Page 101 of Winter Gods & Serpents

“Don't look at me like that, martyrdom is not my style. Whatever you are contemplating over, is only your wrong conclusions.”

“I am not looking you in anyway,” he answered blankly.

“You, Kilian, have a total of three facial expressions: the angry, the disgusted and this last one, which I refuse to take the liberty and call it pity because that is what I despise the most.”

He stared at me through pinched features, like he was about to solve an enigmatic puzzle. “There is no pity.”

“That indeed is the motto of your kind, but I have seen pity enough to easily recognize it.”

“You are wrong,” he said standing. He put his jacket back on, turning to me again, running his stare shamelessly all over half naked me. “I’d suggest you stop this sport of testing the most unusual spots to sleep and just settle in your bed, inside, where your limbs don’t freeze.”

How dare he? “And I’d suggest you pull your eyes out, but hey, each to their own.”

He dared to huff a scoff shaking his head. “Dahaara.”

Had he just cursed me in his retched tongue?

“The men who attacked us lied to you and you lied to me.”

He halted just before reaching the door. “I did.”

“Why?”

“Why not? I am your guard, not your henchman.”

“Yet you told Cai.”

He turned then, all fury. He was a scary man, now he’d become something of fright. “I told him not to tell you till you healed. I figured you cracked this one yourself.”

“Flattered, truly,” I said, standing. “But you’re my guard not my friend, less alone one to make decisions on my behalf.”

“They would have not told you anything different. They’d already made peace with their deaths.”

“Would you like to know whose bidding they were doing?” I knew he didn’t want to hear it, expecting to find out the bitter truth of his people.

“They were there to hurt you, it doesn’t matter whom for they were doing it.”

“Worry not, it wasn’t Adriata but my father.”

His dark brows gathered all shock. “What?”

“That was why, Kilian darling, you should have told me.”

He narrowed his stare utterly confused, possibly doubting my words a lie from the doubtful tone of his voice when he asked, “Why would he send someone to hurt you?”

His eyes traced my slow movement towards the room. “Had you not lied to me, perhaps you would know too.” I pushed the straps of my nightgown down and just before it fell off me he turned around and left.

Nia followed shortly after with a lot of persistence, scared that he might have done more than healed.

“Are we dead, Snow?”

“You are,” I said to myself, my dry voice bouncing over the emerald tiled bathroom and over the sweet flower-scented water. “You are, you all are.”

Words I had never admitted to myself, an answer that I had always avoided even giving myself. I sank beneath the hot surface of the bath. Image after image of that night flashing in front of my darkened sight.

Chapter 21

Truths and Frost