Chapter 88: Catching Up

  Chloe didn't ever want to let her mom go, and Ellie seemed more than willing to reciprocate. They clung to each other for as long as they possibly could without making the small crowd around them wait – and then a little longer.

  “Chloe,” Ellie whispered, kissing her hair. “It's really you. You're all right!”

  Chloe nodded. “I thought... when the arcology exploded, when I heard you were there, Mom, and Stephan never said if he knew where you were, even when he knew Dad was captured...”

  “Then Stephan lied,” Ellie said. Behind her, Milissa looked away. “I was on the Reformer's bridge when it caught up to you at the battlecruiser.”

  “So close!” Chloe somehow managed to hug her mom even tighter. How many times had they been just out of reach? “But how were you on the bridge?”

  “It's a long story,” Ellie said. “One of several. We have a lot of catching up to do.”

  “Principle, Mom,” Chloe whispered. “We do. There's so much.”

  Ellie nodded.

  “I...” Chloe buried her face in her mom's shoulder. She started to cry, felt embarrassed over it, and shoved the embarrassment aside. Principle! If this wasn't a time for happy tears, she'd never known one. “I missed you so much.”

  “I missed you, too, baby. Your Dad and I have been so worried.”

  “Is Dad okay? Are they treating him right?”

  “They have him locked up with Otto Algreil,” Ellie said.

  Rudy whistled. “That's just cruel and unusual.”

  Chloe and Ellie both looked to him. Chloe couldn't help but notice a flash of annoyance on her mother's face, and it didn't exactly end at a flash, either. “The younger Mr. Algreil, I presume,” Ellie said, her voice going from hearth-warm to pure ice at least as fast as Stephan's ever had.

  “That's right, Ma'am,” Rudy said. Chloe was impressed. He could have actually passed for humble. Or at least come within spitting distance of it. She wondered if he was trying to impress her mom or if he felt bad about what he'd said of his brother. “But you can call me Rudy.”

  “I'll keep that in mind,” Ellie said, “Mr. Algreil.”

  Chloe stepped back. “Mom, didn't Milissa tell you about Rudy?”

  About Rudy and me, she wanted to say. But she got the impression those words might make things worse before it made them better.

  “Milissa told me about him,” Ellie said, “as did his brother.”

  Chloe had to suppress a wince.

  “All good things, I hope,” Rudy said.

  “Milissa was very complimentary of you,” Ellie said.

  Rudy nodded his thanks to the Kyrillos girl, whose smile looked decidedly more brittle than it had a second ago.

  Chloe wanted to step between her mom and her fiancé, but before she got the chance, Ellie said, “I'm afraid I don't see what she was talking about, though.”

  Chloe did wince this time.

  Rudy just lowered his eyes. “I'm sorry you feel that way, Ma'am. Does my face offend you, or do you have some gripe about the way I've kept your daughter safe and risked my a... my butt for her every step of the way?”

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  Chloe glared at him. “Rudy! What are you doing?”

  “Answering your mom,” Rudy said.

  “You have an interesting definition of 'safe,' Mr. Algreil,” Ellie snapped. “What part of it involves delivering my daughter into the Senate's hands and shoving her into the spotlight for the whole world to see?”

  “Coming here was Chloe's decision, Ma'am,” Rudy said tightly.

  “One you would have talked her out of if you were any kind of a responsible man!”

  “I'm surprised you think your daughter can be persuaded that easily. Because trust me, she can't. Principle knows I've tried on just about every subject under the stars!”

  “I had to save Dad, Mom,” Chloe said quietly.

  “No, honey,” Ellie said. “You didn't.”

  Chloe blinked.

  “I was trying to get to you before you put yourself in danger,” Ellie said. She glared at Rudy. “Obviously it's too late for that.”

  “But Dad –”

  “Had a plan,” Ellie said.

  Chloe fell silent.

  “Your father,” her mother said, “believed the Senate wouldn't dare do him any harm.”

  “But he's been convicted of treason,” Chloe protested. “Scheduled to be executed right after the Etemenos Cup!”

  “Scheduled, yes.” Ellie smiled bitterly. “But if they hadn't been able to find you, Chloe, they would have needed to keep your dad alive so they'd have a bargaining chip – or a lure.”

  “Oh no,” Chloe whispered. That made a sort of twisted sense. The sort of sense Stephan had been trying to make – that Rudy had warned her might be correct.

  She glanced at Rudy.

  He shook his head. “They'd have gone ahead and killed your dad. It suits their interests better.”

  Ellie frowned at him. Not a thoughtful frown, either. “Oh, really?”

  “Of course, Ma'am. They had another lure and/or bargaining chip: you. If they executed your husband, they would be offing the Hughes they considered more dangerous, they'd be telling Chloe they were serious about their threats – and then they'd be arresting you, because unless I've got you totally wrong, you wouldn't take your husband's death sitting down. If you didn't do anything, well, 'the people' won't exactly weep if the Federal Senate trumps up some charges against a hybrid. Instant lure, and this time there's no way Chloe can possibly ignore it.”

  Chloe shuddered at the plan Rudy described, and at the fact he could think in those terms at all.

  Ellie didn't answer.

  “Chloe wants her dad back,” Rudy said, “and the only way she was going to save him was by coming to Etemenos.”

  Ellie's voice matched Rudy's for coldness. “And was publicly assuming control of your company and shoving cameras in her face and calling her your girlfriend and calling her by name part of saving Jack, too, Mr. Algreil?”

  Before Rudy could answer, Chloe tried to step between them. “Mom, stop it, please!”

  “I have to speak to this young man, Chloe.”

  “It's okay, Clo,” Rudy said. “She's got the right not to trust me. I'm my brother's brother, after all.”

  “You sure are,” Ellie said.

  Chloe looked between them, horrified. Horrified, also, because she realized she and Rudy were standing way too close together. Under her flight suit, the erinyes protested Rudy's proximity in increasingly feeble spasms.

  But she couldn't just let this keep going!

  “Ma'am,” Rudy said flatly, “if I hadn't gone public and taken Chloe along with me, she would probably be dead right now.”

  Ellie and Chloe both stopped and stared at him.

  “The only reason she or I are alive is that the people on the Senate who want us dead don't dare do it under the bright lights of the Etemenos Cup. It's the only way I could think of to keep us safe, and so far – well, we're still here. You're back together. I am doing the best damn job I can for her, and do not need you to bust my ass over it.”

  Rudy turned and took a step toward the back of the mecha bay. Tension like Chloe had never seen in him drew his every muscle tight, and he looked like he wanted to scream instead of speaking in a near-whisper. He took a long, deep breath.

  He looked back to them.

  “This is your reunion, Chloe. I shouldn't have said anything.” He bowed and stepped toward the crimson mecha standing at his back. “I'll see you when we're finished checking up on the Epee.”

  “Rudy,” Chloe began, but he cut her off with a shake of his head.

  “Catch up with your mom,” he said. He took another step back. “Boss? Milissa? Help me out here.”

  Reluctantly, Algreil mechanic and Kyrillos noblewoman followed him. Milissa glanced over her shoulder and cast a plaintive expression at Chloe.

  But Chloe was looking only at her mother –

  And unlike in any version of their reunion she could have ever dreamed of, she was furious.