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“Veyka, where are you going?” I asked. An entreaty, rather than an order.
I did not expect it to work. But she paused.
“I am meeting someone,” she said, back still to me.
I pressed my luck. “Who?”
She half turned, the torchlight casting her pale white profile in sharp contrast to the darkness around her. I could read the frustration in every line of her body. Whatever this was, she cared about it deeply.
Good. Until tonight, I wasn’t certain Veyka cared about anything.
“If you are determined to trail me like an Ancestors-damned shadow, then I have conditions,” she said.
I raised one amused eyebrow. “I do not think you are in a position to bargain.”
“If you try to carry me back to the palace, I will kick and scream and make a scene. I will disrupt your precious peace.” Her voice dripped with distaste at the word. “But if you can keep your mouth shut, and not interfere, you can accompany me.”
“I am protecting you,” I reminded her. I had no intention of doing any of the things she’d said if I felt she was in danger.
She fingered the hilt of her dagger, most likely restraining herself from throwing it at me.
“You will watch,” she ground out. “That is it. You don’t speak, you don’t pull your axe. Promise me.”
“Fine.”
“Say it,” she insisted. I realized then what she was doing. She knew I would not lie. She was as cunning as the elementals in her court, in her own way.
“I promise I will not interfere unless your life is in danger,” I said.
She lifted her head skyward and muttered something that sounded like an appellation to the moon herself.
“Keep up. You have wasted enough of my time tonight,” she said before jogging away.
32
VEYKA
If he so much as breathed in my direction, I was going to fucking kill him.
Arran Earthborn thought he was so sneaky, so stealthy, so clever. The Brutal Prince thought a whole damn lot of himself, even after I’d shown I was more than capable of taking him on.
Three hundred years of experience and he still couldn’t scale a balcony in silence. Once I’d realized he was following me, there was little point in covering my own footfalls. The bastard seemed to have some sort of extra sense where I was concerned.
But getting the jump on him in the alley… I shivered in satisfaction. That would be fueling my daydreams for the next week at least.
We reached the intersection, my giant shadow looming behind me, and I had a decision to make. Arran would stick out no matter where we went; he was huge, for one. He also exuded the sort of power that even the weakest among our kind would be able to detect. At best, he might be mistaken for a bodyguard. At worst… had the details of his physical description made their way down from the goldstone palace into Baylaur yet?
I would have to chance it.
I couldn’t risk losing this contact. It had taken me months of sneaking out, making shady connections in the alleyways of Baylaur, to infiltrate the Shadows.
The illusive society responsible for smuggling banned goods in and out of Baylaur had earned its name by operating in near complete secrecy. They killed anyone who asked too many questions. They killed their own members when they got sloppy. I’d made more than a few of them bleed to obtain the information I wanted.
I turned back to Arran, frowning at his chest. Those tattoos would be a dead giveaway as well.
“You have ten minutes to obtain a cloak,” I said to his chest, trying to view the hard planes of it before my eyes as nothing more than another layer of clothing.
One dark eyebrow rose. “A cloak?”
