Page 55

Her expression shifts, small and unreadable, but her voice softens. “Do not thank me by getting caught.”

“Bossy.”

“Alive people can complain.”

“Good point.”

The guards’ voices draw closer.

I pull the glamour back over my horns with effort that feels like dragging wet cloth over blades. It shivers, then settles, thin but serviceable. Isolde watches the process with visible concern.

“Your glamour is unstable,” she says.

“My everything is unstable.”

“Covered arcade. Now.”

I back away because turning from her feels wrong while danger is coming, but staying would put her in more of it. At the mouth of the lane, I look back once.

She stands in the rain beside cracked, steaming stones with demon ash at her feet and her gray cloak plastered to her body, appearing for all the world like a proper estate analyst who has simply misplaced the part of herself that fears monsters.

Then she bends, picks up a shard of broken crockery, and slices her own palm.

I take one step toward her before understanding catches up.

She lets blood drip onto the stones near the ash, smears it with the edge of her shoe, then looks toward the approaching guards and arranges her face into shocked disarray.

Creating a story.

Protecting me.

“Go,” she mouths.

So I do, even though every instinct in me wants to stay.

I slip into the west passage as the first guards enter the lane behind her, carrying the stolen rhythm of her pulse inside me and the taste of demon essence still burning at the back of my throat. The hunger has not vanished. It may never vanish. It walks with me, quieter now, shaped for the moment by her touch.

Vaerith wanted to know whether I could be provoked into monstrosity.

Tonight, he learned something else.

So did I.

8

ISOLDE

The guards believe my lie because people like Lord Vaerith train them to recognize panic, not intelligence.

That helps.

Blood on the stones helps too.

I kneel in the lane with one hand wrapped around the shallow cut in my palm while steam curls from the fractured cobbles around me. Demon ash streaks the rainwater in greasy black ribbons, and the smell of burned infernal essence still clings to the air beneath the sharper scents of wet stone and frightened sweat. The guards crowd the passage entrance in polished dark armor, visibly unsettled by the damage even as they try to disguise it beneath discipline.

Talen pushes through them a moment later.

Of course he does.