Page 13 of Wicked Endeavors

“I am.”

“And yet here you are,” she drawled, “not accompanying him.”

“I saw you board the ship,” Bas said. As if he realized the combination of those words and his stance might come across as threatening, he stepped to the side with his hands behind his back like a soldier at ease. The stairs beckoned her to freedom, but she was rooted to the spot. “The pendant you’re wearing… where did you get it?”

Caya’s hand flew to the dolphin still nestled in the dip of her collarbone. “Why?”

“I collect them. It’s…” A smile flashed across his face. It lit his expression, until he wasn’t simply handsome but distractingly so. “It’s a hobby of mine.”

“Is it.” Her tone was too venomous to be polite. “That’s a strange hobby for a boy from a landlocked city.”

He stared at a point just over her shoulder. “I was born in Esquivel and raised in Coventry. Right here in Rojanea, actually.”

A server cut around them, three covered trays in her arms. Silence stretched so far it would have been uncomfortable if Caya hadn’t been seething. Bas had offered no further explanation, but something about the fact that he still claimed Coventry despite burning it to the ground made her want to strike him. She’d thought she had this under control. That this plan would give her anger the direction it needed to be more useful than toxic. But the longer she stayed down here with him, the more she could feel her concentration eroding. She couldn’t let her magic go with it.

“I don’t remember,” she said dryly. “Sorry.”

Caya expected him to stop her exit. Part of her wanted him to, so she would have an excuse to hurt him without breaking character. But he shifted farther out of her way, and she made it three steps before a shadow appeared at the top of the stairs.

Prince Tomás smiled politely at her, and then that smile deepened into something warm and intimate as he looked behind her. At Bas. Caya glanced over her shoulder to see Bas’s answering smile, and it felt as if she were the one interrupting something.

Here was the boy she remembered, shy and harmless.

Here was an ice statue of a man melting beneath the prince’s sunlight.

“There you are,” Prince Tomás said, weaving past Caya to reach Bas. He placed a hand on Bas’s shoulder and squeezed with easy familiarity. “I was starting to think you’d decided to swim back to shore.”

Bas’s hand covered the prince’s, as if he’d done it a thousand times. “Without you?”

“I wouldn’t even be offended. I know you hate these things.”

“I’ve sat through worse.”

Bas realized that she was still standing there, and his expression snapped closed like a clamshell. His arm fell to his side, causing the prince to turn and lift his eyebrows as if to say, Can we help you with something? It didn’t feel hostile, but Caya could read the dismissal in it anyway.

She escaped back to the deck, her heart beating at a confused gallop. Ruiz had told the truth about their relationship. Bas and the prince were important to each other in a way that went even deeper than she’d thought, which meant that if she wanted to hurt one, then she need only hurt the other.

A new plan formed in her mind, one far more dangerous and far more satisfying.

If, of course, she could get Ruiz to agree to her terms.

YOU WANT MY HELP? MY SWORD? THEN I WANT Prince Tomás, too.”

Caya had made this declaration five minutes ago. Now she paced the length of Ruiz’s study, wearing down the carpet, while he sat in an armchair in front of the cold fireplace drinking his lukewarm tea in silence.

It was a wood-paneled, windowless room with two doors on either side of a black walnut desk. Each wall was decorated with shelves lined with books, and there was a family portrait directly across from the entrance: Ruiz beside a woman with laugh lines by her eyes and mouth, almond skin, and dark curly hair that spilled down her back, and a young boy dressed in white, dark-haired and dark-eyed. Cushioned chairs flecked the floor, one behind the desk, one by the right bookshelf, and two more in the center. Beneath them was a plush rug the color of a sunset.

A makeshift table had been erected beside Ruiz, on which rested a silver tray with a teapot, a bell, and a second, empty cup. He had been quiet for so long that she could hear her own heartbeat, reverberating through her borrowed body. The clink of his spoon atop the tray had made her stomach churn. It was still churning too much for her to try to keep anything down.

At last, he said, “I thought you wanted Sebastjan.”

It wasn’t what she’d been expecting. But it wasn’t the response she’d feared.

“I do,” Caya confirmed. “Right now, the only thing he cares about is Tomás. I saw it myself. Nothing can truly hurt him as long as they still have each other.”

Ever since they’d returned to Ruiz’s rented manor, she had replayed that intimate moment again and again. Ruiz had told her that the Domingans worried about Bas’s influence over the prince, but what she’d witnessed hadn’t been influence. It had been affection, genuine and deep. The way Bas had melted into the prince. The way the prince had looked at him as though no one else existed. The way they had made her feel like a trespasser even in such a public space.

She’d thought that Bas had nothing but his life left to take, that he was nothing more than a servant of the Castellans. Now she knew better.