Page 54 of Veil of Night & Flames

I take it, and a rush of desire shoots through me, warming me. Exciting me. And making me very aware of the heat building between my legs.

I turn back, suddenly afraid I’m trapped here, but there’s the door frame, alone in the sand like a sculpture someone abandoned at the edge of a beach.

Adric closes the distance between us in two strides and pulls me against him.

He doesn’t kiss me. He holds me close, letting me feel just how much he wants me, and his restraint is what cracks me open. Because I want him desperately, even though I’m so angry at him I can barely breathe. Which, frankly, is infuriating.

I plant my hands on his chest and push back enough to look at him.

“I watched you order six men to die.” I mean to shout the words—to batter him with the horror in my voice—but instead my words are a whisper, heavy with the memory of what I’d witnessed.

His face doesn’t change, but his posture stiffens, as if in some grim way, he’s been waiting for a throw-down.

“You are my betrothed. You needed to see it.”

“Needed? The hell I did. And I didn’t just see it. You made me part of it. A fucking prop. An exhibit.” My voice is shaking. “You used me to send a message, and you didn’t even give me a hint of warning. And then you ordered Kali to kill them like you were asking her to take out the garbage, and⁠—”

I snap my mouth shut.

He says nothing. Just stands there waiting for me to continue.

“And you didn’t even have the balls to do it yourself,” I finish, my voice hard and sharp as I finally say the thing that’s been sitting in my gut since the courtyard.

I expect him to flinch. To defend himself. To get cold and kingly and tell me I don’t understand how things work in his realm.

Instead, he looks me in the eye. “Is that what you saw? Clean hands?”

“It’s what you did.”

He shakes his head. “I will not let you carry a comfortable version of me when the truth is worse.”

His hand is still at the small of my back, not gripping, just there. “Those men are mine. Their deaths are mine. I decided their fate, and there is no realm or court or god that I would let take a single ounce of that weight off me. I do not have clean hands, Cora. I have never had clean hands.”

“The hell you don’t. Kali’s the one who used the damn blade.”

“Because me holding the blade would have been a mercy.”

“Oh, please.” My voice is almost a sneer. “I hardly think they care who killed them.”

He shakes his head. “Not a mercy to them. To me.”

I frown, completely confused. His jaw tightens. “Do you truly not understand? If I take the knife in my own hand, I get to feel that I paid something, too. I walk away with blood on me and call it penance and sleep a little easier for having suffered the doing of it. That is a gift, Beloved. The catharsis of the executioner. And I did not give it to myself.”

He takes a single step back. “I ordered six deaths, and I made myself stand there with empty hands and feel every one of them and earn no comfort from any of it.”

He draws a long breath. “Kali holds the blade because that is her office, and because a king who needs to feel the cut to believe in his own justice is a king who should not be making the decree.

I taste salt and realize I’m crying. Not sobs, just a few quiet tears escaping as if to release the pressure inside me.

“I hate that it’s a good answer,” I whisper.

“It is neither good nor bad. It is simply true.”

I nod. “They were plotting against you. I keep telling myself that.” I press my forehead against his chest because it’s easier than looking in his eyes. “But I stood there and watched men die, and I didn’t look away, and I think—I think the part that scares me isn’t that you’re capable of it. It’s that I stayed. That I belong in a place where a thing like that can happen.”

His arms come gently around me. “You stayed because you are braver than is good for you,” he says into my hair. “And because some part of you already understands the heaviness of a crown. You lightened my burden a bit tonight.”

I almost laugh. “By chewing you out for not taking responsibility?”