“I heard you’ve been looking for me,” he said, his voice more wicked and toe-curling than I remembered. “Was the little prince too much of a bore?”
I gritted my teeth. “You stole something from me.”
“Your heart?” He raised a sardonic brow. “I’m not in the habit of returning those, unfortunately.”
“A diary,” I snapped. “I thought even you wouldn’t go so low as to steal a keepsake from an unconscious invalid, but I guess I should’ve known better than to expect morals from you.”
“Unconscious?” he repeated, unfazed by my insults. “Well, that certainly explains things.”
“What are you talking about?” I bit out.
“You didn’t appear unconscious to me, though you weren’t quite…yourself.”
A hot bolt of fear ran through me. There had been instances during the war, brief moments of inexplicable insanity. When I’d lost myself and tortured a fellow soldier in my squad, nearly killing him in the process. When, certain a parasite lived within my mind, I’d bashed my head against a wall so hard my forehead split open. But never had I lost the memory itself, as if it weren’t me living in my own head. If I could not trust myself, who could I trust?
“You’re lying,” I said, because the alternative was too distressing to consider.
Lei shrugged, sitting back against the wall. “Perhaps,” he said, with the air of one who did not particularly care one way or another. “Though you may consider my motives, and find I have little reason to lie.”
He knew how to toy with people, I reminded myself, how to make an audience believe anything. Knowing this, still, I could not help but be sucked into his stories.
“What…” I drew in a quick breath, bracing myself. “What happened?”
“The diary,” he said instead, ignoring my question. “It belongs to your mother, no?”
I tried to keep my expression neutral, but it was no use hiding things from him.
“I thought so,” he said, inclining his head. “There’s nothing valuable in there, you might as well know. Any notes that could’ve once been useful are too damaged now to be legible.”
“You—youreadit?” I demanded, struggling to remain calm. “How dare you?”
“You would’ve destroyed it,” he said, as if pointing out the obvious. “I wanted to know what was sonotworth reading.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, and now I could not keep my outrage in check. “I would’ve expected you of all people to know how much it meant to me, how much it—” My voice broke in a flood of despair. As quickly as it had risen, my anger splintered into grief. “There were sides of my mother that I never knew,” I said hoarsely. “I thought at last I might know them.”
His pale eyes were indefinable as he considered me. Then, reaching into his tunic, he withdrew a thin leather-bound journal, its cover partially charred with ash.
I stared at the proffered journal in astonishment, before my eyes skipped up to meet his. “What is your price?” I whispered.
“Nothing,” he said, and the word seemed to cost him. “This one, you may have.”
Cautiously, as if expecting him to reveal the magic trick at any moment, I accepted the diary from him. It was real and solid in my hands. Giving in to the childlike urge, I hugged my mother’s diary to my chest, and I imagined it was a little like embracing my mother.Lei said nothing. As I looked into his eyes, it became clear he was thoroughly inebriated.
At my expression, he threw me a derisive smile, as if guessing my thoughts. Despite his frivolous demeanor and flippant remarks, the Ximing prince was no better off than the rest of us. And beneath those cold smiling eyes he hid a deeply troubled soul.
But Lei hated my pity. Quickly I asked, “What did you mean?” I swallowed. “That I would’ve destroyed it?”
He tipped his head back against the wall, exposing the knot at his throat. It made him appear oddly vulnerable, human, and it occurred to me that he could haveenviedme, to know that I had my mother’s last thoughts, when he did not.
“When I entered the infirmary, you were trying to tear that book into pieces, but you weren’t strong enough. Then you brought it to the fire, but you paid no notice to your own hand. I stopped you when I saw that your skin was burning.”
The burn mark on my right hand, I remembered with trepidation. Lei wasn’t lying.
“You kept twitching, like a startled animal. When I spoke to you, it was like you couldn’t hear me. Only then did I notice your irons had been removed. And your eyes”—he met mine—“they were the color of minted gold.”
Qinglong.
Icy fear stabbed the pit of my stomach. That he’d tried to destroy my mother’s diary only confirmed my suspicion—there was something valuable within it, some crucial information he did not want me to discover.
