“Watch yourself, girl,” Lorcan said. “Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not in a week, but someday you will trip up. And I’ll be waiting.”
“Really—you Fae males and your dramatic speeches.” She turned to walk away, a move she could make only because of the prince standing between them. But she looked back over her shoulder, dropping all pretense of amusement, of boredom. Let that killing calm rise close enough to the surface that she knew there was nothing human in her eyes as she said to Lorcan, “I will never forget, not for one moment, what you did to him that day in Doranelle. Your miserable existence is at the bottom of my priority list, but one day, Lorcan …” She smiled a little. “One day, I’ll come to claim that debt, too. Consider tonight a warning.”
Aelin had just unlocked the warehouse door when Rowan’s deep voice purred from behind, “Busy night, Princess?”
She hauled open the door, and the two of them slipped into the near-black warehouse, illuminated only by a lantern near the back stairs. She took her time locking the sliding door behind her. “Busy, but enjoyable.”
“You’re going to have to try a lot harder to sneak past me,” Rowan said, the words laced with a growl.
“You and Aedion are insufferable.” Thank the gods Lorcan hadn’t seen Aedion—hadn’t scented his heritage. “I was perfectly safe.” Lie. She hadn’t been sure whether Lorcan would even show up—or whether he would fall for her little trap.
Rowan poked her cheek gently, and pain rippled. “You’re lucky scraping you is all he did. The next time you sneak out to pick a fight with Lorcan, you will tell me beforehand.”
“I will do no such thing. It’s my damn business, and—”
“It’s not just your business, not anymore. You will take me along with you the next time.”
“The next time I sneak out,” she seethed, “if I catch you following me like some overprotective nursemaid, I will—”
“You’ll what?” He stepped up close enough to share breath with her, his fangs flashing.
In the light of the lantern, she could clearly see his eyes—and he could see hers as she silently said, I don’t know what I’ll do, you bastard, but I’ll make your life a living hell for it.
He snarled, and the sound stroked down her skin as she read the unspoken words in his eyes. Stop being stubborn. Is this some attempt to cling to your independence?
And so what if it is? she shot back. Just—let me do these things on my own.
“I can’t promise that,” he said, the dim light caressing his tan skin, the elegant tattoo.
She punched him in the bicep—hurting herself more than him. “Just because you’re older and stronger doesn’t mean you’re entitled to order me around.”
“It’s exactly because of those things that I can do whatever I please.”
She let out a high-pitched sound and went to pinch his side, and he grabbed her hand, squeezing it tightly, dragging her a step closer to him. She tilted her head back to look at him.
For a moment, alone in that warehouse with nothing but the crates keeping them company, she allowed herself to take in his face, those green eyes, the strong jaw.
Immortal. Unyielding. Blooded with power.
“Brute.”
“Brat.”
She loosed a breathy laugh.
“Did you really lure Lorcan into a sewer with one of those creatures?”
“It was such an easy trap that I’m actually disappointed he fell for it.”
Rowan chuckled. “You never stop surprising me.”
“He hurt you. I’m never going to forgive that.”
“Plenty of people have hurt me. If you’re going to go after every one, you’ll have a busy life ahead of you.”
She didn’t smile. “What he said—about me getting old—”
“Don’t. Just—don’t start with that. Go to sleep.”
“What about you?”
He studied the warehouse door. “I wouldn’t put it past Lorcan to return the favor you dealt him tonight. He forgets and forgives even less easily than you do. Especially when someone threatens to cut off his manhood.”
“At least I said it would be a big mistake,” she said with a fiendish grin. “I was tempted to say ‘little.’”
Rowan laughed, his eyes dancing. “Then you definitely would have been dead.”
37
There were men screaming in the dungeons.
He knew because the demon had forced him to take a walk there, past every cell and rack.
He thought he might know some of the prisoners, but he couldn’t remember their names; he could never remember their names when the man on the throne ordered the demon to watch their interrogation. The demon was happy to oblige. Day after day after day.
The king never asked them any questions. Some of the men cried, some screamed, and some stayed silent. Defiant, even. Yesterday, one of them—young, handsome, familiar—had recognized him and begged. He’d begged for mercy, insisted he knew nothing, and wept.
But there was nothing he could do, even as he watched them suffer, even as the chambers filled with the reek of burning flesh and the coppery tang of blood. The demon savored it, growing stronger each day it went down there and breathed in their pain.
He added their suffering to the memories that kept him company, and let the demon take him back to those dungeons of agony and despair the next day, and the next.
38
Aelin didn’t dare to go back to the sewers—not until she was certain Lorcan was out of the area and the Valg weren’t lurking about.
The next night, they were all eating a dinner Aedion had scraped together from whatever was lying around the kitchen when the front door opened and Lysandra breezed in with a chirped hello that had them all releasing the weapons they’d grabbed.
“How do you do that?” Aedion demanded as she paraded into the kitchen.
“What a miserable-looking meal,” was all Lysandra said, peering over Aedion’s shoulder at the spread of bread, pickled vegetables, cold eggs, fruit, dried meat, and leftover breakfast pastries. “Can’t any of you cook?”
Aelin, who’d been swiping grapes off Rowan’s plate, snorted. “Breakfast, it seems, is the only meal any of us are decent at. And this one”—she jabbed a thumb in Rowan’s direction—“only knows how to cook meat on a stick over a fire.”
Lysandra nudged Aelin down the bench and squeezed onto the end, her blue dress like liquid silk as she reached for some bread. “Pathetic—utterly pathetic for such esteemed and mighty leaders.”
Aedion braced his arms on the table. “Make yourself at home, why don’t you.”
Lysandra kissed the air between them. “Hello, General. Good to see you’re looking well.”
Aelin would have been content to sit back and watch—until Lysandra turned those uptilted green eyes toward Rowan. “I don’t think we were introduced the other day. Her Queenliness had something rather urgent to tell me.”
A sly cat’s glance in Aelin’s direction.
Rowan, seated on Aedion’s right, cocked his head to the side. “Do you need an introduction?”
Lysandra’s smile grew. “I like your fangs,” she said sweetly.
Aelin choked on her grape. Of course Lysandra did.
Rowan gave a little grin that usually sent Aelin running. “Are you studying them so you can replicate them when you take my form, shape-shifter?”
Aelin’s fork froze in midair.
“Bullshit,” Aedion said.
All amusement had vanished from the courtesan’s face.
Shape-shifter.
Holy gods. What was fire magic, or wind and ice, compared to shape-shifting? Shifters: spies and thieves and assassins able to demand any price for their services; the bane of courts across the world, so feared that they’d been hunted nearly to extinction even before Adarlan had banned magic.
Lysandra plucked up a grape, examined it, and then flicked her eyes to Rowan. “Perhaps I’m just studying you to know where to sink my fangs if I ever get my gifts back.”
Rowan laughed.
It explained so much. You and I are nothing but beasts wearing human skins.
Lysandra turned her attention to Aelin. “No one knows this. Not even Arobynn.” Her face was hard. A challenge and a question lay in those eyes.
Secrets—Nehemia had kept secrets from her, too. Aelin didn’t say anything.
Lysandra’s mouth tightened as she turned to Rowan. “How’d you know?”
A shrug, even as Aelin felt his attention on her and knew he could read the emotions biting at her. “I met a few shifters, centuries ago. Your scents are the same.”
Lysandra sniffed at herself, but Aedion murmured, “So that’s what it is.”
Lysandra looked at Aelin again. “Say something.”
Aelin held up a hand. “Just—just give me a moment.” A moment to sort out one friend from another—the friend she had loved and who had lied to her at every chance, and the friend she had hated and who she had kept secrets from herself … hated, until love and hate had met in the middle, fused by loss.
Aedion asked, “How old were you when you found out?”