“No.”
She didn’t pry. That was Maeren’s gift: she knew when to cut and when to retreat. She reached into her coat and tossed him a bundle wrapped in cloth. “Scouts brought that back at dawn. The other thing you are avoiding talking about.”
He caught it. The cloth was warm against his palm despite the cold. Inside lay an obsidian shard no larger than his hand, edges smooth as water, a faint ash-scent curling from it. Its surface was not dead black. Instead, it rippled like ink over oil.
He set the shard back onto the cloth and closed it carefully, the fabric swallowing its shifting dark. “Where?”
“North copse,” Maeren said. Her tone was stripped of inflection, the way she spoke when the details disturbed even her. “Burned trees still standing like bones, ash falling like snow, and shards arranged in symbols again, tighter this time. There was a smell I could not place.” She paused, her gaze locking on him, weighing the lines of his face the way she might judge a blade for flaws.
He wiped his palm against his sleeve, but the sensation clung like static, a faint hum that refused to leave his skin. “What else?”
“Tracks that began and ended in the same place, and there was ash that burned through the soles of a boot.” Her eyes flicked toward the cracked ground beneath his feet, unflinching. “Ash that burns, Jake. That is not natural. Neither was whatever you just did to the grass.”
“I have it handled.”
Her mouth curved in a smile that held no warmth, quick and biting. “Tell that to the groundskeepers who have to restore the courtyard’s manicured squares.”
He almost left it there, but something had been gnawing at him.
He wanted to keep denying how distracted he was, wanted to let the words lock behind his teeth where they belonged, but instead he heard himself say, voice low and raw, “I tasted her blood.”
The air thickened between them, silence settling heavy.
Maeren went utterly still, then snapped her blade higher, the point kissing the hollow of his throat so close that he felt the cold metal through his collar, and her eyes blazed fury. Then, as quickly as it came, the violence smoothed into a scowl, her voice cutting. “Tell me you’re not that reckless. Tell me you didn’t.”
He held her stare until he could taste iron at the back of his tongue. “I did. And worse…it didn’t match any known line. Floral on the surface, but underneath, a fire that wanted to be something else. I couldn’t access her abilities. It locked me out.”
“That’s not possible,” she said, the words flat and cold.
“I assure you, it happened.” His tone left no room for doubt.
He pushed his unbound hair back from his brow, dark waves clinging, damp with sweat, beading on his skin from both sparring and from his confession. “You’ve seen me borrow many different powers over the years, stolen with a drop of blood: Windcrafters, Waterweavers, Metalbinders. A taste of their blood and their gift is mine for minutes, sometimes hours. But with Ella, I took nothing. And not that I was trying to, but it was like the pathway for access wasn’t even there.”
The point of her blade dipped until it hovered over the dirt between them. “Then she’s not Dravaryn. And whatever she is…her blood breaks rules it should not break.”
The floral note in her blood had been a lie painted pretty. With most people, even a whiff of their blood opened doors, but Ella had locked each one and set the whole hall burning, and the longer she kept her truth buried, the more hunger and suspicion twisted tight beneath his ribs.
Maeren began to circle him, boots whispering over frost as her gaze stayed fixed on his face. When she spoke again, her command was hard and controlled. “Jake, do not taste her again.”
He didn’t respond.
He knew better than to lie to Maeren, although he’d already lied by omission.
Still, she would hold him to any word he gave her, and this was not a promise he could keep.
Her blood still haunted his tongue, intoxicating and deceptively sweet. He wanted to soak up the way her body hadbetrayed her under his sheets, even as her voice spewed venom and denial.
Fuck, she had a traitorous body, the way her scent had thickened, leaving no question of how wet she’d been for him. It had pulled at him like a lure, something primal and unforgiving. He could have fed on it—fucking drowned in it. The contrast to her usual defiance only left him wanting to uncover every contradiction she carried, to have every lie and every revelation carved into him. She held countless secrets, and she revealed hardly any truths.
Thank the gods for the furs that night. If she’d seen what she did to him, the way his cock had hardened at the sight of her in his shirt and her arousal flooding the air, she would’ve known exactly how far she’d unraveled him.
But she was a trespasser in his head, just as she had trespassed in his castle, and he knew a threat when he saw one. He could harden for her and still slit her throat if she threatened his kingdom. The two truths did not erase one another.
“Jake,” Maeren snapped, “are you even listening to me?”
“Yes, of course,” he heard himself say.
Shit, he was not.
