The Jawarat didn’t care about her. It wanted someone to enact its will, to unleash a chaos she couldn’t stand behind.
So we have learned.
She shivered at its ominous tone.
“If we are to continue this ridiculous bond, you will neither influence me any longer nor share with me your hideous anger.”
Skies, she sounded insane, commanding a book. A sentient book, but still.
Our bond is irreversible. There is no “if.”
“No,” Zafira agreed, “but I can dig a hole and bury you in it, and you will never again witness the light of day.”
Neither will you, the Jawarat gloated.
She growled, “You know exactly what I meant.”
The Jawarat fell silent as it considered this, and Zafira dropped back onto the bed with a bout of pride, rising when a knock sounded at her door again. She ignored a twinge of disappointment because it wasn’t the soft knock she had come to anticipate. If it was Lana, that girl—
Oh.
She couldn’t stop her smile. “I didn’t recognize the knock.”
“Can’t be predictable now, can I?” Nasir asked, his gaze hurrying across her room before locking on her, a little too eager. “Can I come in?”
Zafira tilted her head, but after a beat of hesitation, she stepped aside and closed the door behind him. “That has to be the boldest question you’ve ever asked.”
A corner of his mouth lifted. “I can be bolder.”
Zafira laughed, and his eyes darkened in response. And then he was reaching for her, pressing himself against her, and swallowing her gasp of surprise with a kiss, leading her back, back, back to her bed.
He was cold. So cold, she felt the chill through her skin. She wound her fingers around his shoulders and pushed him away, her mouth ablaze with sensation, her pulse racing like a steed. She stared at him.
Say something.
“I didn’t think you would return,” she managed. She had been so certain his words were a dismissal earlier, worried he was afraid of her.
“Why wouldn’t I?” he replied, as if her question were ridiculous, and it stopped her from asking after Lana and Aya.
He caught her hesitance and quickly tipped a smile. “You’re like a room full of books. Every time I see you, I discover something new.”
His eyes were bright. There was something brazen about the quirk of his lips. Something too sure to his touch. He seemed to read her face as he had begun to do more often these days, and took a measured step back.
“Should I leave?”
No. But the word was too bold for this moment, so she knelt on her bed and gestured for him to join her.
“Sit,” she said, aware that Lana could walk in at any moment, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. She, the Lion, the Jawarat, the hearts—everything could wait. “Ask me more questions.”
CHAPTER 18
Every color that makes you. Rimaal, he might as well quit now and become a bard.
It was true, though. Color had held no value until her. She was everything Nasir was not. She saw her father die, stabbed in the heart by her own mother—a horror he never could have guessed because she took her pains and sorrows and funneled them into anger and rage and action.
Whereas Nasir was always tired and sad and … there.
He was drawn to her like a moth to a flame, and the closer he went, the more he burned—but what happened when a moth’s wings caught fire?
He trudged up the stairs, knowing they had to move soon if they wanted to track down that elusive vial of blood and find Altair. Nasir had never been to Alderamin, and he wasn’t enthused at the prospect. Nor did he think it was right to use Zafira for her affinity as if she were a tool at their disposal.
You’re one to talk.
He paused before his door and stepped, instead, closer to hers, pressing his brow against the ebony. He always knocked softly, so that if she was engrossed in something, he wouldn’t be disturbing her.
So far, she had responded to every knock.
And instead of setting him at ease and flaring satisfaction, seeing her filled him with a fear he craved and did not understand. A sort of dependency in danger of growing into an addiction.
Before he could skim the wood now, however, he heard it: the low murmur of a male voice on the other side, followed by the heady sound of her laugh.
His mind blanked. He took a quick step back, tripping on the rug.
Safin weren’t known for their chastity. Their debauchery and revelry matched none—any one of them could have charmed her. Khara, even a sand qit on the street was more charming than him.
She laughed again, so softly that it felt a sin to hear it.
Nasir stumbled into his room. Shadows unfurled from his palms before he could stop them, and he laughed bitterly from the edge of his bed, at the control he believed he’d achieved.
He exhaled slowly, flicking his gauntlet blade free before retracting it and repeating the movement again, and again. A killer, that was what he was. A blade made for ending lives. A monster on a leash. How was this moment any different from the last time he had been in Sultan’s Keep?
Anyone who could make her laugh so freely, so beautifully, was better than he could ever be.
But oh, how he wished he could act as selfishly as he felt.
CHAPTER 19
It was a bad idea to invite him to sit on her bed, Zafira knew. The gleam in his eyes made it hard to think and speak and daama breathe. He paused at the apparent change in her thoughts.
“You don’t even have to speak. Your face does it for you.”
He leaned close, brushing his fingers down the side of her face, and she sank into the familiarity of his touch, knowing every moment was stolen. He was the prince. Once this was over, he would remember that there were far more women in existence.
“Should I stop?”
Yes, she thought, but some part of her delighted at the way his voice broke.
“No,” she said, and brazenly turned her lips to his palm. She slid her fingers up the scruff of his jaw before gently threading them in his hair. His lips touched hers, warm and soft, foreign and familiar at once, and nothing existed save for him and her and this.
He eased her back into the pillows, and she fell drunk on the faint sweetness of pomegranates and the weight of him. A sound escaped her when he pulled back with a torn exhale and skimmed his hand down the length of her, lingering at her thigh.
“Wait,” she gasped. She was going to explode. Irritation flitted across his gray eyes, and she felt the sting of it as acutely as a knife.
“What is it?”
“If we do everything now, then—”
She had never seen anyone so still, as if even his heart stopped at his command.
“Then what?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said quickly. Her pulse pounded at her neck. She didn’t feel empowered as she usually did with him. She didn’t feel longing. She felt … debased. Everything felt wrong and she wanted to disappear.
“Interesting,” he murmured. He swept off the bed, and she saw a line of deep mauve on his robes that hadn’t been there before. “I thought you would never make the mistake of falling in love.”
Zafira went cold at the sudden change in his voice. The way it deepened into velvet. Confident in a way only immortality can provide. There was only one to whom she had spoken those words aloud: the Arz. There was only one who had listened from its depths. Who had befriended her as she had him.