“Or perhaps it was someone already close to you?”
Taryn flinched.
Elyria pounced. “Was it someone who made you promises? Who told you they belonged to you and you alone?” she continued. “If so, you can hardly hold me responsible for their actions. Though whatever would possess them to step out on you, I couldn’t possibly imagine.” Elyria’s smile was feline, lethal. “You’re such a treat.”
“You don’t even remember.” Taryn’s voice was quieter now.
“I’ve walked this land for two hundred and sixty-one summers. My list of satisfied lovers is longer than the Chasm is deep. You cannot possibly expect me to remember the name, face, and”—she flicked her gaze from Taryn’s hair to her toes and back again—“associates of each one.”
Elyria found the guard’s answering snarl deeply satisfying.
“That’s enough,” muttered Zaric, though he took no additionalpains to intervene. For a moment, however, it appeared as though that was enough. Taryn broke her stare, shooting her eyes to the floor, and Elyria turned toward the tavern doors once more.
“Whore.”
A greater woman might have taken the insult in stride, but Elyria was tired. She had just endured the feeling of her own skin melting under Raefe’s torturous touch. Her magic was spent. Her patience nonexistent.
Still, Elyria tried. And when the slur was repeated, when the word cut across her ears, sharp as a knife, she took a deep, steadying breath.
Then another.
It was to no avail.
Because thereitwas.
The darkness. The shadow inside her.
Alive.
Raefe’s torture had awoken it, and now it searched. It yearned. It begged to be unleashed.
And Elyria didn’t know how to stop it.
So, she did what any sensible person would do.
She reared back and punched Taryn, a sworn member of the city guard, square in the face.
The rest of Captain Zaric’s squad swarmed—as she knew they would. They descended upon her, pushed her to the ground—as she knew they would.
And when one of them smacked the back of her head with their baton—not once, not twice, but three times before consciousness began to leave her—Elyria smiled.
3
A BAD HABIT
ELYRIA
Golden eyes hoveredon the fringe of Elyria’s awareness, glimmering like stars through a fog. They beckoned her—familiar, distant. A dream she struggled to cling to, to hold, only for it to slip through her fingers like water.
Evander.
Elyria’s eyes flew open.
Her head pounded, a steady, walloping beat that echoed throughout her body, reverberating off her bones. Whether it was due to her fresh head injury, having overspent her magic, or the sheer amount of cider she consumed before the brawl broke out, she couldn’t say.
Most likely, it was a combination of all three.
The pounding grew louder, each drumbeatwiping the lingering images from her mind as her skull throbbed in rhythm with a nearby clanging. Someone was banging on the bars of their cell.
