Page 93 of Beautiful Prey

Once he’s gone, I finally do what I’ve been putting off for days.

Dad’s messages are waiting.

Eleven of them.

After the first barrage demanding to know where I was, why I wasn’t answering, and whether I understood that my fiancé was already waiting on Tempest, he tried something different.

Dad: You are old enough to know what you are for. Start behaving like the heir you were raised to be.

By the time I ignored that one too, the Veyra delegation had left Tempest. The Imperial had sat at our table for two hours before thanking Dad for his time and taking his family home.

A few messages later, Dad stopped bothering with sentences.

Dad: Sentimental. Undisciplined. A disappointment I had thought corrected.

I stare at the last one.

Dad: You have twenty-four hours.

The words hit somewhere older than thought as phantom heat spreads across my back, the ghost of the strap from the years before he decided I was old enough for the cane. The scars are old. My skin remembers anyway.

Corrected.

He always liked that word. Everything about me could apparently be corrected if enough force was applied. I spent most of my childhood paying for something I was never old enough to owe.

Maybe that’s why Jade’s anger yesterday has stayed with me. He knows what it means to build an entire life around a debt. So do I.

Mine was just never written on paper.

It takes me a moment to realize what’s missing. My back doesn’t hurt. I roll my shoulders, waiting for the familiar pull beneath the muscles, the place I usually catalog without thinking. Nothing. No fresh bruises. No deep ache, no careful inventory of what hurts today.

I’ve been away from Dad long enough for my body to stop hurting, and I didn’t even notice. No one has corrected me since the night before the Hunt.

I set the slate face down. For years, I thought that was simply what it felt like to be his son. Pain somewhere. Waiting for the next correction. I don’t know what to do with the fact that it can stop.

The room suddenly feels too still.

Itake the car myself and drive to Jade’s neighborhood.

People start watching before I’ve even reached the eastern block. Conversations pause as I pass. A woman at a water station pulls her child closer, and two miners step off the road long before I reach them. The farther I drive, the narrower the streets grow and the more people watch. This is the part of the planet I own on paper but have never actually seen.

I look now.

Water queues. Children playing in the dirt. A clinic with a hand-lettered sign listing everything it’s run out of. Dust has worked its way into every crack beneath the relentless heat.

Yesterday, Jade showed me a model of this planet, covered in rivers and orchards. Looking at it now, it’s hard to believe Calder was ever green.

My slate lights up on the dash. It’s Dad.

Fucking hell.

I answer as I pull up outside Jade’s building. “What?”

“If I have to call you this many times, Asher, it is because you have apparently forgotten that other people exist.”

“If I don’t answer my slate, it’s usually because I’m busy.”

“You have a wedding here.”