“Maybe I want you both,” Anna said, pushing against his cage.
A razor-sharp smile cut across his face. “You get me or you get her. You don’t get both.”
Anna pursed her lips. She was probably overestimating her value to him but decided to press her luck anyway. “If you don’t want to come, I’m happy to sacrifice my afternoons in the library to learn this.”
His distant emotional portrait split into two dominant forces: anger and fear. “Do you think I care? I already got what I wanted from you. You’re useless to me now.”
Ouch.She winced at the tweak of pain that caused.
Words. His offensive weaponry.
Anna shored up her defense. “Alright, then. Good to know where I stand.” She looked at Elenya. “Would you like to meet tomorrow afternoon?”
Elenya dipped her head. “I look forward to it.”
CHAPTER 24
SEAN
“You hit like a pillow!” Anna yelled at David from the edge of their training clearing.
He ignored her, then failed to evade Cathaire’s jab to the stomach.
Beside her, Sean cupped his hands around his mouth. “Are you dodging or just repositioning yourself to get hit later?”
That earned him a silentlook.
Anna sucked a breath through her teeth. “Oh, he didn’t like that one.” Louder, she added, “I think he’s just accepting his fate in slow motion.”
David took a visible breath, then managed to land a quick one-two on Cathaire’s chin.
Anna gasped. “You hit something on purpose! I’m so proud of you.”
Sean threw out a mocking cheer.
David cracked his neck and didn’t respond.
“He’s salty with me,” Anna said to Sean, the teasing shine gonefrom her voice.
“I noticed.” For nearly two weeks, training had been obnoxiously tense as Anna and David sniped at one another. At first, Sean hadn’t cared much, but as the days passed, he’d grown curious. “What happened?”
She huffed. “He’s mad that I like his mother.”
David’s head snapped to the side with a blow to his jaw, hard enough that Sean winced. His own face ached just imagining it. “I get the feeling there’s more to it than that.”
“Yeah. He’s a stubborn bloody sylph,” Anna muttered. She groaned as David fell to the ground. “He could have blocked that.”
“I still don’t get it. I can’t decide if he’s hiding his skill so people will underestimate him or if he’s using this as some kind of penance.”
Anna shrugged, her gaze traveling over the spectating crowd at the other side of the clearing, eager for bloodshed. “Maybe he’s aware of what they’ll do to him if they believe he’s actually competent.”
Sean’s mind slowed to a stop.
Why had he never considered that? These people hated David. If they believed him a real threat, Sean could only imagine how they’d respond.
But David wasn’t a villain, despite what they thought. Based on Lhynion’s memories, Sean wondered whether even Galadaine had been a villain. Nothing in those memories painted Galadaine in a bad light.
None of it made sense.
