“I’m Cara.”
“I know.” He seemed willing to leave it there. When I stared at him meaningfully, “I’m Kiegan.”
“Are you part of Bismyth I haven’t met yet?” There were so many of them.
He snorted at that as if the thought were ridiculous.
“No.” He rapped his knuckles on the table. “I wish. I belong here.”
It took me a moment to connect what he might possibly mean. “You’re unclaimed?”
He nodded.
“Well, that shouldn’t last long,” I muttered. He was my opposite, as terrifying as I was unprepossessing.
“None of the clans want me.”
“Why?”
He raised his brows at me, then lowered his face toward his plate, piling food in.
Around a mouthful, he mumbled, “Don’t think I like you enough to share facts about my life or my food.”
I held up the apple core in my hand. He’d shared food; he might as well share facts.
He managed to scoff, even while he was eating.
“Well, it’s been nice, but I’m going to go finish my book in peace.” I wanted to go back to the life dome, but I didn’t dare wander alone.
Fieran had seemed protective, but I wondered if he could have set up the bullying. The threat posed by other shifters served to keep me confined to his side or the clan’s quarters, where I was under his control.
“Get more food and eat.” He had his arm hooked around his plate as if he didn’t trust me not to take his, even though he was all but drooling into it. “You can read your book, but I’m tired of eating alone.”
“You’re bossy.”
“I kept you from an ass-kicking. I get to be bossy.”
“They were probably just going to ask me to mop,” I said airily. But I opened my book again anyway, because it seemed rude to leave him alone after he had rescued me.
“That’s not where that was going.” He ripped into a chicken leg. “Are mortals that bad at forecasting the future?”
Did he not know many mortals? “Where did you grow up?”
He gestured vaguely toward the west wall of the dining hall. That really cleared things up for me.
I decided to get another plate. Or rather, two, since I planned another pocketful of items to smuggle upstairs. I’d found my stolen bread moldy under my bed today, and I felt ashamed of it, but I couldn’t stop myself.
When I set it on the table, he glanced up at me, then returned to tearing into a prodigious mound of food. He ate gripping an item in each hand, alternating big, almost desperate swallows of meat with an apple or half a roll at a time. That was how Ifeltlike eating after being hungry as a kid, but I restrained myself from the impulse.
I held the book up as I ate, trying to block out both the sight and the sounds of him eating: a smack of his lips, a half-choked cough, a slurp as he sucked grease off his fingers.
When I closed the book, Kiegan had finished eating and was sitting quietly across from me. I was surprised he hadn’t left as soon as he finished his meal.
When his attention fixed on something above, I knew who it was even before I followed his line of sight up to the mezzanine that ran around the dining hall.
I could feel his presence even as I searched for him.
Fieran leaned against the railing. He looked out across the mess hall as if he were the lord surveying his lands. I glanced across the room to where Bismyth was once again seated—jostling each other, in high spirits, if rather battered-looking—and then checked for the other clan. They were still absent.
