Page 343 of Commanding Scythe and Sky

“Right. Sorry. Carry on.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

His lips twitched, amusement glimmering in those citrine eyes, only the impatient tap of his finger forcing me to focus. “They were friends, or at least it seems like they were. And then he was assigned to her guard. The way she writes about him…” His words wandered off, his focus with them. Cyrus stared vacantly down at the parchment, his fingers absently tracing over a line. “She was a fucking goner. You can’t convince me otherwise.”

“But Koa…”

“Was as good as a slaver, unless my translation skills are lacking, which frankly would be a first.”

I bit back my smile. I’d missed cocky Cyrus. Missed seeing him in his element. He could spill blood as efficiently as most Grayshellians, but this was where he thrived—behind records and tomes, analyzing data.

He said nothing about the books that kept conveniently falling into my path, annotated to hell and back with his thoughts on everything from Greek mythology—highly academic, occasionally arguing myth versus fact—to firsthand narratives of the Second World War—surprisingly emotive for a man who seemed to have three default emotional states—to authors with obscure Russian names and characters battling lifelong isolation within the depths of their intelligence.

The letters of the latter mysteriously went blurry as I pored through page after page of long, increasingly messy notes, wondering why he had zero faith in a happy ending yet couldn’t stop caring about the outcomes anyway. As I watched his eyes move over another entry, pausing to jot notes in his own journal and add tabs to Rhiannon’s, I found myself wondering what kind of cute library nerd Cyrus would’ve been if he’d been raised by anyone but the bootlicker that was Reagan Stuart.

He turned another page, my eyes snagging on a sketch.

The hair on my arms stood on end. “Um, Cyrus?”

“Yeah?”

“Whose shield is that?”

“The Roman, I assume. It’s the same one depicted in Koa’s approved books.” When my hand snapped onto his forearm as my eyes roved over too-familiar lines, he finally looked at me. “Why?”

A disbelieving snort burst out of me, my hands flying to cover my mouth. “Because I stole it.”

“You what?”

“Not in this life—obviously, Jesus Christ, there’s kinda been a lot going on since I ascended⁠—”

“Freya.”

“Fuck,” I muttered, snapping my mouth closed like I could contain the chaos falling out of it. I pulled it closer, tracing a finger over the sun emblazoned on the center. “I stole it from some jackass nomad in a pub, lifetimes ago, but still.”

“Do you still have it?”

“I mean… unless that crypt flooded entirely and washed away.”

“Fuck,” he muttered, leaning back in his chair with a huff. “Of course, you magically stole the Roman’s shield, you fucking dragon,” he mumbled more to himself than to me. My chest heated anyway. He must’ve realized what he’d said, because those citrine eyes snapped to mine. They softened, warm butter over toast, his lips lifting incrementally. “You’re beautiful, ma moitié. A little klepto,” he added with a smirk, “but beautiful.”

I wrestled my grin back into place, cleared my throat, and reached for the journal, sliding it in front of my chest. I hunched over like a shrimp, squinting to decipher the scrawled words beneath it. Cursive. Kind of. But…

A familiar sequence of letters had my breath lodging in my chest.

“Cyrus,” I said, seeking him out like I’d become unmoored. “Look at the name.”

He scowled over my shoulder, the groove deepening as he snatched it back. “Holy fucking shit.”

“There’s no way, right?”

“Coincidence?”

“Maybe?”

“There’s no such thing,” a familiar male baritone drawled from the doorway. I snapped my head up, finding amber eyes and russet hair.