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His voice remained flat, cold, hard, devoid of all emotion. I approached him. In the single lamplight, his face remained hard too. He said he wasn’t hurt, but someone had attacked him. “The man you hurt, can he identify you? Should we leave?”
“He won’t be identifying much of anything.” His smirk grew. Pride and satisfaction lifted his voice. He’d hurt his attacker, likely killed him, and he was pleased about it.
“Are yousurprised?” he asked, seeing my expression and thoughts I’d been unable to hide.
“No, I…” The truth landed hard. He’d killed a man. The blood was still drying on his hands. But he behaved as though he’d experienced a mild inconvenience on his way home, something as frivolous as crossing the street. I knew him capable of murder. None of this should have been a surprise. But there was knowing, and then there wasseeing.
He straightened and crossed the cabin, stopping almost close enough to touch. His energy had turned aggressive, confrontational. “Should I have brought him here, to talk over tea? Is that what you would have done, Prince of Flowers?”
“No.” My heart thumped. “I mean, if you say he deserved it, then he did.”
“I’d believe you, if you weren’t looking at me as though you don’t know me.”
Blood. I could smell it on him, sharp and metallic. I stepped back. Not because I didn’t trust him, I did. I just needed a moment to gather my thoughts.
“You seem to have mistaken me for an innocent man. Arin, the bounty hunter is not the first man I’ve killed.”
“I know that,” I snapped, stumbling away—not from him, never from him, but fromthis, from my own reaction.
“Do you? Because you seem to be having a difficult time with this. If you’ve painted a picture of me as an innocent man who needs a white knight to ride in and save him, then you’ll be sorely disappointed.”
His laugh was cruel, so like Razak’s.
I hadn’t meant to make the comparison, but perhaps I should have. I’d been quick to dismiss any comparison with Razak as wrong, but perhaps I’d also ignored some aspects of Lark’s personality that made him who he was. I’d narrowed my view, not wanting to see the messy, morally challenging parts of us, and that was my fault, not his.
“Am I suddenly too much for you now you see the blood on my hands?” The cruel edge remained in his voice, but it wasn’t there to hurt me. It was there because he was hurting, because he thought I was turning away from him. He believed I was too good for him, and he wasnothing. Words others had told him. Words he took to heart.
Damn him, he wasn’t going to succeed in pushing me away because of a little murder.
“I once burned a butterfly under a magnifying glass,” I admitted, blurting the words.
“What?”What. One word, but my confession had shocked the cruelty from his voice.
“I don’t know why, just that I could. I had the means and I wanted to see what happened.” I turned. He’d returned to the sideboard, and the wicked smirk was gone.
He was my Lark again, his face stained with blood, but still my Lark. “Did you enjoy it?” he asked.
“I hated myself after. And there was a time I told a girl to meet me in the hedge maze. I wanted to see her naked, see what I was missing. When her breasts and other things did nothing for me, I claimed it was her fault. She cried, so I yelled at her and sent her away, then had her expelled from court.”
Lark’s dark chuckle lightened the mood. “Hm,” he purred, “tell me all your filthy secrets, prince.”
“We’ll be here until dawn.” I strode across the floor and stopped in front of him. I could still smell the blood, there was so much of it. Whatever he’d done, he’d made the man suffer. “My point is, I’m not a white knight. And when I saw the blood, my first instinct was fearfor you, then you tell me you’ve killed a man. I needed a hot-moment to process that. If you want to get sassy about it, please do. Now my shock has passed, I’m rather enjoying your ire. And mine. Which is new.”
His catlike black eyes slow blinked, studying me, assessing, reading between the lines, trying to unpick my thoughts when I’d just laid them out for him. He didn’t trust me, not yet, not like I trusted him. “Razak is hunting us from inside Justice,” he said, his voice precise.
“Well then, we’ll have to be careful until we adopt our roles in a few days. And if anyone else gets too close, you’ll dispatch them like you did the last one.”
He swallowed and huffed a silent laugh. “I want to kiss you, but I’m bloody—”
I parted his knees, slotted myself between them, and smelled the blood on him again, saw its speckles on his face. Someone had dared attack him, meant to hurt him. “Was he going to kill you?”
“He’d killed before, but no, he wasn’t going to kill me. He planned to take me back to Pain, to await Razak.”
Which would have been a spiritual death sentence, if not a physical one. “Fuck him then.”
Lark’s grin bloomed. He touched my chin and in a soft voice, he whispered, “I’d prefer to fuck you.”
“As we have a few days until the tailor finishes our princely disguises—” I leaned in and nudged his mouth with mine, teasing the kiss to come. “—and we can’t go outside—” His bloody hands clutched my hips. “—it seems we have some time to kill.”
