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“You don’t tell me anything, Lorian.”
Rythos chuckled. Everyone else had various expressions of amusement on their faces. Except my aunt, who leaned past Rythos to shake her head at me. “You could have had a nice hybrid man,” she told me. “You took him on, and now you’ll have to live with the consequences.”
My life was ludicrous. Despite my fury, a laugh bubbled up from deep inside me. My aunt was right. If I was going to fall in love at the most inconvenient time in my life, I could have found someone even-tempered and rational. Instead, I’d somehow found the opposite.
I fixed Lorian with a hard stare.
He raised his eyebrow.
“Imagine we weren’t mates,” I said. “Would you still make the same suggestion?”
“Imagine you weren’t grieving for Cavis and drowning in guilt for his death. Would you still be attempting to protect everyone at the risk of your own life?”
Lorian’s question sucked all the air from my lungs, and I flinched. There was no amusement on anyone’s face now. He took my hand once more, pressing his mouth to my knuckles. “The pirate queen isn’t going to ask you to do something easy. You’ll need our help. Besides, I can’t negotiate with Conreth on behalf of the hybrids. That’s up to you.”
I could see his point.
That didn’t mean I was happy about it.
Lorian gave me a faint smile, clearly amused. As much as he enjoyed it when I outmaneuvered him, he also loved when he did the same to me.
I wasn’t going to win this argument. At least not right now. So I moved my attention to other concerns. “Stillcrest is a problem. I respect the fact that she’s managed to keep her people safe, but the chances of them staying that way are decreasing by the day.”
Galon sighed. “She’s unlikely to change her mind anytime soon. I have a few fae in the area. I trained them myself. I can ask them to help guard the camp.”
Some of the tightness in my chest eased. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. We need to talk about what will happen if we can’t get the boy out of the city.”
For a moment, I didn’t understand. Was he referring to the amount of power Regner would suddenly have at his fingertips?
Our eyes met, and I sucked in a breath.
“You’re suggesting killing him if we can’t rescue him.”
Rythos cleared his throat. “We have to think about the worst that can happen, Pris. If we can’t get Jamic out, and Regner uses him…we’re all dead. If Regner can’t use Jamic to take his power—and drain the barrier of that power—then we’re no worse off.”
“You think he’s a reasonable loss.” My stomach hollowed out. Just the thought made me want to vomit.
Lorian’s expression was carefully blank. But I knew him. This was the man who had brutally murdered my attacker at the inn that night so long ago. That decision had come easily to him—the man had hurt me, so he was dead, and I should appreciate it.
Unlike that occasion, Lorian wouldn’t enjoy killing Jamic. But if there was one thing my mate was good at, it was making logical, often cold-blooded, decisions.
He was—and always would be—exceptionally ruthless. Part of me loved that about him. He made me more strategic with my own decisions, helping me remove the emotion from them.
But I couldn’t remove emotion from this one.
“We do everything we can to keep him alive. Please.”
Lorian nodded. “Of course we will. He’s much more useful breathing.”
That wasn’t what I’d meant. But the conversation was irrelevant anyway. Jamic wasn’t going to die—not just because he’d spent so much of his life locked away and hadn’t even truly gotten a chance to live. No, he wasn’t going to die because I refused to let Regner kill him.
Someone let out an irritated huff, and I glanced over my shoulder. Madinia stuck her head out of the attic window. “We need to get ready to go. Now.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Rothnic’s favored gambling den wasn’t far from our new safe house. Vicer had quickly realized that if we wanted to get close to him, we needed to blend in to his surroundings.
