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“Everything and nothing is personal with Sith,” Ben growled. He moved over to the computer and frowned. “Where is it? What you were working on?”

“I deleted it.”

“Now it’s my business.”

“Blast it, Ben!” Her voice cracked and he regarded her with surprise. She looked away, fearful that he would see the traitorous tears still glinting in her eyes. “I give you my word, it wasn’t anything against you. Please, just go, okay?”

“I wish I could believe you,” he said. “But if it wasn’t anything important, you wouldn’t be so determined to hide it from me. Do I have to truss you up? I will if I have to. Or I can comm Dad to watch you while I go digging for this stuff.”

Fear and defeat both fluttered through Vestara, and suddenly her body, tense and tight, sagged against the blankets tightly wrapped around her. Ben would do it, too. Then both Skywalkers would see the letters. She could either fight until she killed him, or her secret would be revealed.

And she found, not a little bit to her surprise, that she didn’t want to kill Ben Skywalker. She didn’t want to see him harmed in any way, least of all by her hand. But for him to see this …

She tried one more time, turning her head to look him full in the face. “Ben,” she said quietly, though her voice trembled slightly, “I give you my word. Any word you want, any promise or vow you would believe. What I was doing had nothing at all to do with you, or Luke, or the Jedi, or anything. It was personal and private. That’s all.”

Something flickered across his face for a moment, then his expression grew hard again. “There’s no assurance you could possibly give me that I’d believe. I’m getting awfully tired of being played by you, Vestara. And I’m getting more insulted with each day that you seem to think I’m stupid.”

You’re not stupid, she wanted to say. You’re just … trusting. Which, she supposed, was stupid, when one was dealing with the Sith. She recalled his words some time earlier, when he had asked if she didn’t tire of always mistrusting, of always having her guard up. What he didn’t know was how right he was. She had not understood, until she had come across people for whom this was not second nature, how … exhausting … mistrust was. How complicated it was to spin lies. She felt as though she had suddenly realized that since the day she could talk, she had been carrying a burden that had been draining her life energy.

What would happen if she let that burden go? If she decided not to lie anymore, to open her heart and mind to trusting someone?

You trusted your father, and look what happened. If your own blood could try to kill you, what would a stranger do?

But her father had been a Sith. Ben wasn’t.

Quietly, she said, “Look if you feel you have to, Ben. And you’ll see that I’m telling you the truth.”

“I am going to look. And if you are telling the truth, it would be a first,” Ben muttered. That wasn’t entirely accurate, and both of them knew it. Vestara hadn’t always lied. Sometimes the best deceptions had the most truth in them.

The thought hurt, in an odd way.

She turned her face to her wall and braced herself for the shame and ridicule that were certain to come.

Vestara hadn’t had a lot of time to cover her tracks, which was fortunate. Even though she was relatively new to the technology he’d grown up with, and they hadn’t given her much chance to explore the Jade Shadow unsupervised, the young Sith woman was highly intelligent and keenly observant. If she’d had more than a moment or two, Ben was certain that Vestara would have figured out a way to permanently delete the files or corrupt them so that whatever she’d been doing would never be discovered.

He fumed as he worked, digging deeper into the levels of security to recover the data. He had wanted so badly to trust her. He knew that his dad was at least partially right: Ben was attracted to—okay, maybe even smitten with; just a bit, though, not enough to impair his judgment—Vestara Khai. He wanted her to be redeemable. But maybe Luke was right. Maybe Ben saw in that lovely