“I …”
Creators, it’s like he stole my tongue.
Where did Pyrok scurry off to? A big, tipsy buffer between myself and this male would be really nice right now.
“I’ve got all slumber,” Kaan rumbles, and I swear his deep, raspy voice was designed by the Creators themselves to disable me. To tamper with my insides, rearrange me into a mindless idiot. “The rest of my life, actually.”
Fuck.
“I’ve seen some of your city,” I manage to blurt—not at all what I intended to say, but that thread of conversation was going in dangerous directions.
His other brow bumps up. “And?”
“Not what I expected.”
The corner of his mouth curls into a half smile that makes me want to squirm in my seat, picturing his face between my thighs, right here on this table for everyone to hear me scream.
“Are you giving me a compliment, Prisoner Seventy-Three?”
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
“I most certainly will,” he says, and I roll my eyes, reaching for the fresh mug of mead Pyrok must’ve told him I’d asked for before feeding me to this proverbial Sabersythe—the untrustworthy asshole. I’m just wrapping my fingers around the mug when Kaan’s hand whips out.
Grips mine.
Flattens it against the table.
In another swift motion, he has the sharpening tool poised against the linchpin, the rock in his other hand, and begins tapping it with shrill, tender hits that sweep a hush over the establishment.
My brows rise, and I picture everyone looking toward our closed-curtain booth as the pin slides free.
Kaan sets the tools down while I pull back my arm, cleave the iron free, then toss it through the window, watching it splash into the Loff. I close my eyes and rub my wrist, tightening that mental sound snare on all the other clamorous clatter I have no interest in listening to right now.
Probably ever.
A smile graces my lips while I relish in the melody of Clode’s fluttering giggle …
Welcome back, you crazy bitch.
“Awful trusting of you.”
“I trust my folk, and I’m eighty percent certain you won’t kill me now that I’ve saved your life twice.”
I open my eyes, smile gone as I look into his intense ember orbs. “Depends.”
“On?”
I grip hold of my mead and drag it close to my chest. “Your kingdom may be lush and full of smiling, happy folk, but I doubt you’ve experienced life under your brother’s reign. Are you complicit in the way he snatches children from their mahs at the tender age of nine?” I ask, cocking my head to the side.
All the color seeps from his eyes, leaving cold, sooty coals.
“A whisper of power and they’re immediately snatched from screaming parents and replaced with a bucket of bloodstone. Conscribed. Carted off to Drelgad where they learn how to speak murdering words, practicing on small, fluffy creatures. Ripping out that delicate part of a youngling’s heart that can never be replaced—turning them into true, tortured monsters.”
“Raeve—”
“Did you know,” I say, gesturing to the hole I sliced into the shell of my own ear, “that younglings confirmed as a null are held down and clipped? That this becomes a marker for vulturous folk who target them, coaxing them into Undercity battle pits with vacant promises of enough bloodstone to feed their families. Discounted folk otherwise forced to live in the Undercity. Where the air is too thick. Where there is no sun, and every slumber is a gamble on whether or not this is the time that you get woken—immobilized by a hushling squatting on your chest, gently slurping your brain through your nostrils.”
The wind begins to gust, tilling into a violent swirl that snaps at the curtain, Clode echoing my rage with a roiling song of sharp words and high-pitched squeals.
“Or worse,” I rasp with a clash of thunder, “that some skeevy, more powerful fuck might take liberties in the dark where innocence goes to die—all because your dear brother cares only about his plump, powerful army and how many charmed Moltenmaws he has in his military hutch.”
I lift my mead and drain half the mug in three deep gulps, wiping my mouth with the back of my arm. “If you are complicit with that,” I say as the wind churns my hair into whipping tendrils of black, much of the light sponging away, “then yes, I will find the courage to kill you despite your smiling city, this strange chemistry between us, and the fact that you’ve saved my life twice.”
Our stares hold while the air continues to wrestle with our atmosphere, the silence thicker than water. So much so that I think the establishment may have abruptly emptied.