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“If not her, then another.”
“Is that what you’re telling yourself?” she scoffed. “I saw how you looked at her. Ever since she arrived, you’ve been avoiding me, shutting me—”
“You need to stop,” Malyr growled. “I am a prince in need of an ally and an heir.”
“None of which I can give you because I’m nothing but a fucking Raven whore,” she bit out. “Barren ever since we escaped those dungeons together. Do you even remember?”
My skin tightened as much of Lorn’s hate for me partially explained. They had been kept together. Tortured together. Escaped together.
“I will never forget, which is the only reason why I haven’t sent you off to Hanneling Hold yet,” Malyr said. “But I need you to let her go now.”
“Does she know? Did you tell her what you did? What you are?” Lorn stabbed her finger around him and in my direction. “Little girl, do you know he was your father’s pretty Raven boy?”
“Shut your mouth!” Malyr took a strong step toward her. “I swear, Lorn, one more—”
“She can never give you what I do. Do you know that, little girl? The things he likes done to him?” Lorn shifted her balance to one side, looking around Malyr and straight at me. “Do you know that he likes his vent tickled? Do you know he’s a fucking fa—”
A blast of shadows flooded my room, dousing me in cold blackness. Wood moaned, metal clanked. I held by breath, blinking through the fading whirls of shadows, only to bring Lorn back into focus. The blow had thrown her against my desk, from which she pushed herself up, staggering a step toward Malyr. There, she collapsed just as her head lolled back.
Malyr caught her, picked her up, and turned to look at Sebian. “Tell Asker to find him. Find him, and bring him to Deepmarsh.”
I watched as he carried her off, leaving me behind stunned, my entire body stiff when I turned and looked at Sebian. “Who ishim?”
Sighing, Sebian sunk his head into his hand, pinching the bridge of his nose. “It’s… complicated.”
ChapterTwenty-Six
Galantia
Present Day, Deepmarsh Castle, gardens
“Turn to your left,” Cici instructed, then released a sigh longer and deeper than the other that had come before. “Your other left, Galantia!”
I quickly spun the other way, only to bump my knee into a stone bench that couldn’t possibly have been there before, the white-shelled pathway crunching beneath my uncoordinated steps. “This makes no sense! There is no pattern to it that I can see. It’s just a wild tangle of holding hands, turning, and stepping in ten directions at once!”
“It’s agile, lithe, and graceful.” Sebian folded his arms beneath his head where he’d been nodding on the bench to my far left for the last hour, his black hair sprawled open and hanging shiny from the white marble. “Like us.”
Above him, on the naked branch of a young birch, hisanoaflapped its wings as if in agreement. Sebian did that a lot, sending the bird away for a while so he could rest his senses.
Cici brushed a red maple leaf off the train of her forest-green dress, taking Sebian in with an arched brow. “You are, as always, a picture of grace, Sebian.”
He snorted, eyes firmly shut as rays of sun poked through the clouds and into the castle gardens played across his tan face. “What I am is tired.”
Because he took his new assignment very seriously, keeping an eye on me at all times now that I had moved to large, opulent personal rooms. Even at night.
In my bed. Right beside me.
He’d practically moved in.
“Yes, I can only imagine how tired you must be. Rumor has it that you no longer sleep at night.” Cici’s green eyes found mine before she added in a cheeky mumble, “At least, not in his own chamber.”
My tongue pressed against the roof of my mouth as if to keep from saying something that would give away this strange… arrangement I’d tumbled into.
Cici, however, must have taken my silence for a confession, and merely grinned as she added quietly, “Look at you, shattering the hopes of all the poor, heartbroken ladies who pined after this one.”
My mouth turned dry. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh please, it was easy enough to figure out, but not for lack of discretion, if that calms your nerves,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, likely indiscernible to Sebian without hisanoa. “When the most notorious Raven stops frequenting the local bed chambers and turns those ladies knocking on his door away, one must wonder… What brought about this change in the biggest rake the court had even seen? What indeed, weeks afteryourarrival? I’ve never seen this Raven so… devoted.”
