“I was too clouded by grief.”
“What?” Ahmare said as she came back at him with the blade.
There was a tug off to the side as she isolated a section that was closer to his jawline. When that was cut, she moved over a little. And again. Again. Again. Until what she was putting down on the mattress was tufts instead of a single, cohesive length.
“I should have known what my father was going to do,” he heard himself say. “I should have seen it coming. But I was too broken by her passing.” He closed his eyes as he remembered the decline that had led up to the death. “There had been something wrong with her stomach. She had stopped eating about a month before. If she’d been human, I would have said she had the cancer, but in any event, something wasn’t working right and there was no way to get her to a healer. In those last weeks, as she grew weaker and weaker, she didn’t even take from my father when he insisted on offering her his vein. I had been so proud of her because denying him made him insane, but I didn’t know she was sick. I would have chosen the humiliation and impotent rage I always felt when she took from him if it had meant she’d have stayed with me.”
Abruptly, he popped his lids open. “But that’s selfish, right? I mean, to want her to live no matter what it cost us both just so I don’t have to mourn.”
“That’s normal.” The female met his eyes. “It sounds like all you had was each other.”
“I think I wanted her to see me get my revenge. She wouldn’t have liked that, though. She was like you.”
“Me?” Dark brows lifted. “Here, tilt this way.”
He obliged, letting his head fall away from her gentle urging. Then again, he had a feeling if she’d asked him to cut off his own hand, he would have done so—and then made sure to clean her blade off before he returned it to her.
“She was a good soul,” he said. “A kind person. She didn’t want to do harm. Just like you.”
Ahmare laughed in a harsh way. “I spend my nights teaching self-defense. It’s all about punches and kicks, target practice and technique.”
“So innocent people don’t get hurt.”
“I suppose I’ve never thought of it that way.” She eased back and assessed her work. “Other side. And stay really still. I’m getting close to your skin—I wish we had shaving cream to soften things up.”
“There’s running water in that sink. And a bar of soap. Or at least that’s how I left this place when I built it.”
She lowered the blade. “You did all this?”
Duran looked around. “It was part of my grand scheme, and now just a relic to the best laid plans. My mahmen used to help me sneak out of our room. Every time she created a diversion and I went into air ducts, I know she hoped I would escape and never come back. My idea was to get her out, leave her here, and return for her after I was done with killing my father. Not the way any of it went.”
He frowned and focused properly on Ahmare. “You know . . . I never expected to tell anyone all of this.”
“Because it’s private?”
Duran looked away. “Something like that.”
In fact, he’d assumed the only person he’d ever open up to was his mahmen when they were reunited in the Fade—after he’d found some way of dying without committing suicide as soon as he killed his father.
That had been his ultimate endgame, that loophole in the whole if-you-kill-yourself-you-can’t-get-into-the-Fade thing.
Then again, maybe all that afterlife stuff was just like his father’s belief that you couldn’t cause the death of your own young and live on. Maybe it was just superstition. In any event, given what he had learned of mortal existence—and this was even before Chalen had gotten his claws into him—skipping his mortal due on earth for an eternity with the only loved one he’d ever had had seemed like a no-brainer.
But now . . . as he looked into this female’s eyes, he could sense himself making a shift on that one.
Ahmare kind of made him want to stick around.
Even though that was crazy talk.
14
THE SOAP AND WATER were a godsend, Ahmare decided. Without them, she would have turned Duran’s face into a Halloween mask.
“Okay, I think we’re done.”
She eased back—and could not look away from what she had revealed. During the shaving, she had been paying so much attention to not cutting him that she’d gotten no impression of his face. Now, with the overgrowth gone, it was as if she were meeting him for the first time.
He had hollows in his cheeks and his jawline was too sharp. Eyes that had been calculating and aggressive now seemed wary.
The lips were even better than she’d imagined.
“That bad, huh,” he muttered as he put the bowl of soapy water and the cloth she’d used aside.
Ahmare wanted to tell him that, on the contrary, he was attractive. Very attractive. Beautiful, in a word. But some things were better left unsaid.
Would that they had remained unthought.
“Will you shave my head, too?” he asked.
“Oh, God . . . not the hair.”