Gods and monsters. Which one was he, then?
“I can fix it.” There was no softness in his pronouncement. It was all claw and tooth. “I can give you another anchor, something to pull power from that isn’t the Shadowlands themselves.”
She looked up at him, lips peeling back, speaking through the muddle of pain. “You killed Arick. You almost killed my sister. You used me.” A shudder, a rip of thorns in her veins. “I don’t want anything you’re offering.”
His hand closed around her arm, fingers long and elegant, the silver rings on them burning as he pulled her up. His face was all sharpness, knife-slash brows over those infernally blue eyes and a snarl on his mouth to match hers.
“I’m not offering,” Solmir said.
He sealed his lips to hers in a bruising kiss.
Shock made her still, but Neve was aware enough to realize that this wasn’t an embrace like any she’d been in before. It was more battle than kiss—she could feel his teeth behind his lips, the press of his mouth as good as a sword.
And as he kissed her, cruelly, something within Neve… shifted.
The pain of thorns tearing through her veins receded, shrank to a prick, then merely a sting. The pounding in her head lessened by slow degrees, leaching away the longer her lips stayed on Solmir’s, the contact pulling magic out of her like tugging on the end of a coiled string. The emptying was both welcome and devastating, pain and power receding in equal measure. Her body felt more grounded as it went, more her.
Fragile and human, controlling nothing.
Solmir broke their not-kiss, but his arms still encircled her, holding her up in case she collapsed. He smelled like pine needles and snow, far reaches and open sky.
The look in his eyes reminded her too much of those months when he’d pretended to be Arick. When he’d played at kindness, at—
She shoved away from him, the heel of her hand striking against his chest. “What did you do to me?”
“I gave you a new anchor. Tied your power to me instead of to the Shadowlands. From now on, you want magic, you get it from me first. I’m your vessel.” He caught her flailing hands, his face impassive, holding her still. “Our deal was one hit, Neverah, and you’ve already landed two.”
They froze like that, his hands shackled around her wrists, her face anger-warped and tear-streaked.
His expression could’ve been mistaken for impassive from far away. But there were scant inches between her and the fallen King, and Neve could see the burn of regret and fury and something like sorrow in his blue eyes. Slowly, he let go of her, bent to pick up his discarded coat and tug it over his well-muscled shoulders. “I did what I had to do.”
We do what we have to do.
Neve wrapped her arms around her middle, thinking again of how he’d been back on the surface. He’d acted like he cared for her, and she’d been stupid enough to believe it. It had been a ploy—she knew that now. A way to gain her trust. She wanted to ask him about it, ask him why he hadn’t just been content to wear Arick’s face, why he’d had to make it something so wounding. The only people who’d cared for her then had been Raffe and Arick, and to know that Arick’s caring hadn’t been real—hadn’t been Arick—bored a hole through her.
“You killed Arick,” she growled. “You don’t get to use his words.”
“They were never his.” Solmir’s eyes glittered. “They were mine.”
It was an opening. Almost an invitation to ask, to find out what he’d meant by his kindness, his care. Neve didn’t take it. She didn’t want to know.
She swallowed against a barbed throat. “Is my sister alive?” She had a vague memory of seeing Red through smoky glass, but it wasn’t enough to trust, and she needed to hear it from his mouth. “If she’s not, I will kill you—truly kill you, not make you fly apart into magic smoke. And if I have to drag your ass to the surface to do it, I will.”
“She’s alive.” He gave her a tiny nod. “We’ll need her, I think, if this is going to work.”
Neve’s brow furrowed. “If what is going to work?”
“Killing the Kings, of course.” A jagged grin curved Solmir’s mouth. He turned, ambling back through the trees in the direction she’d run from, as if confident she would follow. “Funnily enough, dragging asses to the surface is exactly what we’re going to do.”
All in all, she hadn’t run very far. The tower loomed just beyond a thin lacing of inverted trees, visible through their leafless branches.