He angled his head, and damn if it didn’t freak her the fuck out to see how similar the motion was to her own habits. “No. What is it?”
“Just something I heard once.”
“You lie. You learned of it in the home world of the Fae.”
Maybe she shouldn’t have asked. Maybe it was too dangerous to have revealed this to him. Not for her, but for the world she’d left. Bryce halted her fingers’ drumming, laying her hand flat on the cool, smooth leather arm. “I only heard the phrase, not the definition.”
He surveyed her, sensing that lie as well, but something like admiration brightened his eyes. “Defiant to a fault.”
Still seated, she sketched a half bow.
The Autumn King went on, idly twirling the pen between his fingers, “I always knew your mother was hiding something about you. She went to such lengths to conceal you from me.”
“Maybe because you’re a sociopath?”
His fingers tightened around the pen once more. “Ember loved me, once upon a time. Only something enormous would have severed that love.”
Bryce propped her chin on a fist, all innocent curiosity. “Like when you hit her? Something enormous like that?”
Fire licked along his shoulders, in his long hair. But his voice remained flat. “Let us not retread old ground. I have told you my feelings on the matter.”
“Yeah, you’re so sorry about it. Sorry enough that now you’ve done exactly what she was so scared of all along: locked me up in your villa.”
He motioned to the windows. “Has it occurred to you that here, hidden from the world and any spying eyes, you are safe? That should anyone on Midgard have learned of your return, word would soon have reached the Eternal Palace and you would be dead?”
Bryce put a hand on her chest. “I totally love how you’re building yourself up as my savior—really, A for effort on that front—but let’s cut the bullshit. I’m locked up here because you want something from me. What is it?”
He didn’t answer, and instead twisted to adjust one of the settings on some sort of prism-like device. Whatever he’d done sent the sunlight piercing through the orrery’s assortment of planets.
A prism—the total opposite of what she’d done with her powers when she’d fought Nesta and Azriel. Where she’d condensed light, the prism fractured it.
She glanced at her hands, so pale against the bloodred of the leather chair. She’d been riding on adrenaline and despair and bravado. How had she managed to make her light into a laser in those last moments in the Fae world? It had been intuitive in the moment, but now … Maybe it was better not to know. Not to think about how her light seemed to be edging closer to the properties of an Asteri’s destructive power.
“Ruhn told me that you hole up in here all day looking for patterns,” Bryce said, nodding to the orrery, the prism device, the assortment of golden tools on the desk. “What sort of patterns?” She and Ruhn had enjoyed a good laugh over that—the thought of the mighty Autumn King as little more than a conspiracy theorist. What does he think he’s going to find? Ruhn had asked, snickering. That the universe is playing a giant game of tic-tac-toe?
Bryce’s heart twanged with the memory.
The Autumn King jotted down another note, pen scraping too loudly in the heavy quiet. “Why should I trust a loud-mouthed child with no discretion to keep my secrets?”
“It’s a secret, huh? So this is some controversial shit?”
Disdain warped his handsome face. “I once asked your brother to provide me with a seed of his starlight.”
“Gross. Don’t call it that.”
His nostrils flared. “What little seed he was able to produce allowed me to use this in a way I found … beneficial.” He patted the gold-plated device that held the prism.
“I didn’t realize making rainbows on the wall was so important to you.”
He ignored her. “This device refracts the light, pulling it apart so I might study every facet of it.” He pointed to a sister device positioned directly across from it. “That device gathers it back into one beam again. I am attempting to add more to the light in the process of re-forming it. If the light might be pulled apart and strengthened in its most basic form, there’s a chance that it will coalesce into a more powerful version of itself.”
She refrained from mentioning the blue stones Azriel had wielded—how they’d condensed and directed his power. Instead, she drawled, “And this is a good use of your time because …？”