Page 14 of Turncloak

Of course, in the version of the Havenwood she’d unmade, she’d told Auria Marriosan the full truth of her assignment. As the two stood over Captain Aspar’s dead body, Saffron begged her former colleague to believe she was still working for the silvers, but Auria staunchly resisted. Saffron also confessed what had happened to Tiernan Flane, Auria’s betrothed, who had been compelled into taking his own life by none other than Levan. All of this had gone so horribly wrong that Saffron rewound those ruinous few minutes, and now Auria was once again in the dark.

Levan stopped dead, cloak swirling around his ankles. “What if I wanted you to reestablish contact? Feed them false intel?”

A small surge of victory. He was considering it. “Then that’s what I’ll do.”

His golden hand clenched, unclenched. “Why didn’t you cut and run while you had the chance? Your handler is dead, and you escaped Bloodmoon custody. You could have had a new beginning, away from the silvers and the scarlets both.”

Saffron allowed an intimate silence to swell and deepen before murmuring, “Because I want to be with you.”

And also to make great use of your apocalyptic hoard of wealth, et cetera.

To her surprise, Levan’s expression was one not of hurt or longing but of anger. Righteous, bitter anger—though directed inward or outward, she did not know. She imagined he was thinking of Alucia, of the stomach-drop moment in which he learned Saffron was the very same. Guilt twinged through her like a pulled muscle.

“That ship has sailed.” The anger smoothed away as quickly as it flared. He gestured to the stack of murder evidence without a trace of emotion. “And now you’ve handed me everything I need to destroy you. Or I can kill you, cleanly, and forget you ever existed at all.”

“Shortsighted—you’re too smart for that. The better play would be to keep me close, use me to evade and manipulate the Silvercloaks. Reestablish contact. Let them feed me information, believing me to still be their agent. You wanted there to be another way, beyond killing me or compelling me. I know you did. Here it is.”

Though Levan looked bland and expressionless, Saffron picked up his inner conflict in the subtle flex of his fingers, the too-stillness of his stance. He was visibly searching her proposition for the trick, the trapdoor, still snagging on the why.

“Everything between us was real, Levan.” She allowed a hairline crack in her voice, a subtle splinter of emotion. “If nothing else is true, that is. And if you no longer want me, I understand. But you can still use me.”

“Want is a complex word.” Levan’s left hand gripped his right wrist, just above the golden prosthetic.

“Does it still hurt?”

She studied his face for tension around the jaw, a narrowing of the gaze. She searched too, for a black tint to his veins—an indicator that pain and grief had driven him back into the snarled arms of loxlure, the most potent substance in Ascenfall. A substance to which he had once been horribly addicted. Her swift scans came up mercifully empty.

Levan dropped his grip on the wrist. “No, it’s fine.”

Saffron chuckled softly, though there was little humor behind it. “You’re lying.”

“I suppose you’re something of a specialist on the subject.”

Though the words were designed to sting, they were not suffused with heat. More of a grim resignation, a wound over a wound, a scar reopened.

“I was doing my job, Levan. You of all people should know what it is to put your family and your duty above all else. The Bloodmoons killed my parents. Do you blame me for wanting revenge?”

“No, I don’t blame you. I don’t feel anything for you at all.”

The words were as dull as a blunt axe through wood.

“Another lie,” Saffron parried easily. “And I should know, because I’m something of a specialist on the subject.”

No smile, just that rapidly calcifying suspicion. “The Saffron Killoran I know would not abandon a lifelong desire to avenge her parents for something so petty as love.”

Something twisted in Saffron’s chest. “So you admit that it was love.”

“So you admit that it is past tense.” Levan stared at a point in the middle distance, as though committing every pane of the intricate window to memory. His face was a blank mask. Anyone else might think him numb, empty, but Saffron understood that the stillest waters ran deepest.

I feel everything at full and terrible force. I just keep it inside, where it belongs.

As though some internal decision had been made, he lifted his wand.

Fear drove down through Saffron like lightning through a rod, and it took all her strength not to let it show on her face, not to draw her own wand, not to freeze time with praegelos and flee for Nomaden.

Instead, she lifted her hand to the spot between her collarbones where her old necklace used to sit. The wooden pendant carved from her childhood front door, which Levan had once re-enchanted back into color. She’d bartered it away for the painmaker that had saved Auria’s life in the Havenwood. That her palm sought its familiar comfort was not a performance.

A place for your hand to go when you’re feeling too much, Levan had once observed. He saw her do it now, and somehow, it broke through.