She needed to believe in herself as much as he did, but how could she, without seeing what he’d seen?
“Two minutes,” he said. “That’s how long the last person to enter her cell survived.” And then he smiled, still amazed that his power had been so damned right about this. “You’ve been in there for five hours.”
Her dark brows raised.
But she gave no response to his statistic...even though he could see the spark, the light, come back to her gaze.
Perfection,he thought.
She wasn’t what he’d expected from his dreams.
She was better.
“Does she just lie here all day?” Ezer asked.
“No,” Kinlear said. He could almost pretend Arawn wasn’t with them anymore. That it was just the two of them, alone in the darkness, talking about their raphon. “The past many months, she has spent her time wearing holes in the floor with her pacing. We had to replace the bars, from how much she’d slammed her body against them, before we finally resorted to the chains to keep her from hurting herself.”
“As would you, when placed in a cage,” Ezer said.
Gods, her words were sharp.
Her tongue cut like a knife.
He yawned, as if he hadn’t been affected at all by her ire, because again, she was a challenge, and he wouldn’t flinch. He wouldn’t back down, wouldn’t ever be seen as weak to her. Not the way he was to Soraya. Instead, he raised his dark brows and smiled. “Do you always speak to royalty in such a way?”
“Yes,”Arawn said beneath his breath.
Kinlear’s back stiffened.
He didn’t like that his brother knew that.
He didn’t like that he had grown to know her atall,because deep down...Kinlear knew Arawn was the true handsome twin. The one with bulging muscles and the godsdamnedabs.
He focused on Ezer.
He pretended Arawn was just the obnoxious sigh of the wind.
Ezer lifted her chin and snarled. “Do you always lock women inside cages?”
Gods, Kinlear could get used to this.
Sparring with wit and words.
“Fair enough,” he said, and chuckled. “Six didn’t stop moving until she met you. She’s been this way, a lump of feathers and fur, ever since.”
And then Ezer began talking, but it was an effort to listen as he watched her lift the kitchen knife. Those hands, those fingertips...he could imagine the way they would curl over the blade he’d give her. The one that he’d plucked from the dead darksoul, the night Six’s mother was captured. It belonged with her. It belonged with?—
“Damn it,” she hissed.
She’d cut herself. Deeply.
Enough that blood welled out, that...
The sound of clinking chains caught his attention...and the raphon rose to its feet.
“Kinlear.” Arawn’s voice was urgent. “Let her out.”
“Not yet,” Kinlear said, the words leaving his lips before he’d even had the chance to consider the effects of them. Was heinsane?Was he truly going to leave her there...bleeding...faced with the raphon?
