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“Who… are… you?” The question came slowly, quietly, as though I’d caught his attention by great surprise. “Why did the goddess bring you here? To us?”
“I…” A gasp cut through my words as his face sunk into the crook of my neck, where the cool tip of his nose brushed along a tendon, stubbing my earlobe before it wandered higher and into my hair with a long inhale.Smelling me?“I don’t know.”
It was the safest answer I could give before I looked at Sebian for guidance as how to remainalive and unharmedexactly, but I only found a hint of confusion on his face before he said, “Are you going to tell me where he is or…?”
“He flew off to have a look at the carriage, likely to see if his gift offered any insight on hisanoaley.” Malyr pulled back to stare at me, studying my face with great focus as if he expected to find answers along my eyebrows, down the length of my nose… on my lips. “Tell me who she is.”
Sebian folded his arms in front of his chest, frowning at the way Malyr pinched a strand of my hair between his fingers, inspecting it closely. “Someone who needs to remain—and I cannot stress this enough, Malyr—unharmed.”
“So youdoknow.” Malyr let his eyes roam over my form with an appreciation no man had given me before, rousing strange tingles beneath my skin. “I have half a mind to take her to my chambers for the night.”
Sebian chuckled. “Unharmed is not how women come out from there in the morning.”
Cold swept over me, making me shift away from Malyr’s touch. What did that mean? Women never came out unharmed?
Malyr pouted his lips with a slight uptick at the corners as he looked over to Sebian. “You truly worry I won’t like who she is, don’t you?”
“On the contrary, my friend… I worry that you’ll like it too much.” A smack of his tongue. “If I mess this up, Asker will pluck me bare.”
“There is always the option of me ordering your wedding.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“After what you did to that purse of salted shadows?” Malyr arched a brow at him. “Try me.”
“I hadn’tmeantto lose them at the card table.” Sebian exhaled a long breath. “Fine, you’ll find out soon enough from Lorn, anyway. Malyr, this is Lady Galantia.”
“Galantia…” Malyr breathed. His dark gaze snapped back to mine, eyes burning into me with such intensity, it cast feverish chills across my skin. “She’s the bastard’s daughter.”
My throat tied shut.
Lips thinning into a straight line, stature tensing under the sudden strain of his muscles, tendons along his neck protruding, chest lifting and sinking in an erratic pattern… Everything on him changed, twisting his apathy into unrestrained, frightening interest.
“Mm-hmm, now Itrulywant to take you to my chambers.” His grip slipped to my throat faster than I could dodge it, robbing me of air with how tightly he squeezed, his dark whisper nothing but a purr against my temple. “Or I might just snap your neck, little white dove.”
I tossed and writhed, but there was no escaping the bruising grip of his hand as shadows crept up along his arm. Ice-cold tendrils slithered along my chin, my cheeks, my temples. They crawled into my nostrils, wriggled my lips apart, only to invade my mouth, my throat, my lungs. They strangled me, suffocated me.
My vision darkened.
Blackness swallowed me whole.
ChapterSix
Sebian
Present day, a copse of trees
Well, I’d tried my best.
Had tried hard to get Asker to dump this assignment on another pathfinder, but no, he’d insisted thatIfound and secured this girl. And look how well that was going…
Malyr wove his shadows down Galantia’s throat and into her lungs until her violent thrashing slowed into uncontrolled twitches. He’d been a moody bastard for as long as I’d known him, with a quick temper that hid beneath an otherwise quiet demeanor. That made him all the more vicious. You just never knew when his shadows would lash out.
But he was also a cunning son of a bitch. Malyr knew full well that we needed this girl alive, and it was theunharmedpart that currently stood up for debate in that messed-up head of his. He would stop any second now. Any second…
Half a minute later, something akin to concern rose in my empty stomach, because it wouldn’t be the first time he killedby accident.Ah, shit… he was killing her.
“Malyr…” Focusing on the gift at my core, I communed with his shadows.Calm.Calm yourselves.Had any other person dared this, they’d lash back, but not with me. Never me. “Call them back.”
