“I don’t know. It’s what I sensed. Something like… Like guilt. For being alive. Is that why you hate immortality? Because you’ll always have to live with this guilt now?”
She tries to shake her head, but it’s shackled between my palms. I slide my fingers into her hair, glancing at her lips again. Color returns to them, and she blushes.
“I don’t know. None of it makes sense. You’re raving.”
I give her a small nod of concession, even though I’m convinced I’m right. Jaga is still here. I have to keep this conversation going, then, for as long as I can. I will steal every unguarded moment she gives me.
“You are a complicated mess,” I tell her bluntly. “Things are tangled in there, and it’s no wonder you suffer. But Jaga, I loved every bit of you I saw. You are beautiful, inside and out. The most lovely creature in all the worlds.”
She swallows with difficulty, and still, her eyes are open, that hunger churning and hot like one of her hidden demons.
“If we ever do this again, I’ll go deep,” I promise her, and my voice is rough, because it feels like sex, only more intimate, and sacred. “I’ll get lost in the maze of you and never come out, and you’ll have me, then. Maybe you won’t ever be mine, but can I be yours? Please.”
My heart stutters when her gaze drops to my mouth, heavy and intent. She presses her lips together, and they are so rednow, redder than her freckles. I want to lean in so much, it’s painful to hold back.
But she can reach me if she wants. We are of equal height, and she can kiss me first. Has she ever done it? I don’t think so. I’ve never let her. What a fool I was, so arrogant, thinking she had no choice but to be mine.
The moment stretches. Jaga doesn’t breathe, her entire being frozen, riveted. Fire crackles in the nearest fireplace, and I part my lips just a fraction.
Please.
She stumbles back with a hoarse sound. I try to hold on to her, but her skin grows spikes that pierce my hands, and I let go with a hiss. She disappears in Nienad’s room, slamming the door behind her.
“Can you hear me?”I send the thought through our bond to see if it’s working.
For a moment, nothing happens, and I think that maybe she somehow broke the connection. Again, I failed. My tricky girl, so impossible to ensnare.
“Leave me alone.”
I jolt, hearing her voice in my head, hushed and angry. I can’t contain a wide grin, and it’s just as well Jaga can’t see me, because she’d be so suspicious.
But I got what I wanted so long ago. I’m in her head now, wherever she goes. I’ll never lose her again. Even if she ends up buried by Mokosz in some remote patch of land, I’ll find her with no trouble. Or if she runs away, fed up with me.
My smile crumbles when I remember how I thought she’d kiss me, and she didn’t. But I swear, she almost did. She thought about it, that’s certain.
I conjure a mirror and school my face into a sultry expression, my dark eyes soft and hooded, my lips full and curled in invitation.
“Try to look out through my eyes. Just once, so we know it works.”
Nothing happens. Behind the closed door, Nienad makes sounds, loud yet impossible to understand. Naughty, naughty Jaga, torturing her former teacher to release her pent up tension.
I wait, and sure enough, the screams go silent a minute later. The bond in my mind lights up, and then I feel her, all warmth and poppies, a flutter of Jaga’s consciousness just behind my forehead.
I spread my lips into a full smile and wink. The bond grows silent, and she’s gone. I laugh under my breath, going off to make preparations.
She wants Perun not to punish the people of Slawa after I’m done? Let’s see if I can kill two birds with one stone.
Chapter twenty-one
Roast
Jaga doesn’t leave the torture chamber until I’m ready to wreak havoc in Slawa a few hours later. I knock, and when there is no sound or reply, I try to open the door.
It doesn’t budge. She has sealed it with a spell.
“Go away.”
I press my back to the door and send my shadows through the cracks, looking in. Nienad hangs in his ropes, unconscious, a pool of blood on the floor, and Jaga sits against the farthest wall, her leather clothes splattered with gore, her face and hair filthy.
