Daughters of Lyra: Heart of an Assassin Read Online Free PDF Page A

thing that
she had promised she would give up.

    She couldn’t go down into
the city. She had sworn to Ixion that she wouldn’t go there
anymore, even though she desperately wanted to. It would break her
promise with Ixion and he might tell her parents this time. She
couldn’t outsmart a royal assassin of his standing. No matter which
way she chose to go, he was bound to see her and stop
her.

    It was useless.

    She couldn’t risk it. If
Ixion told her father, he might keep her locked in the palace until
he found a male to marry her off to.

    Soft steps on the white
flagstones made her tense. She imagined it was a handsome male
dressed in black, a dangerous male who made her giddy just from
looking at him. The person came to stand beside her.

    Not a male at
all.

    Her mother.

    Natalia looked at her,
managing a smile. Her father was right. She was the very image of
her mother. Their black hair and bright green eyes matched
perfectly. Her brothers and sister all looked more like their
father. Perhaps that was why her father doted on her so much,
because she looked like her mother. But then that didn’t answer the
question burning in her heart. Why had her father decided to start
accepting proposals for her?

    “ Missing your
father?” her mother said.

    Natalia took the small
black translator bud from her ear. Sometimes it was nice to speak
to her mother without it.

    “ No,” Natalia
said in Terran. Her mother smiled and removed her translator
too.

    “ Have you two
been arguing again?” Her mother’s look was gentle, concerned, and
it lifted some of the weight from Natalia’s heart but made her feel
weak at the same time. If she cried like she wanted to her mother
would understand, but what kind of princess cried over something
like this? She had always been the strong one, the responsible one,
and that wasn’t going to change now.

    Natalia looked out at the
city again.

    “ Are there
really suitors contacting you?” Her voice trembled but she held it
together. She wouldn’t cry over something like this.

    “ He told you
then?” her mother said on a sigh and placed her arm around
Natalia’s shoulders. She squeezed them and Natalia closed her eyes,
feeling as though her future had already been determined and her
sentence pronounced. Her father really did intend to take proposals
from suitors. “Don’t worry. He won’t go through with
it.”

    “ How do you
know?” Natalia leaned her head against her mother’s shoulder,
needing the comfort.

    “ Because he has
mentioned it before and nothing came of it. He won’t give you up so
easily… at the moment he is just overwhelmed. He didn’t expect you
to grow up so quickly and be noticed so soon after you turned
mating age.”

    There was a little comfort
in those words but not enough. Her father could be unduly stubborn
when it came to his duty and he would see finding her a good
husband as one of his duties, even when she was willing to beg him
not to. In that respect she was much like her father. She would do
her duty and what was expected from her, even when it broke her
heart.

    “ I don’t want a
suitor,” she mumbled, her heart heavy again.

    “ And you won’t
have one,” her mother said and held her closer. “Renie and Rezic
will return soon and we will all be together again. The
preparations for Renie’s wedding will keep him distracted. We can
make sure that we reach the letters before him and get rid of any
ones from suitors. If they contact him directly through the
imperial army, we will simply have to bide our time. Renie’s
wedding will satisfy him and it is only a few months
away.”

    A few months. In that
time, her father might have given his consent to any number of the
suitors who were bound to contact him via channels that she
couldn’t access. Neither her nor her mother had the clearance
required to enter the imperial army’s computer system.

    She considered asking
Rezic for help but thought the better of it. While her