“Who was it?” Sean asked, his hands clenched at his sides.
“I don’t know,” she answered, voice weak. “He was a deva. Tall and thin. Dark hair. I didn’t recognize him.”
He sat on the corner of her cot. “Did he say why?”
Anna stared at her hands fidgeting in her lap. “He called me Princess and said I was on the wrong side.”
Brow creased, Sean glanced at David, but David only shrugged. Hours of research on mind apparitions and the royal genealogy of Luxoria had resulted in nothing. He had no clue what any of it meant.
“This is for the Savior,” Anna murmured, barely audible. “That’s what he said.”
Sean’s outrage detonated through the room, through theirconnection, and he jerked to standing. Anna winced, clutching at her chest. “Please calm down,” she said.
“Calm down?” he demanded. “Did he say anything else?”
She sighed, looking so drained, so tired. “Long live Caden Sidera.”
David’s own anger slunk beneath Sean’s, cold and quiet, a snake poised to attack. Sean, however, was a lion’s roar—sudden and deafening, impossible to ignore. “I’m going to kill him,” he said.
Anna’s grimace only grew. “Sean, please. Can you— You need to calm down.”
He opened his mouth as if to argue, but David cut him off. “You’re hurting her.Calm down.”
Angry expression easing away, Sean stole a deep breath into his lungs.
“Take a minute,” David said to him. “I’ll stay with her.”
Anna shot him a pained frown as if his presence wasn’t any better, but Sean muttered something under his breath and exited the room, shutting the door firmly behind him.
She released a sigh. Sky-blue eyes moved toward him, assessing. “You saved my life.”
David wouldn’t call it that. He’d sat there while other people saved her. Zero, however, was the amount of energy he possessed to argue with her.
She inhaled a painfully slow breath. “Thank you.”
He swallowed.
“Someone—someone tried to murder me today, David.” She gazed around her, lost.
“We’ll find him. He won’t get away with it.”
“I don’t understandwhy. The man who did it acted like he knew something. Something I don’t know.”
“We’ll keep searching,” he said, annoyed by the roughness of his voice. “We can figure out who your mother is.”
Her gaze returned to him and her head cocked. “We?”
David pressed his back into the wall. “I’d like to help. I know you don’t believe me, but I do care about you, Anna.”
She stared, unflinching, while shards of that same broken pain he’d sensed the day he ended their tryst sliced at him. “Yeah?” she asked. “Did you care when you broke my heart beyond repair?”
His gaze dropped to the floor.
“Did you know how I felt about you?”
The golden grain of the wood called his undivided attention. “Yes.”
Her small gasp struck an agonized chord in his chest. “Is that why you ended it? Because I was moving too fast?”
