He makes no move to take the málmr. He doesn’t even look at it.
“It was not lent, Raeve.”
The words land slow and hard, lacking the softness of his previous sentence, casting my skin in little bumps.
I shove my hand closer to his chest. “This means things I can’t give you.”
He watches me with the honed regard of someone inching toward a wild dragon, head tilting. “What do you think I want?”
I break from his stare and look through the window, seeing a tumor of gray clouds rolling toward the bay, light scribbling across the surface to the tune of crackling thunder.
A warm heart.
Offspring to carry on his heritage.
At the very least, someone who gets along with his swaggering sister.
I swallow, refusing to meet his gaze as I settle the málmr on the table and stand, shouldering my satchel. I edge from the booth and push free of the fluttering curtains.
Around him … sometimes words just feel inadequate.
Wind snatches my hair and tosses it about, Clode’s song a mix of tittering mania and high-pitched screams. Like she’s working herself up to slit the atmosphere straight through its bulging, electrical gut.
I feel somewhat similar.
I charge down the esplanade in a flutter of black fabric, not bothering with my hood, the sun blocked by a boil of gray clouds burgeoning toward me like some rumbling beast—the horizon lost to a hazy smear that appears to be falling from the storm cloud’s underbelly.
So unlike the earlier bustle, the esplanade is empty and still. So at odds with the rowdy thump of my boots.
My thoughts toil with the churning wind, that phantom heaviness sitting on my chest like a mountain, each breath a labored pull.
Sighing, I recall the way Kaan’s eyes lost all their warmth when I offered him back his málmr …
He was hurting. I know he was.
I could see it.
Perhaps I should’ve explained. Told him the last fae who saved my life did it to her detriment. That folk who care about me enough to put themselves in harm’s way tend to end up dead. He dodged that blow in the crater battling Hock. I’m not stupid enough to believe he could dodge another.
Life doesn’t pat me on the head and praise me for making connections. It thunks arrows through hearts. Stabs bellies. It makes damn fucking sure I know loneliness is the only acquaintance I’ll ever have, waiting until the roots of connection bore deeper than I’d like to admit before it rips out flesh and bone. Sheds blood. Stops hearts.
Hardens mine with another calloused layer of disconnect.
But to explain, I would’ve been forced to fish heavy, painful memories from that ice-covered lake inside myself, and I’m not doing that. Going within is eerie enough as it is. I’ve dumped all sorts of shit down there, adding to whatever else is already hiding beneath the surface.
Who knows what I’d pull up.
Probably my illusive Other, and I’m really not in the mood to wake with more tendons between my teeth, strung up to endure another whipping, completely oblivious to whatever trail of carnage was left in my wake.
Nope.
Not happening.
That’s what led me here in the first place.
If Kaan wants me to keep his málmr, he might as well slip his head through a noose and tighten it himself, then hang his weight upon the loop until he chokes. And though that would’ve been a balm to my burning rage just a few short slumbers ago, the thought now plows its fist through my chest and rips, rips, rips at all my important bits.
I need to get out of here.
Casting my stare toward the plateau where I saw the Moltenmaw land, I slow, frowning. The assassin tack I ordered would’ve been handy, but fuck it. Looks like I’m going bare.
I’ve got a dagger. And Clode. Once I reach The Fade, I’ll work out the rest.
I charge down a side alley that appears to weave in the right direction, pausing when a drop of rain weeps right past my ear and splats against my shoulder.
My heart stills.
Grappling with my internal sound snare, I make sure it’s the right tautness. That I’ve got the right sieve tucked over the opening—the one that allows Clode to slip through but prevents Rayne’s frosty, snow-falling sobs from penetrating my brain.
Keeps her out.
I cast my stare upward, and another wailing bead plunges toward me. I flinch as it collides with my cheek in an agonized splat, my hand lifting to sweep its weeping corpse from my skin …
What’s happening?
I study the wetness smeared across my fingers like the anomaly it is, the raindrop’s forlorn whimper cleaving a crack through my chest. Like she broke apart on impact, achingly aware she’ll never be whole again.