Working alongside someone was a delightful novelty, someone she could trust, someone whose instincts and interests were so closely entwined with hers that betrayal became unthinkable. He seemed to regard her with a mixture of awe and adoration she found quite intoxicating, even when they disagreed. She could give him a planet and within a century the skim would be showing improvements, yields would be up, profits expanding. He could talk to the media so charmingly that share prices would rise overnight. Balem Abrasax may have had his father's looks, but every bit of his business savvy was hers; pure Abrasax acumen and a temper to match.

Their fights became legendary among their staff and retainers. Sooner or later smashed sheaves, broken chairs and overturned tables had littered their quarters in every refinery, alcazar and palace Seraphi owned. They were too alike in this way, they couldn't disagree amicably. The staff knew better than to interfere. It almost always ended in a Nectar bath. Him, damp with tears, sobbing and helpless in her arms as she smoothed his ruffled hair and kissed away the vivid red slap marks on his delicate face, her own hair riotous, sometimes with a handful torn out and with purple fingermark bruises on her upper arms.

"My boy," she would whisper into the graceful curve of his ear "my darling boy".

Sharing his mother with his siblings did not agree with him. Kalique he could tolerate, she kept her distance and tried to understand him rather than befriend him. Titus he could have cheerfully thrown from the highest point of the refinery he ran for his mother on Jupiter.

Sharing a father as they did with each other and not with Balem, they were very alike and fought and squabbled and laughed and whispered with each other in a baffling manner. Thinking of their father Balem found it hard to know when he had most hated the man; when he had sailed in and captured Seraphi's love with such ease, or when he had left her crying and heartbroken, even Balem's kisses and caresses unable to bring back the smile he longed for every waking moment of life.

Her will, that once detested document, had actually become a source of comfort to him. His siblings had of course had to be accommodated, and it gave him pleasure to leaf through it and see the prime properties that would be left to him, potential populations numbering in the billions and tens of billions, and even her favourite, a strange little planet, fairly near in fact to his Jupiter refinery, named Earth.

"My, my, brother, you're smiling", said Titus in his aggravating way. "Has it been a century since the last one already?"

Kalique giggled. Balem looked at his brother languidly and contemptuously. "No indeed, brother, but it has been at least as long since you were able to hold your head up in the board room. How are the properties you manage for mother? Thriving?"

Titus grinned. "Oh, I think you'll find mother has been most pleased with me lately".

Balem flushed, as ever unable to hide his emotions when it came to Seraphi. "You keep a respectful tongue in your head, boy". His eyes were filling again, and from the corner of his eye he could see Kalique's pitying expression. Intolerable. He stood and swept from the room, choking back an anguished sob, a battle he lost as soon as he was alone in his chamber.