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“I’m Riot,” she said. “Riot Phillips.”
He smiled then, in earnest. And it did not make him less intimidating. “Krav.”
He did not offer a last name.
Krav.
“You live around here?” she asked.
“I live in many places. Wherever it suits me in the moment. I keep a residence here, and that is where I’m currently staying.”
He didn’t seem like a bohemian wanderer in the way that Jaia did. But then, he’d been at a funeral, so perhaps that was why.
Maybe the suit was the piece of him that was wrong.
And as she looked at him she thought, yes. The suit was wrong. He was not a man who belonged in a suit. He was a man who belonged here. In the ruins. In the jungle. In the rain.
It was funerals that were wrong.
“Are you...were you here for the funeral?”
“Yes. Though I came a few weeks ago when it was clear my mother would not last much longer.”
Her stomach twisted.
“Your mother. Oh, I’m so sorry.”
She didn’t have the kind of relationship with her mother that brought out any warm feelings in her, but she knew, oh, she knew well, that most people loved their mothers very dearly. And in fairness, she loved hers. It was part of why it was so difficult.
If she felt nothing, then it would all be easier. But she did.
“It is life.” He looked desolate when he said it, even though his voice didn’t change. “A part of it. And never do I feel more aware of that and connected to it than when I am here, so it felt just the right place for a walk.”
He was still a tiger.
But she did not think he’d eat her.
In spite of herself, she shivered. It wasn’t particularly cold, but the fabric of her dress was truly stuck to her now. And it was beginning to seep down into her bones.
“Come with me,” he said. “You’re soaked clean through. My home is just a short walk away.”
“Your...home is a short walk away?”
“Yes,” he said. “Through the trees.”
“The trees but...”
“Follow me.”
She did, because there was nothing else to do. And because she felt if she didn’t...the very thought of not going with him filled her with a sense of sadness. Darkness. And when they came to the end of the ruin, he went on. Deep into the jungle.
The darkness of the foliage swallowed them whole.
“I don’t think there’s...”
And then she looked up. There was a glow in the trees, and her jaw dropped.
It was a house. Up in the trees. Not at all like the hostel they’d stayed in last week, but something otherworldly. The roots of the trees grew down over the top of a stone shrine, the banyan tree seeming to hold it like a mother would cradle a child, and it was the trees above the shrine that held the house as well, large pillars extending down to the ground, adding support. A staircase began at the shrine and wound tightly around the tree, carrying them up into the canopy, and into the house.
