He huffed out a half laugh, half snort as he set an empty plate in front of her and transferred pancakes, then did the same for him. “No. Cooking is not my specialty. I snagged it from the kitchen.”
“Well.” Her features relaxed as she lifted her fork and waited while he poured syrup all over her pancakes. “Then I’m afraid this is as far as this goes, because I don’t cook either. You clearly need to be with someone who can make sure you don’t starve.”
No. He eyed her across the table as she bit into her breakfast. He needed to be with someone who cared about what happened to him. Someone who knew how to comfort him when he was stressed. Whose touch made him forget everything but her. Who craved him as much as he craved her. He needed to be with someone…exactly like her.
“So,” he said, shaking out his napkin, working for casual because he knew he could never admit all that to her without freaking her out. “I didn’t get a chance to ask you yesterday how you know the witch.”
She stilled, then swallowed the bite in her mouth and quickly reached for her coffee. “You mean Delia?”
“Was she the one in that house?” He cut into his pancake.
“Yes. She was a friend of my mother’s. She helped me escape when Kyrenia was attacked. I told you that before.”
“So she’s not a relative?”
“No. I’m not a witch, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He wasn’t. But it was nice to know she wasn’t hiding any trippy spells for later use. He lifted his coffee. “How did your parents end up in Kyrenia?”
She moved the bite around in her mouth, but apprehension slid across her features for just a split second before she swallowed. “My father used to be involved in Argolean politics. After a while, he didn’t agree with what the Council was doing to the refugees in Kyrenia, and as a show of defiance, he chose to relocate with them.”
Nick sipped his coffee. “He was a politician? What kind?”
Cynna hesitated but didn’t meet his eyes. And several long seconds passed before she said, “He was a Council member.”
Whoa. Yeah, that would piss the Council off. And made Nick wonder if a big part of the reason the Council had attacked Kyrenia was in retaliation against the guy. He didn’t put it past them to wipe out an entire city just to spite one person who’d turned his back on them.
“They’d been trying to force him out for years,” Cynna said, finally looking up. “He was only selected to the Council to appease the dark-skinned portion of the population, which has dwindled over the years. Most were slowly forced to the fringes of society as jobs slowly became unavailable, and many wound up in Kyrenia. The witches don’t discriminate.” She looked back down at her plate and cut into her pancake again, only now there was a hint of anger in her eyes and words. “Unlike the Council, they don’t see in shades of color, only the quality of the soul.”
He understood her anger. The Council didn’t like anyone who was different.
“Anyway,” she went on. “He stayed on with the Council, hoping to instill change. When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, he decided to relocate to Kyrenia and help establish a new government. My mother was a refugee there.”
“And she wasn’t a witch?”
“No.” She swallowed another bite, careful, he noticed, to keep her eyes on her plate. “Just someone who’d once lived in Tiyrns.”
There was more she wasn’t saying, about who her mother had been and her father’s involvement with the Council and how that had impacted the attack on Kyrenia. But something in Nick’s gut said now wasn’t the time to push her on it.
He slid his plate back and folded his arms on the table in front of him, hating what he needed to ask next but knowing there wasn’t any way around it.
“I need to go out there today. To Kyrenia. To see my people. They know I’m here. Yesterday, when I followed you, several saw me. I didn’t stick around to talk to them, but I know they have to be curious. If I don’t go, they’ll come here to find me.”
She lifted her coffee from the table. “How did you find me anyway?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just focused on you and knew where you were.”
“Have you always been able to track people that way?”
“No.”
“Hm. Another new gift.”
Yeah, it was. And he wasn’t sure how he felt about it. A lot of these new powers were pretty cool, but he didn’t know if that meant he was getting closer to breaking like Hades and Zagreus wanted, or if he was growing stronger and somehow might be able to resist that ultimate break.
The shadow energy came raging back, but he didn’t focus on it. Instead, he focused on her. “I need to ask you a favor.”
She set her mug down again. “I seem to be doing you a lot of favors lately.”