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“Yes,” I assured him as he tilted my head back. “But what if she hurt someone—?”
“You are not fine.” His nostrils flared.
The air in the chamber suddenly thinned, charging with energy. The tiny hairs on my arms lifted as the embers in my chest thrummed faintly in response to the power pouring from…
“Ash?” I whispered.
Shadows appeared, whirling beneath his flesh in a dizzying rush as his eyes filled with tendrils of crackling eather—eyes that were focused not on mine but on my throat.
My heart thudded heavily. The memory of Kolis’s fangs scraping against the skin of my throat sent a wave of revulsion through me. He must’ve broken the skin. That would explain the dull pain there.
Ash’s head lifted, his attention shifting beyond me to where Kolis lay. His lips peeled back, revealing his fangs. He started to lower me to the floor. “I’m going to destroy him.”
My breath snagged in my chest. With the eather lighting up the veins of his, cutting through the whipping shadows there, and the darkness gathering on the floor, I thought there might be a good chance he could, in fact, do that, especially given Kolis’s state. As Kolis himself had said: His nephew was very powerful. But…
But Kolis couldn’t die.
I’d known that when I drove the bone through his heart. My hold on Ash tightened as I willed myself to be, for once in my life, the smarter, more logical one. “Let it go.”
Ash tensed against me as a thick mass of midnight whipped around us. “What?”
“Let it go,” I repeated, tugging on his hair until his gaze returned to mine. I could barely see the pupils in his eyes. “He’s not worth it.”
“Worth what, exactly?” he snarled. “Because right now, anything and everything is worth ending the bastard’s existence.”
“The end of the realms?” I reasoned.
His eyes narrowed. “I don’t give a fuck about the realms.”
A quick, hoarse laugh left me. “Yes, you do.” I took a deep breath to clear my mind more. “You care about the realms.”
“You give me too much credit, liessa,” he said. “You think of me too kindly.”
“You don’t give yourself enough credit,” I shot back.
Two clouds of shadowy eather rose behind him, taking the faint shape of wings. “I’ve told you this before. Any and all decent bones I have in me belong to you.”
“And I’ve told you before, that isn’t true.”
“Do not argue with me, Sera.” His body hummed with vicious power as the shadows in his skin melded. Somewhere in the chamber, something cracked loudly. “Not about this.”
“I’m not arguing with you!”
He glared, and I could’ve sworn he was counting to ten. “I don’t think you understand what the word argue means.”
“I don’t think you understand what it—”
“He bit you!” Ash roared, causing my body to jolt as the shadow wings slammed down onto the floor, shaking the entire chamber.
I sucked in a sharp breath, resisting the urge to touch my neck. “He didn’t. I stopped him this—” I stopped myself before I said more and made things worse. “I stopped him.”
“This time?” Ash’s voice dropped to a whisper of such cold death that even I shivered. “That is what you meant to say.”
“No.”
“Do not lie to me.”
“I’m not lying,” I lied.
