"A kitten?" she gasped. The kitten mewled as if to answer her question. Luella smiled at the gentle creature. Far too innocent and dependent. "Where did you find her?"
Her hands grasped at the furs as she half pushed herself up, turning her head back around toward Tharen. Her back twinged, but it was muted. She felt a paw on her hips, and Az made a tsking sound, before the kitten was gathered up in his arms and placed over her other side, so as to not disturb her healing body.
"I couldn’t leave her. We found her in the castle. She was in our way." Tharen’s eyes flicked to Az’s.
Luella felt as though that was not the full story. "But you will keep her?"
"That’s up to the King," Tharen said.
They all looked to the male in question, and Luella couldn’t stop her eyes from growing wide with desire to keep this small, innocent thing with them. She found she wanted to have a creature depend on her for once, instead of doing all the depending.
"The Prima has a habit of rescuing lost things." Vale’s green eyes left invisible burns on her exposed flesh; she could never hide from him, and his words spoke of more than just sprites and kittens. "Do not let his indifference fool you, darling." He let out a low hiss that made the kitten’s golden eyes darken with wariness. "It can stay."
She watched the kitten place her front paws on Az’s thighs, as if testing him. Her small head lowered, brushing against the demon once he was deemed satisfactory.
"She needs a name," Bastian supplied.
Luella found herself looking at Tharen again—she always did that, it seemed.
The mage’s eyes narrowed. "Give her a name, lamb. She might like you more than me. It’s your soft heart that appealed to Vale, but you might want to keep her in your sights. Dragons eat kittens—and lambs," he added.
One by one, the Prima rebuilt his walls of stone, locking her away.
Holding his eyes, Luella mused, "Raven."
"Raven?" Az murmured, large hands nearly eclipsing the kitten as she kneaded the furs by his thigh.
The fever made her bold, but sleepiness made her eyes half-lidded as she glanced to the raven shifter, whose eyes had never left her. She wondered if they ever would. "The shade of her fur reminds me of your feathers, Graves…"
Graves’s hands clenched at her words.
Tension was thick in the air until…
"You name her after him when I’m the one who found her?" Tharen’s words were a barely controlled explosion of dominance.
She tried to hide her smile, but failed. An invisible piece of stone that encased his heart fell around him, toppling to the ground.
"I’ll call her… Ven." Luella sighed as she looked at the kitten, wishing every moment could be so pure and light as this.
This soft, stolen moment. It was neither soft nor stolen, however. Strained and taken. The air in Vale’s den was terse and tinged with fever, and it was not stolen with liberation but taken by their hands, carved into the fabric of their fate by bloodied fingertips and wet, stormy clouds.
But here, now… she felt a small, splintered piece of her—one that she had wondered would ever heal—soothe over, just a bit. As if someone had placed a golden balm over the cracks ofher soul, healing it. The cracks were still there, still hurting, still threatened to splinter outward if she moved too much, thought too deeply, but it was a start. A small, shivering, delicate thing, wrapped in the bloodied innocence of her wings and built upon the soured foundation of her hidden lineage.
The terseness to the air returned as moments of silence passed, and finally, with evident reluctance, Tharen reached for his cloak, discarded on the stone ground by his legs. From inside a hidden pocket, he pulled out two things that made her brows raise.
A small, purple, leather-bound book—nameless. And a crumpled note.
The mage all but slammed the two items down on the furs, making Ven jump slightly, stopping her kneading with a low hiss.
Luella swallowed, feeling the dryness in her mouth creep back to attention.
"I got theCompendium of Fatesbefore we left the castle." Tharen tapped a long finger atop the leather cover, the sound deafening in the sudden quiet.
"Where did you—when did you—" she stammered, feeling caught and helpless.
"Did you really think I didn’t know when you got it? When I stumbled into you in the halls that night?" Tharen arched a brow, firelight casting shadows on the hollows of his cheeks.
"Luella, who do you think put the Compendium in the library?" Vale inquired lowly. "The Fates? My father, the prior King of Serpentis, perhaps? Or did you know, somewhere deep down in the pit of your stomach, that we knew it was there all along, because we put it there." A dark, cruel grin touched upon his lips, and with the cloak bundled around his shoulders, a small triangle of muscled, tanned skin exposed where it was clasped at his neck, she saw him as the cruel King he wasproclaimed to be. In this moment, not the male who murmureddarlingto her and forced her beyond her limits, believed in her powers.
