He leaned forward by perhaps an inch, which was somehow enough to constitute the winning move in whatever this was.“You really did think I was pretty?”
Her eyes went wide.The combination of being caught and being offended by being caught produced an expression that Shade suspected very few people had ever been in a position to witness, and he was aware enough to recognize the privilege of it even as he pressed his advantage.
“Teenage you,” she said, her voice carrying the clipped, slightly elevated quality of controlled indignation, “hadterriblehair.”
“It was glorious.”
“It was tragic.”
“It inspired awe.”
“It inspiredpity.”She held the expression for exactly as long as she could manage it, and then something cracked beneath it and she laughed, a real one, short and reluctant and entirely authentic, and Shade felt it somewhere in the vicinity of his chest in a way that he declined to examine further.
He laughed too, low and quiet, and the fog seemed to absorb that as well, the sound pressing into the gray and disappearing without echo, and for a moment the cold and the ancient watching dark of the place felt further away than it had since they’d arrived.
Then a page turned.
Neither of them moved.Neither reached for what had, half a breath ago, been easy.The laughter dissolved back into something quieter, and the quiet had weight again, different weight than before, less guarded, but present.Significant.They stood in it together without speaking, the pages circling, the fog drifting, the cold unchanged.
And somewhere in the gray beyond the edge of where the light reached, patient as anything that had existed before the concept of patience was invented, the book listened to everything they hadn’t said and noted that down as well.
CHAPTER5
“There are moments when your life hangs in the balance and you realize sarcasm may have carried you farther than wisdom ever intended.”~Kara
The silenceafter the Troll King lifted his hand was worse than the threats had been.
Silence implied decision.And decisions made by creatures large enough to use boulders as decorative accents rarely, in Kara’s experience, favored the prisoners.Not that she’d necessarily had much experience with said creatures, but it just seemed like common sense.
She resisted the urge to step backward.Mostly because she suspected showing fear to trolls operated on the same principle as bleeding in shark-infested water, technically survivable if luck is on your side, statistically inadvisable, and not an experiment she was prepared to run today.
The king studied her with the focused, unhurried attention of something that had learned patience the hard way, across centuries she couldn’t begin to calculate.His black gaze moved over her like a hand tracing the surface of something he hadn’t expected to find interesting, and the quality of his attention, curious rather than predatory, was, somehow, more unsettling than contempt would have been.Contempt she knew how to navigate.Lots of her foster parents had held contempt towards her and the other foster kids, it wasn’t anything new.This was something else entirely.
“You carrytwopowers,” he said at last.His voice was low, ground-deep, the kind of sound that resonated in the chest rather than the ears.“Not just the witch power you claim, though I do feel that magic, as does the power seeping into my realm.A power you brought with you.”Accusation dripped from his tone.
Kara blinked.“Well, that feels prematurely presumptive.”
His black gaze narrowed by a fraction, the stone-cut lines of his face shifting with the expression like fault lines redistributing weight.“And a third not yet born.”
Every sound in the cavern died.
Not faded.Died.As though the air itself had decided to stop circulating while it processed what it had just heard.The drip of mineral water somewhere in the dark went still.The shuffle of enormous feet ceased.Even the torchlight seemed to hold itself in place, flames frozen mid-flicker in the sudden, absolute quiet.
And then Nick went feral.
Not metaphorically.Not in the way people said it when they meant someone had lost their temper or raised their voice.Actuallyferal—the distinction being audible in the sound that tore out of him, a growl so deep and so primal that the iron bars of the cage vibrated with it, a resonance that traveled through the stone floor and up through the soles of Kara’s boots.It was the sound of something civilized being stripped back to its foundation in a single moment, every careful layer of control shredding at once.
“No one,” Nick snarled, his hands wrapped around the bars, knuckles bone-white, his eyes burning with a gold so intense it threw light onto the cage floor, “speaks of my mate or child again.”
The words weren’t a threat.They were a line drawn in bedrock, and everything in his voice said he would burn whatever needed burning to hold it.
The Troll King turned toward him slowly, with the unhurried certainty of something that had faced down a great many things and had rarely lost the exchange.He studied Nick with the same quiet, assessing attention he’d turned on Kara, and then, terrifyingly, inexplicably, he smiled.
Not cruelly.Knowingly.
The distinction, in Kara’s mind, was everything, and this one hit her squarely in the sternum.Cruel she could argue against.Knowing implied the king held information about the current situation that none of them did, and that was a significantly more dangerous position to be standing across from.
“Wolf,” he rumbled, his voice carrying the patience of something that had watched many storms and weathered every one, “if I meant them harm, you would already be mourning.”
