably grateful she was for that incredible gift.
Yet that gift came at the price of a dark and personal agony, for it was the last gift, the last miracle, Andrew LaFollet would ever give her. And now, the last—and the most beloved—of her original Grayson armsmen was gone.
I made him Raoul's armsman to keep him safe. To keep him away from me, from the way people keep dying for me . The thought trickled through the tearing anguish. I tried. God, I tried to keep him safe .
But she'd failed. Even then, she knew it wasn't truly her fault, just as she knew that if Andrew had known exactly what was going to happen, he would have done exactly the same thing. That her armsman had died knowing precisely what he was doing and knowing he'd succeeded. That was something. In time, it might actually help her deal with this numbing sense of devastation, but not now. Not yet.
"Your mother insisted that all of them—including your father—go to White Haven, to be with Emily," Hamish's voice went on after a moment from the dark void which surrounded her. "That was her official argument, anyway. Mostly, though . . . Mostly, I think, it was an excuse to get your father away from Yawata Crossing. It wasn't as if there was anything they could have done there, Honor. Not after something like that."
"Of course not." She felt the tears flowing, and the guilt she'd felt before, the sense of failure, was a knife in her heart. "Mother was right. She usually is."
"I know," he said quietly, changing position to pull her face down against his shoulder while Nimitz and Samantha cuddled tightly against her.
"Somehow," she heard herself say, and the steel had gone out of her voice, replaced by dead, defeated flatness, "I never thought about this. Never worried about it—not really. I thought I had, but I know better now. I never really let myself think that it could have happened. That I could have let it happen."
"You didn't!" he said softly, fiercely. "There wasn't one, solitary damned thing you could have done to stop this Honor."
"But we should have. We were supposed to. It's our job , Hamish, and what use are we if we can't even do our jobs?"
Hamish Alexander-Harrington heard the grief, the pain, in that dead soprano voice, and he understood it. Better than he'd ever understood anything in his life, in that moment, he understood exactly what his wife was feeling, for he'd felt it himself. But his arms tightened around her, and he shook his head hard.
"You aren't thinking a single thing I haven't already thought," he told her. "If it was anyone's 'job,' Honor, it was the Admiralty's. So, trust me, love, there's not one single, ugly, hateful thing you can think about yourself that I haven't already thought about myself. But we're both wrong. Yes, keeping this from happening is what our lives have been about ever since we put on the uniform. But you weren't even here when it happened, and nobody saw it coming. Nobody was asleep at the switch, Honor. Nobody ignored anything. Every damned one of us did our jobs, exactly the way we were supposed to, and this time, it just wasn't enough. Somebody got past us because they came at us in a way no one could have predicted."
She stiffened in his embrace, and even without her own empathic ability, he could literally feel her effort to reject what he'd just said, to continue to punish herself. But he wouldn't let go—not with his arms, not with the fierce embrace of his heart. He held her ruthlessly, knowing she could feel what he felt, knowing she couldn't escape his love.
For a long, long moment the tension held, and then she sagged against him, and he felt the deep, almost silent sobs shuddering through her. He closed his eyes again, holding her against himself, cradling her in his arms and his love.
He never really knew, later, how long they sat there. It seemed to last forever, yet finally, she shifted slightly, pillowing her head on his shoulder, and he tugged a handkerchief from his pocket and dried her eyes.
"Better?" he asked very quietly.
"Some," she replied, although she wasn't at all certain that was actually the truth. "Some."
"I'm sorry, love," he said again, softly.
"I know." She patted the arm still around her gently. "I know."
There was another long moment of silence, and then she inhaled deeply and sat up straight.
"I'll miss them," she told her husband, and her voice remained soft, but her eyes were not. They glittered, still bright with tears, yet there was a darkness beneath that glitter, a hardness beneath those tears.
Hamish Alexander-Harrington knew his wife as only two humans who had both been adopted by a pair of mated treecats ever could. He'd seen her deal with joy and with sorrow, with happiness and with fury, with fear, and even with despair. Yet in all the years since their very first meeting at Yeltsin's Star, he suddenly realized, he had never actually met the woman the newsies called "the Salamander." It wasn't his fault, a corner of his brain told him, because he'd never been in the right place to meet her. Never at the right time. He'd never had the chance to stand by her side as she took a wounded heavy cruiser on an unflinching deathride into the broadside of the battlecruiser waiting to kill it, sailing to her own death, and her crew's, to protect a planet full of strangers while the rich beauty of Hammerwell's "Salute to Spring" spilled from her ship's com system. He hadn't stood beside her on the dew-soaked grass of the Landing City duelling grounds, with a pistol in her hand and vengeance in her heart as she faced the man who'd bought the murder of her first great love. Just as he hadn't stood on the floor of Steadholders' Hall when she faced a man with thirty times her fencing experience across the razor-edged steel of their swords, with the ghosts of Reverend Julius Hanks, the butchered children of Mueller Steading, and her own murdered steaders at her back.
But now, as he looked into the unyielding flint of his wife's beloved, almond eyes, he knew he'd met the Salamander at last. And he recognized her as only another warrior could. Yet he also knew in that moment that for all his own imposing record of victory in battle, he was not and never had been her equal. As a tactician and a strategist, yes. Even as a fleet commander. But not as the very embodiment of devastation. Not as the Salamander. Because for all the compassion and gentleness which were so much a part of her, there was something else inside Honor Alexander-Harrington, as well. Something he himself had never had. She'd told him, once, that her own temper frightened her. That she sometimes thought she could have been a monster under the wrong set of circumstances.
And now, as he realized he'd finally met the monster, his heart twisted with sympathy and love, for at last he understood what she'd been trying to tell him. Understood why she'd bound it with the chains of duty, and love, of compassion and honor, of pity, because, in a way, she'd been right. Under the wrong circumstances, she could have been the most terrifying person he had ever met.
In fact, at this moment, she was .
It was a merciless something, her "monster"—something that went far beyond military talent, or skills, or even courage. Those things, he knew without conceit, he, too, possessed in plenty. But not that deeply personal something at the core of her, as unstoppable as Juggernaut, merciless and colder than space itself, that no sane human being would ever willingly rouse. In that instant her husband knew, with an icy shiver which somehow, perversely, only made him love her even more deeply, that as he gazed into those agate-hard eyes, he looked into the gates of Hell itself. And whatever anyone else might think, he knew now that there was no fire in Hell. There was only the handmaiden of death, and ice, and purpose, and a determination which would not—could not—relent or rest.