I offer him a small smile. “Thank you, Kolden.”
“Just promise not to throw another knife at me,” he mutters, jerking his chin toward the palace’s front gate.
* * *
“Orlaith!”
Cainon’s voice booms through the foyer, slamming me to a halt with my fingers stretched toward the railing of the grand staircase that leads to my suite.
I draw a deep breath that does nothing to quell the frantic beat of my heart, then turn to see him striding across the polished floor toward me. He’s a vision of wind and rain—cheeks flushed, his dark blue top soaked through and clinging to the tailored slabs of his muscled physique.
My gaze drops to his gray pants, a similar shade to that of which the Shulák wear …
My heart flips.
He has connections to the faith, that much is clear from his reliance on Elder Creed. But how deep do those veins dig?
Does he condone the slaughter of my people?
I swallow the bile burning a trail up my throat.
Brow buckled, his stare carves over me as he rolls his sleeves. “Did you just get back?” I catch sight of his lapis lazuli cupla caught around his strong, sun-brushed wrist, and my heart leaps into my throat, my own wrist burning with an emptiness I stab behind my back.
Shit.
“Yes, we ahh … we got caught in the storm.”
He pauses, frown deepening as he assesses me from a few strides away, and then he’s charging forward, snatching my wrist from behind my back, holding it between us.
He steps so close our bodies are flush.
Our breaths mingle—sharp and harsh, a crackle of tension snapping at my wet skin. “Where’s your cupla?” he whispers against my ear, the words too quiet to have such a grating effect.
Why didn’t I think to ask Gun to fix it?
“In my bag,” I rasp. “The latch broke ...”
Seconds slip by to the beat of my hammering heart while I stare at the buttons on his shirt. At my grazed knuckles bunched between us.
He pulls back, looking down into me, and rather than the expected wrath I was shoring myself up to weather, there’s concern swirling in his eyes. “You should have come directly back the moment it did. Anything could have happened to you. This is your protection,” he urges, squeezing my bare wrist. “Yoursafety net.”
I suck a bolt of air through parted lips …
Safety net.
I don’t want one of those. Not anymore. I haven’t since I stepped a toe across my Safety Line at Castle Noir. Not even with the newfound knowledge that themebeneath this skin is being hunted every second of the day and night.
Perhaps that’s been our problem from the start. Perhaps he wanted the naïve, scared, moldable girl he found barefoot and broken at Rhordyn’s castle, thinking he could bend her weaknesses into his own strengths.
But the new me doesn’t bend.
Isnap.
“It’s okay, though,” he says, brushing his knuckles against my jaw and flashing me a smile. “Nothing I can’t fix.”
Keeping a tight grip on my wrist, he leads me out across the concourse and through a small door on the other side. A coil of stairs drills us down into the bowels of the palace—an area I’ve yet to explore, though I know where we’re going the moment the distanttingof metal on metal hits me like sharp nails to my tired, unfortified brain.
I’m smacked with a smoky, metallic scent I’ve smelled before—on the southern border of Vateshram forest, and only ever when the wind blew a stiff northern breeze.
