“What about these?”
His fingertips ran over the curve of my shoulder. Goosebumps rose on my skin, a chill trailing his touch. Then a twinge of pain, as he brushed the still-bleeding, half-moon marks Evelaena had left behind.
It was so shockingly soft that my rebuke tangled on my tongue. It took me a moment too long to say, “It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.”
“Nothing I can’t handle. I’m used to being hated.”
“No. You’re used to being dismissed. Being hated is infinitely more dangerous.”
I pulled my arm away, and this time, he let me go. “I won the Kejari, Raihn. I can handle her.”
Raihn gave me a half smile. “Technically, I won the Kejari, actually,” he said, and didn’t move, but he also didn’t take his eyes off me.
Evelaena was already very, very drunk. When I approached her, she released the hands of her child companion and held hers out to me, instead.
I genuinely could not bring myself to take her hands, but I let her drape them over my shoulders.
“Cousin, I am so happy you have finally come to visit me,” she slurred. “It does get so very lonely here.”
Not that lonely, if she’d Turned an army of children to keep her company.
She swayed a little closer, and I watched her nostrils flare with the movement. She had been gorging herself all night—there was no way she was hungry, but human blood was human blood.
I stepped away from her grasp, looping her arm through mine and holding it firmly, so that she couldn’t get any closer.
“Show me my father’s possessions,” I said. “I always wanted to see where he grew up.”
I wondered if the words sounded as unconvincingly sickly saccharine as they felt coming out of my mouth. If they did, Evelaena was too drunk to notice.
“Of course! Oh, of course, of course! Come, come!” she crooned, and stumbled with me down the hall.
I didn’t look back, but I felt Raihn’s gaze following me the whole way down the hall.
21
ORAYA
“Not much still exists,” Evelaena slurred as she led me down dark, crumbling hallways. There were almost no torches, and my human sight struggled to avoid the uneven tiles and cracks in the floor—coupled with the fact that an extremely drunk Evelaena had attached herself to me, it took a lot of concentration just to keep myself putting one foot in front of the other.
“But I kept it,” Evelaena went on, as she dragged me around a corner. “I kept all of it. I thought he might… thought he might come back someday. Here!”
Her face lit up, and she jerked away from my grasp. In the darkness, I tripped over a raised slab of stone and had to catch myself against the wall. Evelaena flung open the door. Golden light bathed her face.
“Here!” she said. “Here it all is.”
I followed her into the room. It, unlike all the hallways that we’d come down, was lit with a steady, golden glow—sconce lanterns lined the walls, all lit as if awaiting the imminent return of its occupant. The room was small, but immaculate—the only place in this entire castle that seemed to be, truly, in one piece. A neatly made bed with blankets of violet velvet. A desk, with two golden pens, a closed leather-bound book, a single pair of gold wire-framed glasses. An armoire, one door open, two lone, fine jackets hanging within. On the coffee table, a single spoon, a single saucer. One shoe, neatly placed at the corner of the room.
I stood there staring at it all as Evelaena flung her arms out and spun around.
“Is this it?”
I was grateful that she was too drunk to hear the complicated emotion in my voice.
“All that remains, yes,” she said. “He didn’t leave much behind, all those years ago. Much of it was lost when…” Her gleeful smile faded. A shadow fell over her. “When it all happened.”
She turned to me abruptly, her big blue eyes watery and glistening under the lantern light. “A mistake, surely,” she said. “That he would destroy so much when he left. This is why I kept all of this. Some of it took years to find in the dirt and rubble. I kept it. Cleaned it. Put it here, to wait for him.”
She picked up the single shoe, her finger dancing along the edge of the laces.
I paused at the desk, and the strange collection of random items atop it. One of them was a little ink drawing of Lahor—at least, what I thought was Lahor, but the perspective was from an angle I didn’t recognize, looking down at the city from the east.
“Is there anyone else here who knew him back then?” I asked.