Reverie’s jaw clenched, and her movements ceased, if only for a moment. She began to wipe her knife a little more violently than before. “My youngers,” she muttered. “Pretty little things, Father’s precious favorites.” The words seethed from her lips like poison. “I’m sure you’ve met them,” she added, eyes rising to his.
Dorian wasn’t sure what his face was doing. He was sure there was either a look of surprise or guilt, as to which he couldn’t be sure. Perhaps both. He’d spent far more nights with the Scindo twins after meetings than he could remember.
In more compromising positions than he cared to admit.
A quirk of a smile rose on her lips, and she shook her head as she started cleaning her knife again. “Figures. I’m sure they’ve wrapped their legs around you a few times just as they do every other man Daddy likes to bring home.”
Dorian’s eyes narrowed at the sneer in her tone. “You don’t approve?”
“It isn’t that,” she said quickly. “Really, it isn’t. Father knows little of their explorations, thinking they’re the innocent ones and I am the whore—”
“Your father should pay more attention,” Dorian interjected, staring at a singular spot on the ground as the vision of his own explorations with them played back in his head.
Violent and non-violent. Together and separate. Sometimes with guests of their suggestion.
“My thoughts exactly,” she agreed, the words snapping Dorian out of his daze.
He could hear the drip of frustration in her voice, and he wondered what people had said to her over the years that had her so angry and desperate to prove herself different from the other Dreamer women.
“What if I gave you a rank instead?” Dorian said then.
“Excuse me?”
“Rank,” he repeated with a shrug. “In my army.”
“You don’t have an army.”
“I don’t, yet,” he agreed. “I also don’t plan on hiding out in the woods while strangers take over our world,” he continued. “I’ll get my sister and I’s crowns back. And when I do, I’ll need a commander for the Dreamer army to take Man.”
The dark lavender of her eyes stretched through him from beneath her shaggy bangs. Her light brown lips tightened into a pucker, sharp jaw twitching, and he watched as her chest rose and fell as she thought it through.
“What do you want in return?” she finally asked.
“Tell them I am dead,” he answered with a shrug.
She laughed. “No one will believe me.”
“They might,” he argued.
“Really? How? They would expect your head in a bag.”
Dorian’s hand clenched around the knife at his waist, the knife he’d made himself with the help of his sister… the knife that he carried with him everywhere as though it were an extension of his own arm. He pulled it from its sheath and looked it over. The rough swirled carvings in the blade. The dark red leather wrapped around the handle. The curvature of the flame and sun crest on the hilt…
He handed it to her hilt-first.
“What—a knife? That should mean something?” she mocked.
“That knife is the last possession I truly care about,” he admitted. “People who know me well know that I would never part with it unless it was pried from my dead fingers. Your father will know this.”
“That won’t work,” she argued, handing him back the knife. “If you are supposedly dead, they would have wanted me to go after your sister instead.”
Dorian sighed and ran a hand through his fluffy hair. “Then you can come with us to Dahrkenhill,” he said with a surrendered clap of his hands. “Make sure I stay alive long enough to stand trial for treason in your realm and keep me out of trouble in the mountains because you can bet they will hold me accountable for Draven’s death. If you can keep me alive through their trials, you can take me back to Scindo after. But—”
She had opened her mouth to speak, but he held up a finger.
“—my offer still stands,” he said. “I will make you my High Commander. This war with Man has hardly begun… it is far from over. You will have a legion of Dreamers and Belwarks at your fingertips. I need all the strength and ferocity I can get to defeat them. And you...” He paused, giving her another once over, "You're certainly one of the most ferocious things I've ever met."
"You know nothing about me," she countered.
