“Oh, I can remember.”
“Good.” But he gave me a long, doubtful look.
It made me wonder if we both knew what it was like to be in one of Fieran’s traps, and to still not be entirely able to resist his charms.
At dinner, Dairen tried to block my path again, offering me that disarming smile. “Sit with us where you belong.”
“Rules are rules, Dairen. Idon’tbelong.”
I did need to sit down before I dropped one of these plates, though. I was balancing three plates and the remnants of my dignity; I didn’t want to give this roomful of shifters one more show.
“You belong with us if we say you do.” He reached for the plates—to help me and to force me to obey, probably in equal measure—and I ducked him as best I could, trying to move on to the unclaimed side of the room.
I glanced down the table, then up at the mezzanine, but I didn’t see Fieran. The room, despite its embroidered tapestries, soft torchlight, and soaring ceiling, felt dull without his presence.
Still, the air prickled. That strange sixth sense of mine—the one that always flared when he was nearby—told me he was watching or pulling strings from the shadows.
I wasn’t sure why Fieran needed to not just bring me under his control. He needed to charm me. He needed for me to be under his control…and to like it.
I was not being drawn into his kinks.
“Maybe I don’t want to belong anywhere I haven’t earned,” I told Dairen over my shoulder.
He was right there, closer than I had expected, walking alongside me with his hands shoved into his pockets. “No one earns their clan. We’re chosen. Fought for.”
“Then I guess Bismyth will have to earn me,” I said with as much of a shrug as I could manage given my precarious cargo.
Laughter rose in my wake as I moved on, but it sounded good-natured, with Bismyth ribbing Dairen for his failure of charisma.
A big shifter barreled through the crowd, shoulders squared, face half-hidden in shadow. I gasped and stumbled back, eyes squeezing shut on instinct, the plates wobbling dangerously.
The collision never came.
A sharp grunt, a crash of wood and glass. But I stood untouched.
Then I opened my eyes in time to see the man half-sprawled across a table—into someone’s dinner, no less. He tried to pick himself up as a table full of Obsidian shifters shouted at him, but he mostly seemed to be managing to roll himself around in the gravy.
Standing between us was Kiegan.
He didn’t look angry. That was the unnerving part. Calm, steady, like a cliff the sea broke itself against. His hand still hovered midair from the shove before he reached for one of my plates, and I let him take it.
“Going to make the most of the free food until I die,” I said cheerfully. The two of us left the ruckus behind as we walked to the unclaimed side.
He put his plate and mine down on one of the empty tables as I sat across from him. There was a stain of fresh blood smeared on his tunic, but he looked unharmed. It looked suspiciously like a handprint, like someone had grabbed him trying to keep from falling.
“Why are you sitting with me? I’m not very popular,” I reminded him.
“Neither am I.”
“Why’s that?”
He seemed like a formidable friend and ally.
“Many reasons. One’s the rumor that I killed my own brother,” he said the words off-handedly.
Tension cringed down my spine. “Is the rumor true?”
“Yes.” He split his apple again and held out half. His leaf-green eyes met mine. “But it’s not the whole truth.”
