He hated it.
The next time her hand brushed his, he grabbed her by the wrist. “Stop that.”
“Stop what?” she asked innocently.
“You know what I mean.”
“Actually, I don’t.” Her dark eyes seemed to peer into him, and he swallowed. But he refused to show that her petty tactics worked on him—he, the champion known to be a monster.
Plus, it was humiliating. No matter how much he wanted her flirting to be sincere, it couldn’t be, not if he was the only one who could use magick. Her ploys were no more than a desperate farce.
Alistair stood up, chair scraping against the stone floor, and stalked to the other side of the room. “I’ve lost my appetite, and I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”
“Fine. I’m tired, too.” Isobel marched over to the four-poster bed and slid beneath the covers. She grabbed his crossword book from the nightstand and bit the end of his pencil. “I want to finish this puzzle, though. I don’t like giving up.”
“Obviously not,” Alistair muttered under his breath. He sat down stiffly on the other side of the bed and stuffed a spare pillow between them.
Isobel moved it and rolled closer so he could get a better look at the book. “It’s four letters. It ends in ‘-ust.’ The clue is, ‘Even the strongest of iron dissolves into…’”
“Lust,” Alistair answered automatically and without thinking. Then he took a deep breath and growled angrily, “I meant rust.”
She snorted. “Remind me again how you’re supposed to be clever.”
“I don’t want to do a crossword. I want to go to sleep.”
“It’s not that late.”
“You said you were tired.”
“I am.” She faked a yawn and scooted herself closer to him. She rested her head on his chest. “Very tired.”
For a moment, his thoughts slipped. Maybe this was no farce. Isobel seemed relaxed. And she was so warm against him. He liked the way her hair looked splayed over his shirt. He liked how her hips—
No. This was too much. She would hear the pounding of his heart. She would know that Alistair was fake, that he was weak.
He siphoned a small sliver of power from the Dragon’s Breath, so when he spoke, hot steam blew from his mouth. “How can you stand it?”
Isobel jerked away from the heat and sat up. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Stop doing this! Stop pretending to … to…！”
Too mortified to finish his sentence, he pulled the covers away and bolted out of the bed. A Fear of the Dark spell made Alistair’s shadow stretch up the Cave’s walls behind him as though he loomed three times as large. The candles extinguished one by one until he and Isobel stared at each other in near blackness.
“Maybe you’ve forgotten who I am?” When he strode toward her, Isobel scrambled out of bed away from him. “Maybe you’ve forgotten what I’m capable of.”
She pressed her back against the wall and asked coolly, “If you hate it so much, why have you made every excuse to stay in the Cave with me?”
She was right, but Alistair would never admit that.
“I’ve replenished more than enough of my supplies,” he reminded her. “Which means you have exhausted your usefulness. You have no magick. You’re defenseless. Nothing is stopping me from killing you right now.”
His shadow slipped around her ankles and twisted up her body. She resisted, but when no amount of squirming would make the restraints budge, a look of true, unbridled terror crossed her face. It was exactly the expression that Alistair had hoped to inspire, exactly the one that he had been taught to.
The shadow wound around her neck.
But before Alistair could kill her, Hendry’s voice came to him. If you’re not doing this for me, who are you doing it for?
Alistair shuddered, even if his brother’s words were only figments of his imagination. Winning the tournament had always meant returning to Hendry, playing the monstrous role his family assigned him so he could one day leave it behind entirely. But they had murdered the only person who’d never wanted Alistair to be a monster at all.
Was this really what he wanted to do? Really who he wanted to be?
He swore and cast a Flicker and Flare. The candelabras around them roared back to life.
Isobel blinked at him in the sudden brightness. She didn’t move, even though she could have. The look on her face was wretched.
It filled Alistair with something uncomfortably close to shame.