“How?”
He looked at me. “By winning the Tournament of Blades. Nothing makes Victor prouder than having a Draconi win, whether it’s Deah or Blake or one of the guards. If you won, you would spoil the whole tournament for him. You would finally get to take away something he cares about.”
“For a change,” I muttered.
“Yeah. For a change.”
Devon removed the ice from my knuckles and handed me a cold bottle of water before grabbing one for himself. I mulled over his words. It would be satisfying to take something away from Victor, even if it was just winning the tournament. At the very least, it would prove that the Draconis didn’t always get exactly what they wanted whenever they wanted it—at least for one day and in this one small way.
“All right,” I said. “You’ve convinced me. I’ll do my best in the tournament. Cross my heart and everything.”
I drew an X over my heart, and Devon grinned again, the hot spark shimmering in his green eyes warming me from the inside out the way it always did. I dropped my gaze from his and took a long swig of my water, trying to cool off in more ways than one.
“So you’ll do your best in the tournament, and Felix will do his best to juggle two girls at once,” Devon snarked.
I laughed and almost spit out a mouthful of water. I gave Devon a mock glare. “You did that on purpose.”
His grin widened. “Would I do something like that?”
“Absolutely.”
He laughed. “Okay, okay. So I did do it on purpose. Just to cheer you up. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true about Felix, Deah, and Katia.”
I snorted. “Oh, I doubt that Deah will let Felix juggle her. You should have seen how upset she was tonight when he came to the Draconi compound. Like it or not, she really does care about him.”
“I know,” Devon said. “I’ve seen the way she looks at him when she thinks no one’s watching. But Katia likes him too. She was crazy about him last year.”
“And what about you? Do you have a summer love who’s come back to town for the tournament?” I teased, although my stomach felt strangely heavy as I said the words.
“Nope.” He paused. “There was a girl once, though.”
My heart squeezed tight in my chest, but I forced myself to ask the inevitable question. “And what was she like?”
He shifted in his lawn chair and stared out over the railing, his eyes locked on some spot far, far away in the Midway. “Well, we didn’t actually get a chance to talk. All I really remember is that she had the most amazing blue eyes I’d ever seen.” He looked at me. “And she still does.”
Despite all the water I’d drunk, my throat felt as dry as a dirt road in the summertime. He was talking about the day we’d first met, when my mom had saved him from being kidnapped by the Draconis.
Every time I thought that I’d put some distance between us or done something that would piss him off for good, Devon came right back at me with something like that—something so sweet and so thoughtful and so damn sincere that it melted my defenses in a heartbeat. He didn’t need his compulsion Talent to make me like him. He didn’t need any magic at all.
He did it just by being himself.
But I was me, and I didn’t do feelings. I didn’t do attachments, and I especially didn’t do relationships. Not since my mom had been murdered. I was a thief. I knew better than anyone else that it was much, much safer to keep my heart locked up tight, instead of putting it out there on display for everyone to see, where it could so easily be stolen—or broken again.
Devon kept staring at me, but I didn’t let my eyes meet his. I didn’t want my soulsight to kick in and show me everything he was feeling. Or how his emotions mirrored my own.
Instead, I chugged down the rest of my water and got to my feet. “Well, I should get some sleep. Tomorrow will be a busy day with the tournament. I need to rest up if I want to have any chance of winning.”
“Yeah,” Devon said, not bothering to hide the disappointment in his voice. “Busy.”
He got to his feet as well. I gave him a small, nervous smile, still not looking into his eyes, then hurried around him, went over to the drainpipe, and climbed back down to the safe, lonely emptiness of my room.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“This is ridiculous,” I grumbled. “Completely, utterly ridiculous.”
White feathers fell down in my face. I huffed out a breath, trying to blow them out of my eyes, but the feathers dropped right back down to where they’d been before. Annoyed, I reached up, yanked several of them out of the brim of my black cavalier hat, and stuck them in a nearby trash can. The motions made my black cloak billow out around my shoulders before dropping neatly back into place, while my black, knee-high boots creaked with every step I took. Tight black pants and a sleeveless white silk shirt completed my ridiculous ensemble.