Page 91 of Turncloak

He paused with his prosthetic hand on the doorknob. “How do you know that if we unmade time by two decades, we wouldn’t make things infinitely worse?”

Her hazel eyes were wide and warm enough to fall into.

“Hope,” she murmured.

The same word he’d used back in the Havenwood rendered him momentarily speechless.

“I don’t have to use your mother’s weaverwick,” she added. “Not if it makes you feel strange. We can find another.”

For a moment, Levan considered telling her he’d destroyed his mother’s weaverwick wand right after the Havenwood. But that would mean admitting he’d known of her powers all along, and everything was still so tentative between them that he simply said, “Thank you.”

“I meant it when I said I wasn’t undercover anymore, Levan.” Saffron climbed to unsteady feet. She closed the gap between them slowly, slowly, then all at once. “The Silvercloaks cannot give me what I really need: enough ascenite to turn back twenty-one years.” A hitch in her breath, at once seductive and raw. “I want what you want. And I’ll stop at nothing to get it.”

In truth, Levan found this equal parts hot and terrifying, which he supposed was historically Saffron’s sweet spot.

With only a few inches between their bodies, she lifted a hand and rested a palm on his chest—where his old brand warped and discolored his skin, where his heart beat frantically underneath. At the confirmation of his rapid pulse, a subtle curl of a smile plucked at her lips.

Desire flooded him as he felt the heat from her dramatic curves, as the low light made a halo of her pale hair, as he thought about everything this mage was, powerful and smart and funny and stubborn and ruthless and, deep, deep down, a soul whose trauma mirrored his own.

When she kissed him, he did not stop her.

He let himself melt into it, her lips soft as rose petals and just as sweet, and for several glorious moments the simple animal of his body took control. Her hands roamed his chest, his stomach, his lower back, leaving a spreading warmth behind them. When her fingertips grazed the fresh burn on his side, he hissed and bit down on her lower lip, which only seemed to spur her on.

Pushing her back toward the bed, he fought the inane urge to laugh as her calves met the trunk and she stumbled into a clumsy seat on its wooden lid. She peered devilishly up at him through long, pale lashes and unbuckled his belt.

Everything in him came alight at once, the anticipation raw and heady like the moment before the loxlure hit his system, but like the loxlure, there was an underpinning of dread, the feeling of impending doom, a warning bell tolling deep inside his body. He thought of trick steps and false bottoms, of the exact moment he realized he’d been lied to, the sick drop of it, the self-loathing, the fortress of mistrust growing higher with every betrayal, and he knew he could not do it.

Saffron felt the moment it shifted, stilling her hands.

The air between them turned brittle as glass.

He took a step back. Two, three.

“I’m sorry, Silver.” Levan rebuckled his belt, fighting the absurd swell of anger inside him—the sense that she had manipulated his basest urges for her own end. “I can’t.”

41

• • • •

Sex, Saints, and Solitude

Saffron wandered the streets of Atherin like a homeless velvine, searching for something, anything, to fill the void that had opened up inside her.

The night air was hard with winter chill as she meandered in the vague direction of Broad Row—perhaps a night of carnal pleasure might, at the very least, replenish her well.

Everything hurt. She’d imagined that her father’s words might fill the gnawing hole behind her ribs, might sate a craving she’d had since she was six years old, but instead it had only made her ache.

What did it say about her, that she could barely think about the enormous truths he had shared with her? What did it say, that she didn’t care about her place in the grand war between Augurest and Timeweaver? What did it say, that while she was willing to journey to Flarence in search of the Fifth Prophecy, the only thing she really hoped to find was a weaverwick she could finally use?

She would give anything, do anything, to see her father again. Her mother.

To run away into the warm, safe arms of the past.

The night rang out with the jubilant sounds of sex and revelry as she finally rounded the corner onto Broad Row. She craved release, craved escape, craved the simple intimacy Levan had not been willing to engage in.

His rejection stung more than she cared to admit—not just the blow to her pride, but an acute feeling of loss. She wanted so badly to lie with him as she once had, feel the soft caress of his fingers lacing through her hair as she slept on his bare chest. She had told him almost everything, the great truth of her existence, the plundered depths of her pain, and it still had not been enough to win back his trust.

Then again, wasn’t Levan right to not trust her entirely?