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His eyes flash. ‘Which part?’
The question hits hard because there are too many answers.
I don’t know why Selphine gagged me this brutally, why Bride’s Mercy might be more trap than shield.
But how do I tell him I didn’t know my blood was a blade laid across his throat? Didn’t know I was possibly maybe falling for him until the fall had already broken something?
I can’t… so I say none of it.
And for a moment, I simply lie there on the cold floor, staring at him while memory rearranges itself into something uglier than before.
Selphine’s warnings and her fucking dramatic little pauses.
If I wanted to harm you, would I have hidden you?
Valentin’s lethal kiss in the Tower’s shadow… because the dreams had me fraying at the edges, because I wanted help framed as a loophole badly enough to mistake intrusion for care.
And under all of it, Valentin in full wrath, protecting me by driving savage, elegant ruin through mercenaries and demons and the Myrkshade until violence became message, punishment, promise.
I’ve worked beside monsters in excellent tailoring and worse intentions. What Valentin did that night was something older than mortal rage. Retribution drawn from a black well. The sort of violence that reshapes a room around it and lingers in stone.
Now I know exactly what he’s capable of when fury has a target.
And I’ve made myself the centre of his. Fear settles properly at last. Then turns colder. Because fear is useless unless it sharpens. ‘You think I poisoned you on purpose,’ I say.
Black-red eyes burn into me. ‘I think you are full of secrets, and one of them may be killing me.’
The rumble of that verdict shakes through me. ‘Then ask Rowan.’
‘I did.’
‘And?’
His jaw tightens. Interesting.
‘What did she say?’
‘Enough.’
‘That’s very ominous and wonderfully unhelpful.’
He steps closer. ‘Do not test me.’
‘Why? Because your temper has been such a carefully supervised success today?’
His hand moves. Fast. Clawed fingers seize my throat, the other hand locks around my wrist, and the wall greets my spine with bone-rattling force. Stone cracks behind me and my breath leaves in one hard burst as he pins me high enough that my boots scrape for purchase against the floor.
I grab his wrist on instinct. It doesn’t move.
His face is inches from mine, beautiful in the way catastrophe is beautiful, every line sharpened by wrath held on too tight a leash. His eyes burn dark crimson from within.
‘If you lie to me again, Eira,’ he says, voice low enough to make the dungeon itself listen, ‘I will peel every secret out of your body one scream at a time.’
My pulse stutters. And I hate that part of me responds to him even now. Hate more that the fear doesn’t erase the ache. ‘Hasn’t your witch told you everything you want to know?’
His grip tightens by a fraction. ‘My witch has told me enough to know you have an agenda, hunter.’
The missing ‘little’ hits harder than it should. Little hunter had been infuriating. Possessive. Patronising. Somehow intimate.
