“Thinking of going somewhere, Moonbeam?”
My head whips around, heart plopping into my guts at the sight of Kaan reclined in the booth—hair pulled back, loose bits hanging around his fiercely beautiful face. He’s dressed in a black leather tunic that fits his frame like a second skin, stitched together with thick thread, the lines accentuating the broad scope of his powerful chest. What little sleeves the garment has are cut off across his wide shoulders, his scarred arms crossed as he watches me from beneath an arched brow.
I suck a breath into suddenly parched lungs, filling them with his molten scent that makes my heart rally.
“Hmm?” he coaxes, and I realize I’ve been sitting here staring at him, cheeks aflame, dry mouth empty of words, marinating in the stiff waves of tension undulating between us.
“I …”
Creators, it’s like he stole my tongue.
Where did Pyrok scurry off to? A big, tipsy buffer between myself and this male would be really nice right now.
“I’ve got all slumber,” Kaan rumbles, and I swear his deep, raspy voice was designed by the Creators themselves to disable me. To tamper with my insides, rearrange me into a mindless idiot. “The rest of my life, actually.”
Fuck.
“I’ve seen some of your city,” I manage to blurt—not at all what I intended to say, but that thread of conversation was going in dangerous directions.
His other brow bumps up. “And?”
“Not what I expected.”
The corner of his mouth curls into a half smile that makes me want to squirm in my seat, picturing his face between my thighs, right here on this table for everyone to hear me scream.
“Are you giving me a compliment, Prisoner Seventy-Three?”
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
“I most certainly will,” he says, and I roll my eyes, reaching for the fresh mug of mead Pyrok must’ve told him I’d asked for before feeding me to this proverbial Sabersythe—the untrustworthy asshole. I’m just wrapping my fingers around the mug when Kaan’s hand whips out.
Grips mine.
Flattens it against the table.
In another swift motion, he has the sharpening tool poised against the linchpin, the rock in his other hand, and begins tapping it with shrill, tender hits that sweep a hush over the establishment.
My brows rise, and I picture everyone looking toward our closed-curtain booth as the pin slides free.
Kaan sets the tools down while I pull back my arm, cleave the iron free, then toss it through the window, watching it splash into the Loff. I close my eyes and rub my wrist, tightening that mental sound snare on all the other clamorous clatter I have no interest in listening to right now.
Probably ever.
A smile graces my lips while I relish in the melody of Clode’s fluttering giggle …
Welcome back, you crazy bitch.
“Awful trusting of you.”
“I trust my folk, and I’m eighty percent certain you won’t kill me now that I’ve saved your life twice.”
I open my eyes, smile gone as I look into his intense ember orbs. “Depends.”
“On?”
I grip hold of my mead and drag it close to my chest. “Your kingdom may be lush and full of smiling, happy folk, but I doubt you’ve experienced life under your brother’s reign. Are you complicit in the way he snatches children from their mahs at the tender age of nine?” I ask, cocking my head to the side.
All the color seeps from his eyes, leaving cold, sooty coals.
“A whisper of power and they’re immediately snatched from screaming parents and replaced with a bucket of bloodstone. Conscribed. Carted off to Drelgad where they learn how to speak murdering words, practicing on small, fluffy creatures. Ripping out that delicate part of a youngling’s heart that can never be replaced—turning them into true, tortured monsters.”
“Raeve—”
“Did you know,” I say, gesturing to the hole I sliced into the shell of my own ear, “that younglings confirmed as a null are held down and clipped? That this becomes a marker for vulturous folk who target them, coaxing them into Undercity battle pits with vacant promises of enough bloodstone to feed their families. Discounted folk otherwise forced to live in the Undercity. Where the air is too thick. Where there is no sun, and every slumber is a gamble on whether or not this is the time that you get woken—immobilized by a hushling squatting on your chest, gently slurping your brain through your nostrils.”
The wind begins to gust, tilling into a violent swirl that snaps at the curtain, Clode echoing my rage with a roiling song of sharp words and high-pitched squeals.
“Or worse,” I rasp with a clash of thunder, “that some skeevy, more powerful fuck might take liberties in the dark where innocence goes to die—all because your dear brother cares only about his plump, powerful army and how many charmed Moltenmaws he has in his military hutch.”
I lift my mead and drain half the mug in three deep gulps, wiping my mouth with the back of my arm. “If you are complicit with that,” I say as the wind churns my hair into whipping tendrils of black, much of the light sponging away, “then yes, I will find the courage to kill you despite your smiling city, this strange chemistry between us, and the fact that you’ve saved my life twice.”
Our stares hold while the air continues to wrestle with our atmosphere, the silence thicker than water. So much so that I think the establishment may have abruptly emptied.
“This strange chemistry, you say?” he asks, the intensity of his gaze sizzling a hole in my soul that makes it hard to breathe.
I shrug.
He reaches across the table, fingers brushing against mine as he grabs hold of the mug. I let my own hand loosen, and he brings the vessel to his lips, drawing from the opposite side while he studies me over the rim.
The ball in his throat rolls.
Again.
Again.
He sets the drink down with a heavy thump. “It has taken many phases to secure The Burn and build an armada almost strong enough to rival my kin, who’d already dug their talons deep within the stone and obsidian thrones by the time I found incentive to take the bronze. A war with Cadok or Tyroth will be catastrophic, but it’s only a matter of time. My brothers deserve the same mercy my pah received, and it will be served,” he says, voice thick with a daunting tone that casts a chill across my skin. “But it will be costly.”
Silence reigns while I chew on his words.
“You don’t mean gold …”
“I mean innocents,” he growls, and my blood turns to ice.
“Hire an assassin. Eliminate them without flair rather than a violent overthrow. I volunteer. Heartily. I’ll even do it for free.”
Then dance on their fucking corpses.
The tic in Kaan’s jaw pulses, a line forming between his brows. “There is no honor in this in our culture. A battle is either waged with brute force or between two Oahs upon a nullifying battlefield—though my brothers would never agree to that. Not since Rygun and I became Daga-Mórrk.”
My eyes widen, brows rise as my heart skips a beat.
Another.
That explains the weald.
The strength.
The—
“You’re—”
“Most importantly,” he interrupts, “they hold a strong, steady alliance forged in the womb that is unshakable. Dangerous. Deadly.”
I hear the silent message threaded between the rumbled statement. To attempt to take on the weight of either kingdom would mean war with both.
“A battle would puncture our world and scatter the skies with many more moons,” he says, dropping his voice to a haunting grind, his next words a sizzled swipe at my nerves. “It would pour flames across flesh. Drown many. Suffocate more. As you pointed out, a great number of those conscripted in The Shade’s and The Fade’s armadas are still younglings who should be running around barefoot, laughing and enjoying life. Less fluent than seasoned warriors, they would be the first to die—”
“Stop.”