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“Fair enough,” Riker said, giving her a smile of his own.

The sound of William Riker’s breathing was a comfort to Deanna Troi. The rhythmic inhaling and exhaling provided a certain steadiness to the external world that was woefully absent from her internal self. They’d lain beside each other, just being in each other’s arms, for almost an hour before Riker finally dozed off.

Sleep, however, didn’t come quite so easily to Troi.

She hadn’t told the entire truth to Riker. Blowing up at her mother had precisely nothing to do with the wedding or Mother.

Minza.

Every time she closed her eyes, Troi saw the placid face of the Tezwan general. Part of the deposed prime minister’s resistance movement, the group that had abducted Riker, Minza had been captured by Enterprise security and brought to the ship, where Troi tried everything she could within Federation law to interrogate him.

No, to break him. To make him suffer. He knew where Will was being held, and he wouldn’t tell me, and I wanted so much to just take that smarmy expression off his face, I wanted to rip his feathers out one by one

Again the anger started to build, just as it had with Mother, just as it had with Minza. She remembered him leaning back, his arms folded behind his head, giving her that pitying expression, even as she tried—and failed—to break him by assaulting him with temperature changes, bright lights, and a cacophonous combination of both Klingon and human opera, combined with Data’s near-monotone recitation of The Mikado. All he did was laugh at her, saying, “If this is your worst

I pity you.”

She wanted so much to wipe that pity off his face.

Rising slowly from the bed, being careful not to disturb her fiancé’s slumber, she padded into the next room. Regulating her breathing, which was speeding up at an alarming rate, she tried to tamp down the anger, quench the inferno that was building inside her.

How long will I have to do this?

She sat at the same desk where just a few hours ago she’d yelled at her mother for no good reason and contacted the bridge.

“Wriede here.”

“Falon, it’s Deanna. Tell me—” She hesitated, then decided to vague things up a bit. “Are the Amargosa, Republic, and Musashi still in real-time communication range?”

“Let me check, Counselor.” A pause. “The Republic isn’t, but the other two are. Why?”

“Nothing you need to worry about,” she said quickly. The last thing she wanted was to let the entire gamma-shift bridge crew know precisely what she was doing. “Thank you.”

“No problem, Counselor.”

She then put a private call through to Counselor Marlyn Del Cid on the Amargosa.

Moments later, a bleary-eyed Del Cid appeared on the viewer in front of her. Her long hair was uncombed and unkempt, and she was wearing only a nightshirt emblazoned with a large version of the Starfleet delta—she’d obviously been woken out of a sound sleep. “Del Cid here.” Then she realized who it was. “Deanna? What’s wrong?”

Troi hesitated. “I—I snapped at my mother tonight.”

“Well, that’s certainly a good reason to wake me out of a sound sleep,” Del Cid said with a wry smile. “After all, that sort of thing never happens between mothers and daughters.”

“It’s not that—I just—” She sighed. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have woken you for this.”

Waving her hand in front of her face as if she was swatting an insect, Del Cid said, “No, no, I should be the one apologizing. I just don’t do well first thing after I wake up. I take it you don’t normally snap at you mother?”

She actually smiled at that, which was a relief, as Troi hadn’t credited herself with that capability at present. “Actually, I do all the time, but not over something like this—and I never get this angry with her.”

“Back to the anger, then?”

“Yes.”

“Something to consider, Deanna. Those Federation laws that you were dancing on the edge of with Minza—the ones that kept you from torturing him, or even visiting any kind of cruel and unusual punishment on him?”

Troi frowned. “What about them?”