When he's finished, I turn to him. “Can I… I mean, am I allowed to see your riftlines?”
Red plays along his sharp cheekbones, but he nods. “It’s common for us to check each other’s marks. Erevan will sometimes add a symbol to them as a sign of good luck.”
He pulls his shirt back off, dropping it onto the bed before catching my hand gently and drawing it to his chest. I brush the pad of my darkened finger against one of his marks. “This one is new?”
He nods. “I believe so. I won’t know for certain until I can check in a mirror, but it’s common to have one mark added.”
I purse my lips as I look down at the neckline of my shirt. “What does it mean that I have so many?”
“I don’t know,” Eres admits. He stands quietly as I begin where he showed me, following the mark with my finger. It travels diagonally across his chest, curving around his nipple and branching out across his stomach. His skin flexes beneath my touch, and I receive a boyish grin when I look up. “I’m ticklish.”
I bite my cheek to hide my amusement, only for it to fade as my hand brushes against the hairs that leads from his navel todown, below his waistband. He hisses air between his teeth as I run my finger beneath the material of his hose, following the line as it winds around his hip and back up, a dark line directly up his spine that branches out just below the back of his neck, similar to the branches of a tree.
“It ends here.” My voice wavers. “No special signs for you.”
“Am I interrupting?”
We both spin at the cold, tightly controlled voice. Duskbane lowers his head to enter the cell, raising the tray in his hands. “Dinner. Thought you might be hungry.”
He doesn’t look at me at all. Only at Eres, the two of them watching each other for a long moment that feels like something I have no part of. Duskbane sets the tray down on the small table with a clatter. “I’ll be at the door.”
“Kae—”
The sound of retreating footsteps is the only response. With a sigh, Eres waves a hand. “Go ahead and eat. You must be hungry.”
He moves to leave, only to turn back. “I’ll be back.”
I only nod. He vanishes after Kaelen, and I hear the hushed tones of an argument from the stairs. Despite my attempts, I can’t hear the exact words, so I tear into the bread instead, dipping it into some sort of vegetable broth and following up with some of the thinly-sliced, salted meat.
I leave half for Eres. After forcing myself to stop looking at the door, I crawl into the cot and face the wall, playing with the ends of my still-damp hair.
He’s coming back.
He said he would be back.
Get a hold of yourself, Lyra.
Eres
“Ihave another question.”
That’s the first time she’s spoken to me this morning. Aside from a mumbled greeting when she woke with her face buried in my chest, followed by an embarrassed fumble between the two of us as I tried to climb out of one side of the cot and she almost rolled into the wall in her haste to get as far away from me as possible.
I shouldn’t have gotten in. Wasn’t going to, except when I entered the cell after another row with Kaelen that didn’t end well for either of us, I found her crying on the cot with her eyes closed. Her whole body was shaking. In hersleep.
So I climbed in beside her. I only meant to hold her until she settled, blaming it on the Binding, but she wrapped herself around me and didn’t move for the rest of the night.
Meanwhile, I didn’t sleep at all.
I blink away the exhaustion as I look up from retying her bandaged hands. “Ask whatever you need to.”
I’ve realized that she gives little away. Lyra keeps her face expressionless. But her feelings are there—in the faint crease of her eyes, the small v that appears between her brows, the way her lips twist and quirk, the color that blooms in her cheeks. “What if I was defending myself, and the outcome was a betrayal of you? Would it have the same ending?”
Brow knotting, I try to follow her reasoning. “In what way?”
She barely blinks. “If Duskbane decides that I’m too much of a threat to be allowed to live. Would a death blow in self-defense trigger the Binding?”
Both of my eyebrows raise. “I’d love to take a look inside your mind. It sounds bloodthirsty.”
