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L. M. Sagas follows her fast-paced sci-fi adventure Cascade Failure with an equally explosive sequel, Gravity Lost. Everyone’s favorite fierce, messy, chaotic space fam is back with more vibrant worlds, and the wildest crew since Guardians of the Galaxy.

After thwarting a space station disaster and planetary destruction, the Ambit crew thought turning Isaiah Drestyn over to the Union would be the end of their troubles. Turns out, it’s only the start.

Drestyn is a walking encyclopedia of dirty secrets, and everyone wants a piece of him—the Trust, the Union, even the Guild. Someone wants him bad enough to kill, and with the life of one of their own on the line, the Ambit crew must jail-break the very man they helped capture and expose some of the secrets he’s been keeping before it’s too late.

In the Spiral, everything has a price. In their fight to protect what they love, Eoan, Nash, Saint, and Jal will confront some ugly truths about their enemies, and even uglier truths about their friends. But nothing will come close to the truths they’ll learn about themselves.

You can’t always fix what’s broken … and sometimes, it’s better that way.

Please enjoy this free excerpt of opens in a new windowGravity Lost by L.M. Sagas, on sale 7/23/24

CHAPTER ONE

SAINT 

“I did tell you not to touch my shit.” Nash snatched her bag back from the wide-eyed security  technician as alarms bathed the checkpoint in red. She didn’t even look inside; just thrust her hand in, fiddled around, and  after a few seconds the alarms stopped. “What the hell was that?” said the tech, face flushing  and blanching at the same time, in cheese-curd blotches. He  watched the bag as Nash reclaimed it, like he half-expected whatever he’d touched to jump out and take a bite out of him.

Go with that instinct, Saint thought. He didn’t actually  know what’d set everything off; could’ve been any one of the  half-dozen fun, fantastically dangerous toys Nash kept in that  bag. Being the crew medic and mechanic came with some interesting equipment. Nash ignored the tech and turned back to Saint. “You heard  me, right? I told him not to touch it.” “You told him,” Saint agreed, gravely. He’d stopped a few  steps back from the checkpoint, mostly to wait his turn for  the scanner, but also to enjoy the show. Had to get your kicks where you could on a slow day, and lately, they’d had nothing  but slow days. Nearly four months posted on that satellite, and in that time, Saint hadn’t had to punch, shoot, or bury a single soul. He woke up, drank his coffee, did his job, and went back to bed, and then he woke up and did it all over again. 

Streaks like that never held. 

With a damn right nod, Nash turned back to the tech. “You want to lose a finger, Newbie? Because that’s how you lose a  finger.” 

“Maybe a hand,” Saint said. 

“Possibly the whole arm,” Nash agreed. “Say, Newbie, you a lefty or a righty?” 

The newbie didn’t manage much more than an uneasy stare as Nash zipped her bag and shouldered it. That stare said he couldn’t decide if she was joking or if she was genuinely, ball shrivellingly terrifying. Don’t worry, Saint thought. She has that effect on every one. Even Saint. Maybe especially Saint, because he knew her well enough to know that ball-shrivellingly terrifying was an undersell. 

It took the tech a handful of seconds to recover. “Wait,” he said, finally. “I need you to sign in.” 

“First shift, huh?” Saint thought he looked new. They’d passed through that checkpoint over two hundred times, coming and going. Always the same trip down the same hall at the same time of day; the only thing that ever changed was the technicians. A new face every few weeks—newbies on break-in rotation, and this guy fit the bill. Way too green to be a transfer, and if he’d hit his twenties, it was only by the tip of his  pimpled nose. His oversized uniform said he’d either lied about his measurements, or just felt real optimistic that he still had some growing to do. They’re running a damn daycare down here. Saint guessed every organization had its version of a mail room; theirs just included a few more deadly weapons. 

“We’ve got a standing reservation,” Nash told him, shrugging her bag onto her shoulders. “Table for two, under Shooty McBlastinshit.” 

Saint pinched the bridge of his nose. “You have got to let  that go.” 

“Over my cold, dead body,” Nash replied sweetly. “That’s Shooty with a Y,” she told the tech. “And McBlastinshit with  a—” 

“We’re with the Ambit.” Saint cut in, and Nash coughed  something into her elbow that sounded conspicuously like  buzzkill. He ignored her. “Designation GS 31–770. We’re here  for prisoner escort.” And while the tech fumbled with his holo screen, Saint took his turn in the scanner. Christ, he hated  the things.

Every screw and plate in every bone, every keep sake shard of shrapnel under his skin, put on display. Always earned him a certain look, like one the Ambit got whenever they docked her in a new port. Like how the hell’s that thing still running? 

Stubbornness was probably as good an answer as any. 

“You’re clear,” the tech managed to say, in a voice that tripped on a crack and landed a pitch higher than it started.  

Out of the corner of his eye, Saint thought he saw Nash hiding a smile as he grabbed his shit from the bin. Belt and holsters, wallet and flask. Nash had already made it a few steps down the hall, so Saint dressed while he walked to catch up. 

He wouldn’t miss it. Not the checkpoint, not the scanner, not the sterile white lights and bare metal walls of the secured sector. The Alpha Librae Satellite wasn’t exactly a tourist destination, even in the more civilized parts. Built into the icy crust of the sixth-largest Saturn moon, it was more colony than satellite, but never let it be said the Guild didn’t know the power of  a word. Colony came with a whole lot of well-earned baggage  that the Guild just didn’t want to carry. 

So. Satellite.

It domed up out of the ice, about 140 meters at  its highest point. Like a massive militarized snow globe, Nash liked to say. Ever wondered what’d happen if you shook it?  Saint leaned more toward iceberg, though: way more shit happening under the water than above it. Structures plunged like stalactites into the ocean below, all chitin and silica and oxidized aluminum alloy, woven together into something almost organic.

Like coral grown around the bones of scuttled ships along the coasts where he’d grown up. Had to go deep; all the station’s power came from the hydrothermal vents at the moon’s core, and it turned out they didn’t make extension cords that  long. The temp in the station never rose above a balmy seventeen degrees Celsius, which meant creaky joints for Saint, and a near-endless rotation of hand-knit sweaters and shiny bomber  jackets for Nash.

There in Sector F, though, he swore it got even colder. Set into the deeper parts of the satellite, it had the silence of something buried. Sector F was where the Guild housed most of its security operations—station surveillance, armory, the brig. Even the lobby past the checkpoint felt like something out of a penitentiary, without so much as a potted plant to spruce it up. No place to sit, no pictures on the walls, just two rounded elevator bays cutting through the center of the room like glass tree trunks. Only one of them serviced all the floors of the sector; the other was overflow for the administrative floors. 

Nash and Saint made for the one marked brig access. 

“Okay,” said Nash, as they walked. “Who shit in your sugar flakes?” 

“What?” 

“All the bitching you’ve been doing about our babysitting detail, I’d have thought you’d be thrilled to pass the torch. Half expected you to dance your way to the brig.” 

“Not much of a dancer,” he replied. 

“Cry one single, solitary tear of joy?” 

“You know satellite atmo dries me out.” 

“Not even a little jazz hands?” She glanced over, and he sighed and stuck up his hands. Gave them a wiggle. Got a grimace for his efforts. “Aw, sad hands.” 

“I’m not sad.” 

“Tell that to your frown lines.” 

“They’re not frown lines. They’re line lines. It’s called get ting old.” 

Nash snorted. “You’re not even forty,” she said, patting his  arm as he hit the call button and keyed in his access code on the biometric pad. Code, facial recognition, retinal scan; they really didn’t want anybody getting into that elevator without a damn good reason and some damn high clearance. “Relax, you’ve still got a few good years left in you before I gotta start replacing parts.” 

Whatever face Saint pulled, it screwed so badly with the facial rec that the pad flashed red. He shot her a flat look over his shoulder, like look what you did, but she just smiled and gave him another pat. Don’t know why I bother. “Nobody’s replacing my parts,” he grumbled as he rekeyed his code. This time the facial rec and retinal scanner got what they needed, and the doors slid open. “My parts work fine. I like my parts.”

He’d just like them better with a little less scar tissue was all. Maybe forty wasn’t old, but Saint felt that way. Old and tired, in ways even four months’ downtime couldn’t fix. He shook his head.  

“Get in the damn elevator.” 

She did, but probably only because the doors had started to close. He slid in right after her, his back to the rounded glass walls as they started their descent. That elevator was the only way in or out of the brig’s high-security ward. Main brig, you could take the stairs if shit got dicey, but for the unlucky bastards in deep lockup, that was it—one long umbilical stretching down another hundred meters from the brig, ready to get snipped at the first sign of trouble. Hit the right button, trip the right alarm, and the whole ward could be detached from the rest of the station and jettisoned into the dark.

Alpha Librae didn’t fuck  around. 

Not a bad view, though, once they got down past the brig.  

Floors of dull lobbies rose like curtains around the elevator, until only ocean remained. If he looked up, Saint could still make out the backlit windows of all the different stalactite structures of the station glittering like diamonds in the dark. Like stars whose glow haloed the whole station below the water’s surface. He’d have been content to take the ride in silence, watching the lights grow dimmer as they sank farther and farther away. 

Nash had other ideas. “Seriously, though,” she said, leaning back against the wall with her arms crossed. “Bad mood. What gives? It’s our last day of daycare—we should be celebrating. Cap, back me up, here.” 

“You know I don’t take sides,” Eoan’s airless voice said  over the comms.

Nash and Saint were a long way from the Ambit, which was still docked in one of the surface ports, but the signal came clear as day. Nash had done a lot of tinkering with their comms since the shitshow on Noether.

Her way of coping, and something to do with all the time she spent holed up on her own. Socializing hadn’t been too high on her to-do list lately. “Although . . .” 

Saint scowled. “There’s no although.”

“Nothing to talk about that they hadn’t already talked about the other couple hundred times they’d taken that long-ass ride on that slow ass elevator. The trouble with an underwater base was all the damn pressure. The car had to stop every thirty meters or so to let folks’ ears pop or to rejigger the gas mixtures, because apparently oxygen did some real weird shit at depth. Nobody wanted a bunch of stoned rangers stumbling around, bleeding out of their ears.

Eoan chuckled, voice warm with amusement. Lot of folks didn’t expect that kind of affection from a centuries-old AI, but with the benefit of years under Eoan’s command, Saint knew better. He’d never met a captain with more grit, compassion, and sheer damn savvy than their Eoan. Even if they did have a cosmic curious streak and a bad habit of playing Secret Science Experiment with their crewmates.

Undeterred, they said, “It’s just an observation, dear. You’ve never been fond of prisoner details, and I know this one’s been harder to stomach than most.”

“It’s been fine.”

“Bullshit,” said Nash. “It’s been boring as hell. Same thing day after day after day. I wanted to scramble my brains with a knitting needle by week three, and I actually have hobbies outside of work. Don’t tell me you’re not going full-on non compos mentis in this bitch.”

“I didn’t know you spoke Latin,” Saint muttered.

She ignored him. “You hate this detail,” she said. “I know you do. Cap knows you do. But you’re walking around today, our last day of this snoozefest, in your own personal storm cloud. So, I say again: What. Gives.” She punctuated the words with a poke to Saint’s chest and a stare promising tragedy and torment if he even thought about giving her the runaround.

He might’ve chanced it, anyway, but Eoan intervened. “It’s not about the detail, is it?” they said. It sounded like a question, but for Eoan, it was more like a hypothesis. They’d considered all the variables and arrived at the most likely explanation. “It’s been quite nice, hasn’t it? Having the Red family on base. I hear Regan’s doing excellent things in the communications division.”

Well, Eoan wasn’t wrong.

At first they hadn’t been sure where Jal and his family would end up after Jal recovered enough to travel. The Captains’ Council didn’t stick to one place, and shit had been so crazy there for a while, he could’ve gotten shipped to any one of a half-dozen Guild outposts. Wasn’t until about a month after the Ambit’s assignment to Alpha Librae that the council finally decided to bring Jal there for the hearings, and everything kind of sorted itself out after that. Regan got herself a position as a comms engineer; Eoan pulled some strings, got Bitsie into school with all the other station kids; and Jal had ready access to the best docs on offer, Nash included, while he finished healing from the fall on Noether that should’ve killed him. Couldn’t have worked out better.

Except.

“Does he know we’re shipping out tomorrow?” Eoan asked gently.

Except for that.

Saint sighed again, rolling his neck and shoulders. Damn cold always made him seize up like a rusty hinge. “He does.”

“And how’d he take it?” Nash, this time, but she didn’t look at him as she asked it. She’d turned to the wall, puffing hot breath on the glass and drawing her finger through the fog. She and some other poor, bored bastard had a running series of tic tac-toe games—maybe fifteen rounds and counting. She drew an X in the bottom right corner, scratched a line through it and the two above it, and drew a smiley face below it. No new hash. No sixteenth game.

“I don’t know,” Saint admitted.

Nash squinted. “You don’t know?”

“That’s what I said.”

“How do you not know?”

You don’t know, either, Saint tactfully didn’t point out. Wasn’t like she spent a lot of time with Jal, anyway. Tagged along with them for drinks a few times, and dragged Jal aboard the Ambit sometimes to upgrade the specs she’d made him. For the most part, though, Nash kept her distance, and Saint couldn’t help wondering if it was because Jal reminded her of something she’d rather forget.

Or someone, maybe.

“I thought he took it fine, all right?” he said instead. “But we were supposed to meet up last night, and he begged off last minute. Hasn’t answered any of my comms since.”

Nash raised a hand. “Yeah, I’m gonna say definitely not taking it all right.”

“Thanks for that.” Brutal honesty was just another service Nash provided. She’s right. He’d told himself something similar—just a lot of murky water under that particular bridge. If the kid was having trouble getting left behind again, Saint could hardly blame him.

It just . . . didn’t sit right. Jal’d been so damn serious about keeping in touch and, Don’t you leave without a proper send off, old man, or I’ll hop a ship and run you down myself. Kid wasn’t exactly the sulking type, either. Golden retriever personified. So maybe that did have something to do with the knot in his stomach. The itch between his shoulder blades.

Or maybe those had more to do with what waited at the bottom of that elevator.

“Well, shit,” said Nash, shrugging. “If that’s what’s got your holsters in a hitch, miner boy could always come with us. We’ll have to, like, quadruple our food stocks, but I didn’t hate having the guy around last time. You know, once we got past the whole fugitive deserter with a chip on his shoulder thing.”

Saint shook his head. He’d left Jal behind once, and it’d been one of the worst mistakes of his life. Things were different now, though. “Kid went through hell to get where he’s at.” Back with his sister and niece, alive and safe and happy. “I’m not pulling him away from that.”

“So we’re just gonna sulk about it and hope it goes away. Got it.” Nash was first off the elevator when it finally slid to a halt, clapping him on the shoulder as she passed. “Good talk.”

“Was it?”

“Was for me.” She swept ahead into the central hub of the security pod. Not much to look at—just a round space with a single control console jutting out of the floor in the middle. Five offshoot hallways, like the legs of a sea star, led to the high security cells; but the whole time Saint had been there, only one of the cells had been full.

“One last time,” said Eoan encouragingly. “Whenever you’re ready, you’re clear all the way to the secondary dock, and the Union transport ship is ready and waiting for delivery. Let’s finish this out with our heads high, shall we?”

Saint didn’t much care about high heads or low, just that in a half hour or less, it would be finished. He nodded to Nash as she took position at the console, punching in her credentials and the access code for the middle cell of the sea star—creatively labeled Holding C.

Standing before the thick cell door, Saint swallowed against the acid heat rising in his chest. Nearly four months, and it hadn’t gotten any easier to stare down the man behind that door. To remember what he’d done and who he’d done it to.

“Opening the porthole,” Nash said, and a beat later a panel on the door slid open at waist height.

“Hands.” Saint’s voice sounded so mechanical, so automated, it could’ve been part of the building. Just another moving part, just another piece of protocol in action. His own hands clenched to fists at his sides, before he forced them loose and reached for the cuffs on the back of his belt.

A beat later, another pair of hands came through the port hole, palm-up. White and scarred, with calluses that even months of captivity hadn’t worn away. They seemed too small, too fine-boned and aristocratic, to have drawn as much blood as they had.

Jaw clenched to aching, Saint clamped the cuffs around those wrists and tightened them flush. A man could be as wily as he wanted to be, but the only way he’d slip those cuffs would be to leave his hands behind. “Clear,” Saint called back to Nash, and he counted off three, two, one in his head before the door opened.

It didn’t slide, didn’t part; it opened from the porthole in the middle like an antique camera shutter, individual panes twisting and withdrawing into the walls to reveal the man inside.

Isaiah Drestyn didn’t look like a man with a rap sheet, much less one as long and varied as the one he had. He was about a dec shorter than Saint and built like a reed, eyes soft and sloping on a pale, pockmarked face. Only sign he’d ever seen trouble was the web of scars across one side of his face, a memento from the refinery fire that’d killed his brother and kick-started him on the winding path to, well, here. Looked more like a preacher or a poet than the kind of man who could gladly sacrifice an entire space station to a planet-killing computer virus for the sake of showing the world what its makers were capable of.

Saint wasn’t sure anybody in the universe could hate something or someone more than Drestyn hated the Trust. For the man who’d run Jal off a rooftop, though? Saint would surely try.

“Move,” Saint said, and Drestyn moved. His slippered feet slid across the diamond-plate floors, and his stiff scrubs rustled; otherwise, he didn’t make a sound. No talking—the speech jammer around his throat saw to that. Distorted his voice when he spoke, so he never managed much more than nonsense, and the opaque white shield over the bottom half of his face thwarted any would-be lip-readers. The Captains’ Council’d had a strict hush order on him since day one, and for good reason. The man was a goddamn encyclopedia of hard truths and batshit conspiracies, and since nobody’d come up with a good way to sort one from the other, Saint reckoned it was better he kept them to himself.

Nash led the way back into the elevator, punching one of the buttons on the console as she passed it. Not back to the lobby this time, but all the way up to the private docks in one of the auxiliary surface domes. You didn’t escort a man like Drestyn through a populated shipyard, especially since the Guild had never managed to track down his two accomplices from Lewaro. For all Saint knew, the pair was out there plotting a jailbreak that very second.

“You know,” Nash announced into the strained silence, somewhere around the three-minute mark. Elevators had a way of stretching time like taffy, and Nash didn’t handle idle very well. “I’m really starting to rethink my position on elevator music. Some smooth jazz, a little bebop—shit, I’d take a ten minute drum solo. Might really help cut the awkward.”

Awkward didn’t quite cover it, Saint thought, but what did it matter? Just one last time. One last trip.

Finally, the doors slid open to the private docks. Felt like walking into a frosted fishbowl; from a distance, the hexagonal tiles of the dome faded into something rounded and smooth, a clear wall against the white haze of water vapor rising off the ice. Despite the dome’s thermal insulation, Saint’s breath fogged in front of his face, and condensation settled on the outside of Drestyn’s face shield as they stepped out onto the docks.

A single Union transport vessel waited down walkway, not too different in design from the Ambit, with mothlike wings and thrumming quad-thrusters. It wasn’t made to carry much, but it was made to carry it quickly. The sort of vessel you chose when you expected trouble and wanted good odds of shaking it with your ass and ship firmly intact.

Four uniformed Union security officers stood at the ship’s hatch, navy-blue fatigues crisp and berets tipped slightly to one side, and an un-uniformed man and woman stood a few paces farther down. Seemed to be shooting the shit.

“And here’s our guest of honor,” said the man when he noticed them approaching. He was the kind of tall, rangy fella that you just knew would play dirty in a bar fight—and probably come out on top because of it. Had a fading tan and a drawl that made Saint a little homesick, a single revolver on his belt, and a head begging for a cattleman hat. Cowboy came to mind, but Saint couldn’t take the credit for it; he’d heard it a dozen times across a dozen retellings and conversations, as many critical as they were complimentary. Captain Dalton Raimes had a bit of a reputation in the Guild. Youngest buck on the council, but some were convinced he only got the promotion so the rest of the council could keep a closer eye on him.

Sure, here’s the text with adjusted spacing:

Of course he’d be the one overseeing the transfer.

“You must be Saint and Nash,” Raimes said amiably, pointing to each in turn. Not Toussaint and Satou—clearly not the type to stand on occasion. Saint was suddenly sure he’d be a friendly drunk, but only because he sounded half-drunk already and greeted them with a cheerful cant of a smile. “Me and Mister Agitator here have already had the pleasure, so you’ll excuse me if I don’t shake his hand.” He stepped one foot back to gesture to the woman he’d been talking to. Short purple hair, tall as the day was long; she looked damn near Amazonian next to Raimes, with a stern brown face and muscles visible through her white jumpsuit. A getup like that was as much a statement as a dare: I don’t expect to get dirty today, and if I do, it’ll be your blood I’m bleaching out in the wash. “This here’s Phillipa Casale, head of Union security.”

“Head,” said Nash. “Kind of high on the food chain for a milk run.”

Casale let out a bark of a laugh that echoed all the way through the small dome and back again. “Milk run. She’s funny,” she said to Raimes. Then, to Nash, “You’re funny.” Then, like a flipped switch, her face went serious. “Our agreement with the Trust makes the Union responsible for Drestyn’s security while we have him in our custody. If he gets away, if he gets dead—not so good for us. So, they send me.” She made a quick gesture toward the four uniforms, who stepped up and took Drestyn off Saint’s hands like he wasn’t one of the deadliest people in the universe. Cuffed and gagged and diminished, somehow, by the faded gray scrubs he wore, he didn’t look the part.

It was harder than it should’ve been to let those Union officers shepherd Drestyn away into the belly of their ship. At the top of the gangway, Drestyn stopped. Just for a moment, just long enough to turn back and give Saint a look he couldn’t begin to interpret. Meaningful, purposeful—a question, but one too short-lived for Saint to decipher—before a shove from one of the officers sent him deeper into the ship. Out of sight. Out of reach.

“Good luck with that one,” said Raimes. “Keep on your toes. Fella might have the whole buttoned-up accountant vibe going on, but believe you me, he’s slicker than a wet cat in an oil drum. Not much of a conversationalist, either.”

“Conversation isn’t my department,” Casale replied. An all-clear call came from inside the ship, and that seemed to be her cue. “We’re behind schedule. Good meeting you, funny girl. Saint. Councilor.” She nodded to each of them in turn, and with one last handshake with Raimes, she set off into the ship after her crew.

Saint watched until the hatch slid closed, then forced his eyes away. It was done, and damn whatever feelings he had on the matter. Onto the next.

“Must be a relief,” said Raimes, starting back for the elevator and motioning for them to follow. Wouldn’t pay to still be in the dome when the air lock opened, and those engines were already starting to turn the air uncomfortably warm. After all that time in all that cold, Saint started sweating under his jacket. “Y’all headed back into the great wide yonder? The frontier,” he clarified, when Nash gave him an odd look as they stepped onto the elevator. “Heard that’s your usual stomping grounds. Give Captain Eoan my regards.”

“They can hear you,” said Nash, tapping her earpiece.

Raimes rolled with it. “My regards then, Captain Eoan. Been a while.”

“Indeed,” Eoan agreed, broadcasting their voice through the external speakers on the earpieces. “Congratulations again on the promotion.”

“Is that what this is?” Raimes said. “Feels an awful lot like time-out with benefits and time-and-a-half pay. Keep your friends close…” He trailed off as the elevator slowed to a halt halfway down to the sector lobby. Administrative floor. Turning on his heel, Raimes back-walked off the elevator with a half-cocked salute. “Be seeing you.”

As soon as the door closed, Nash mimicked his salute. “Jesus, he’s like a caricature of himself. And what was that bit about not much of a conversationalist? I thought we weren’t supposed to talk to Drestyn.”

“We aren’t,” said Eoan, and Saint knew that pained them more than anyone. They’d never been able to pass up an unanswered question, and Drestyn was about three thousand unanswered questions stacked together in a trench coat. But Eoan had changed, since the Deadworld Code incident. They hadn’t gotten any less curious, but they had gotten more cautious. Noether had shown them things—fear, danger, death—in a way they’d never experienced. Intensely. Personally. Their whole world had shifted, and AI or not, that took time to work through.

And they had to be careful here. Too many security cameras, too many watchful eyes, too many people with strong opinions about who should and shouldn’t be talking to Drestyn. They’d drawn some heat of their own, too, with what folks had started calling the Redweld Leak. Nobody knew it was the Ambit crew that’d released Yarden’s extremely detailed, extremely unflattering Trust records to the public, and most people were content to blame it on Drestyn and his two escaped crewmates. Still, some had their suspicions. Better for the crew to lie low, let the clouds blow over, so that was what they’d done.

“But Raimes said—” Nash started.

Eoan interrupted gently. “Raimes has always had a somewhat… flirtatious relationship with the rules. Two weeks into Drestyn’s hold on Alpha Librae, he shut off his security feeds and had himself a friendly tête-à-tête with our resident agitator, ostensibly to try to get the locations of his accomplices. It was all in the memo.”

Nash glanced over at Saint. “Did you know they sent memos?”

“I did.” He’d simply continued his proud tradition of not reading a single goddamn one of them.

Eoan gave a long-suffering sigh. “Impossible, the both of you. I blame myself, really,” they added, with the mock dismay of a parent who’d indulged their children too long. “For what it’s worth, it was only the once, and I understand Drestyn wasn’t particularly forthcoming.”

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