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I wanted to believe this had nothing to do with me. They’d caught sight of Arven D’Or out and about on his own, and they thought that they could take advantage of that.
There was no way that Locke knew that I was hunting him. There couldn’t be! I’d been careful to keep myself hidden. I worked efficiently, with nowhere for anyone to catch me off guard.
“Go home,” I told him with a jerk of my chin. “Your presence puts my life at risk. Leave me be. Let me get on with my work.”
He closed the distance between us. When he tried to touch my face, I slid out of the way of his grasp. His jaw tightened and all gentleness fled from his eyes. I wouldn’t be charmed so easily. Perhaps he thought a sweet touch and a few slick words could change my mind, but I’d fling him into the sun before I ever listened to his trickery.
“If you would just go back with me, then this wouldn’t happen,” he said.
The man seemed two seconds away from flinging his hands in the air and storming off. I waited for it to happen, but he didn’t so much as move an inch—much to my dismay.
“I have a…job to do.” I’d wanted to say that I had a life here, but that wasn’t true.
I had nothing. But that wouldn’t change if I left with him. Everything within reach would belong tohim, and I wasn’t about to give up and be his caged pet. He called my little apartment a cage, but that’s what he would be if I did as he asked.
He would become a cage that I could not escape.
“This job is a bust.” I stared out over the roiling ocean as I tried to temper my rage.
“Maybe if you lived in something nicer than that shoebox, then they wouldn’t have been able to break in so easily. Your defenses were at an all time low considering the stakes of your chosen profession. If you really are as good at this as you say you are, then this shouldn’t have happened. You would have had a better fallback than that hovel.”
I closed the distance between us so that I could finally jam my finger into his chest. “I’m not the one who gave away our location. You have been an idiot this whole time, flagrantly following me around without even once thinking about hiding your presence.”
His jaw twitched. I could tell he wasn’t ready to give up arguing about my safety precautions. It came from that very male part of his brain. Every guy had it. They saw tits and wanted to protect. In this case, it made him angry that I wasn’t safe enough.
“That wasn’t my home,” I told him.
He narrowed his eyes questioningly. “As I understand it, that was because you had no home.”
“What made you think that? My story about how I started? It’s been decades since I ran away to the mortal realm. I’m not the same person I used to be.”
“I find this hard to believe,” he said with a sneer.
My foot lifted from the ground for a split second. Had I not firmly planted it back down, I would have kicked him right between his self-righteous legs.
“When I’m on a job, I never know if my target has anyone who can track magical signatures. You’re not the only one who can sniff out magic, though you certainly have the most literal version of that ability.” I pulled arcana around myself and prepared to step in-between. “So, I usually stay close to my target until the job is done. That way, I never lead anyone back to my home.”
Between one footstep and the next, the world around me changed. It grew dark. The walls that sprang up were painted a midnight blue. Scatterings of silver and gold stars decorated the dark paint. They reached up to the dome overhead to form a collection of constellations.
Though my own domain was small, it was comfortable. The walls were lined with shelves heavy with books I could recall from home. A sliding ladder rolled across the floor and allowed access to the highest of shelves. Deeper within my little abode, a living area held dozens of plush cushions, all wrapped in faux fur and velvet.
Beyond that, a small kitchen sprawled around the black stone hearth. I snapped my fingers and the hearth sprang to life, its firelight dancing throughout the room. For a moment, I considered falling into the nearest cushion, but I desperately needed a shower after getting sprayed with kelpie water and tumbling into the sand.
In the entrance of the hall, I paused and looked back at Arven. He stood in the middle of the open room and stared up at the ceiling with his jaw damn near on the floor. It was as if the man expected me to live in absolute squalor.
“I paid for all of this in blood,” I said before turning and leaving him.
It wasn’t like he could do a whole lot of harm by himself. My trust in him might have been misplaced, but I didn’t think he would bring in an army to seize my domain as his own. Nor would he break down my door while I showered.
The man in my private domain wasn’t the monster of my memories. It made me wonder what’d really happened the day Eveningwind was sieged. This seemed wrong. The past and present were furiously battling for dominance, and I was too afraid to let go of the past. If I did, then I knew he would turn on me, and everything I’d fought for would be lost.
I set my plush cat on the marble counter and stripped free of my mussed clothing. The shower was made of a deep blue stone cut through with veins of gold. I stepped into the stone circle and activated the arcana in the ceiling above. A waterfall of fresh water droplets rained down over my head.
My domain was luxurious. It was everything I could have had if I’d never been pushed from my devastated home. And so I almost never came here.
It was a trophy of sorts. I wanted to prove that I wasn’t a rat living on the streets, so I built this out of everything I’d earned over the years. Once in a while, when the world made me weary, I would retreat here for a short while. If I lingered too long, my heart would begin to ache for all I’d lost.
Then I would fling myself back into the grime of the mortal world and spill more blood to make sure that no one forgot my name.
