I rose, slowly, and leaned across the table to match his movements, looking straight into his eyes.
“Is it treason,” I spat, lip curling, “to act against a usurper? Or is that just an Heir defending her crown?”
Raihn’s mouth twitched, just a little. “Good question, princess,” he said. “Depends on who wins.”
There he is, I thought.
This was real.
Then his smirk disappeared, that mask of rage back. The mask of the Nightborn King.
“Make no mistake, you’re lucky to be alive,” he said. “And the only reason we have to keep you that way is that blood of yours. So think long and hard about turning down this offer.”
“I don’t need to. You want me to open my wrists for you and give you my father’s blood so you can go find a weapon to wipe out my people?”
The thought sickened me. Actually sickened me.
“You don’t have a choice,” Raihn said, and this time, I almost laughed in his face.
Because with that little slip of his mask moments ago, now I knew—this was the act, and I wasn’t afraid of what Raihn pretended to be.
“No,” I said. “I will not do it. If you want to kill me and take my blood that way, then fine.”
Silence for several long seconds, as we stared each other down.
Finally, Septimus chuckled.
“It’s been a few weeks of high emotions,” he said. “Give her some time to think it over, Highness. It’s always so much less fun to force.”
13
ORAYA
Raihn knocked at my door just a few hours before dawn.
I knew it was him right away. I’d spent the rest of the night after that conversation with Septimus waiting for him to show up. That wasn’t the end of the fight. Any minute, I told myself, and he’d be at my door, trying to force me into this.
I was ready for it.
I didn’t get up, of course, when he knocked. Prisoner or not, I didn’t feel like rising to meet my own punishment.
Click, click, click, click, as the locks released. The door swung open. Raihn stood there wearing a dark cloak, a pile of fabric over one arm.
He tossed it on the bed—a matching cape. “Put it on,” he said.
I didn’t. “Why?”
“Because I said so.”
“That’s a shit reason.”
“Ix’s tits, princess. Put on the damned cloak.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, confused and trying not to show it. A few hours ago, he’d been all but threatening to torture me.
“I’m not sure why I’d go anywhere with you or do anything you ask me to,” I said curtly. “When you’ve already made it so clear you’ll just force me to do whatever you want.”
He sighed. “We can’t have this conversation here. Just put on the cloak and come on,” he said, raised his hood, and left the room.
I sat there for a few long seconds, then cursed to myself under my breath. Mother damn that human curiosity.
I put on the cloak and followed Raihn. He’d gone next door, to his chamber. He held the door open for me, then closed it behind us.
I had never been in this room. The apartment had been empty when I lived here as a child—Vincent would never let anyone but himself so close to me, considering the fragility of my human skin and the draw of my human blood. There were only two chambers in this wing, so keeping this one unoccupied left me isolated—safe.
It was a mirror image of my own—a small sitting room, a washroom, a bedchamber. I eyed the open door to Raihn’s bedchamber—much messier than I would have expected, the sheets and blankets a pile on the bed—and tried not to think about the fact that our rooms shared a wall.
Raihn strode to the other end of the sitting room, where two large windows stretched to the ceiling. He unlatched one of them, letting it fly open. A rush of dry desert air rustled his hair around his face as he climbed up on the sill, turned to me, and offered his hand. With a puff of smoke, his wings unfurled.
I didn’t move.
“Come on,” he said.
“Absolutely not.”
“We both know you’re going to agree. So let’s skip the part where we go back and forth about it. We don’t have a lot of time.”
“Are you asking me or are you commanding me?”
His mouth tightened. “Can I really command you to do anything? If you really want to go back to your room and sit there by yourself, you can do that too. Your choice.”
He pulled his hood up a bit more, the shadow over the top half of his face highlighting the smirk on his mouth, the strength of his jaw, the light pooling in the lines of the scar on his left cheek.
Mother damn him, I wished he wasn’t right, but he was.
I approached warily. He reached for me, then hesitated.
“May I?” he asked, his voice a little rough.
I nodded, trying very hard to look nonchalant.
It wasn’t the first time Raihn had flown with me. But it was the first time since… the end of the Kejari. The thought of being that close to him, the thought of allowing him to hold me… it…
Fear is a collection of physical responses, I told myself, trying desperately to slow my rapid heartbeat before he could sense it.
Even though this was a whole different kind of fear than the adrenaline rush of bodily danger. Harder to numb.
I stepped onto the sill, and he pulled me into his arms, one tight across my back, the other under my thighs. I wrapped my arms around his neck in a way that felt far more natural than it should have.
He smelled the same. Like the desert and the rush of the sky. The warmth of his body felt the same, too—firm and stable.
For a brief, terrible moment, we paused just like that. His muscles tightened, as if struggling with the instinct to pull me closer, to make this a real embrace. Such a subtle movement, but I still felt it, because my awareness of him was so agonizingly acute.
My attempts to slow my heart had failed, and Raihn undoubtedly heard it. My eyes fell to his throat—right at the angle of his jaw, where muscles flexed as he swallowed and turned his head slightly to look at me.
I didn’t want to meet his eyes, because that would have put our faces far too close together.
His thumb rubbed that single circle on my upper back.
“You’re safe,” he murmured. “Alright?”
He sounded a little sad.
And then he hurled us into the night sky.
He brought us, to my surprise, to the human districts. He kept us out of sight during the flight and landed in the yard of an abandoned building. As soon as he set me down, I took two steps away from him, eager to put space between us.
Our hoods had fallen back in the wind. Raihn casually replaced his and started walking to the main streets. “This way.”
“Where are we?”
I didn’t recognize this part of town. I’d been all over the districts, but this was near the outskirts of Sivrinaj’s borders—far even for us, during our nighttime training sessions.
“I want to show you something.” He glanced over his shoulder, the hood obscuring all but his profile. “Oh. And I brought these for you. In case you want to have some fun while you’re here.”
He held out two sheathed weapons—blades.