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“I don’t recall you saying that.”
He frowned, then smirked sheepishly. “It must have slipped my mind, then, but the thought was there.”
He was so ridiculously charming, it should be illegal. Emerald swallowed, refusing to be charmed. The man couldn’t think that he could just wrap her around his finger like that as he did everyone else, including Yu. Needing this conversation to end, she extended her hand to shake his.
Sparks flared to life, awakening something inside her. She bit back a gasp at the electric charge that thrummed under her skin, then snuck its way to their connected fingers until she was struggling not to quiver. Magenta eyes flew to hers, the warmth fading and his irises darkening—a confirmation that he felt it too. She snatched her hand away as if burned, then cleared her throat.
“Truce it is,” she said lightly, keeping herself busy as she pretended to arrange her outer clothes. Minutes later, she was tucked in and turned away from him…a bad idea, but so was being in this cave with him and a pixie. Emerald knew she had to pick her battles at this point.
“Were you alone out at sea before you were dragged here?”
His question was mildly curious but not insistent. She stayed in her silence for a while, then decided that maybe talking would erase the weird tension from earlier.
“Yes. I was renting an acquaintance’s ship and headed home from a mission.”
“Mission?” he echoed.
“A retrieval mission. I needed to retrieve something for someone important.”
“A higher-ranking warlock or witch?”
“Hmm.” The truth clutched her stomach hard and wouldn’t let go, and her mouth opened before she could stop it. “An ex’s family.”
“I take it I just made you fail your mission.”
“A Fae beat me to it in Centro, so it was already a failed mission before this little detour.”
“Ouch. I should say way to go, Fae, but I’m not friends with all of them. Was the mission’s success correlated to you getting back together with your ex?”
“No.” There her stomach went again. She gritted her teeth, then stopped resisting. “It was about pride, and showing them that I wouldn’t take their judgment with my head down.”
Silence.
“I take it it wasn’t a nice breakup.”
“No breakup is nice,” she shot back. Then, “He dumped me after my brother was accused of delving into dark magic, which is forbidden to us. My brother didn’t…at least, not willingly. He was manipulated.”
The truth was more severe: Silver Sutton being controlled by black magic and forcibly made to burn houses and kill their villagers, all because Silver’s best friend was jealous of his power and angry when Silver threatened to expose his illegal business—selling dark magic—to their Council. The aftermath had been Silver getting put down and the entire Sutton family being ostracized by their society.
“He dumped you just like that? You weren’t at fault.”
“He was a member of an affluent, influential family and I was linked to a murderer. A lot of the villagers believed we were in on the bad things my brother did.”
It used to hurt until she couldn’t breathe, but Emerald had kept those emotions in the dark when she was in her bedroom and no one could see her. Then she just grew better at hiding them. The heartache was gone now, but her pride still smarted whenever she bumped into that family and was looked down on—like she was a piece of trash stuck on the bottom of their shoe and they couldn’t quite believe that she was still there. The ironic thing was that the family didn’t even know she was sleeping with their son because their relationship had been a secret.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
She blinked the memory away.
“There’s no need to be sorry. My brother’s in the clear now and happy.” After being thrown in a hellish prison and miserable for years. She swallowed, trying to brush that away too. “You talk too much.”
“And you’re responding now, so I think the right wording is we both talk too much. But that’s what a truce is for.” She heard him move around, finding his comfortable spot. She heard him sigh. “Goodnight, pretty Em.”
Emerald listened to his breathing while she curled in on herself, imitating Yu’s position. The pixie was dead to the world and exhausted. After a while, a soft snore escaped Rick’s lips and had her fighting back a snort…then, a smile.
One more thing the books didn’t tell her: that Fae folks weren’t regal in their sleep and snored like regular folks.
Sleep was elusive, but she tried, tiring her mind with escape plans that felt futile and bearable ways to co-exist with the Fae and the pixie. The more she thought about the truce, the more she was convinced it was for the best, especially since they could team up to get out of there faster. That lulled her into sleep—a restless one with pixies throwing their glitter bombs everywhere. They hissed with their lips pulled back and shook her with their anger. Then she was being shaken for real, a sensation that had her sitting upright and ready to blast away with her magic.
