Ella opened her mouth to reply, but Jakobav lifted a finger, gaze never leaving hers. “Don’t ruin it by explaining.”
She lost the words completely, caught staring at him, exposed in a way she hadn’t braced for.
Unfortunately for her focus, the next image that forced itself into her head was Jakobav half-naked. Not a hazy fantasy or some imagined indulgence, but the very real memory of him walking out of the bathing room, water dripping over his skin, unapologetically bare, as though modesty was a language he’d never learned. She’d only glanced once. Well, maybe twice, but that glimpse had burned the image into her memory.
The ink crawling down his chest like it had a mind of its own. The ridges of muscle shifting with every step. The deep V cut into his hips, leading downward like a map she hadn’t meant to memorize yet had clearly imprinted into her subconscious, staging mutiny at the worst possible moment.
She swore under her breath and raised her mug high.
“Another round, please!” she called to the barkeep, maybe louder than she intended.
Then, under her breath, barely a mutter, she added, “Before I start remembering more things I didn’t fucking ask for.”
Jakobav nearly choked on his drink.
“What?”
Ella flushed. The ale in Dravaryn must have been stronger than anything she was used to.
“What were you just thinking about?” he asked, a wicked smile curving his mouth.
She blinked. Hard.
Fuck.
Maybe she should switch to water.
A smell wafted through the room, pulling her attention across the tavern. In a shadowed corner near the hearth, two cloaked men sat hunched over a low table, smoke seeping fromtheir mouths in slow, iridescent spirals, twisting like serpents toward the rafters. The metallic tang of wraithleaf thickened the air, bitter and sweet all at once, stinging her eyes. One of the men exhaled through his nose, his gaze glassy and unfocused. The other muttered in a language Ella didn’t recognize, the words thick and syrupy, each syllable dragging heavy through the air.
Jakobav didn’t glance their way, but his posture shifted subtly and his hand drew closer to the hilt of his blade.
Ella forced herself to look away, too exhausted to ask if he’d understood the foreign words, though the echo of them clung in her mind a beat too long. She tipped her mug back and drank again, the ale suddenly tasting bitter, fizzier than before, the swallow harsher than she intended.
When she lowered the cup, Jakobav was watching her.
“You want to head up soon?” His voice had dropped, quiet enough to belong only to her. “We face the seer tomorrow. Best not to be hungover for…whatever that’ll be.”
She parted her lips to reply, but the conversation at the next table bled into her awareness.
“…Orchid’s queen… weeks now…”
“…doors shut… physician from the capital…”
“…collapsed in the hall, I heard…”
“…the girl should be crowned already… what’s her name…”
The words fell heavy as stones into water, rippling outward until everything else in the room blurred. Sound thinned, the chatter dimming to a muffled hum, and her hand tightened around the mug until the handle bit into her palm. Heat stung behind her eyes, sharp and useless. She couldn't tell whether her lungs remembered how to expand.
The prophecy had warned her that the queen’s death would be the spark, the blaze that would drag her into the light.
Ella’s rise was never meant to be born of ambition but of necessity, and now it was the cruelty of the fates that her mother was the tinder destined to ignite it all.
Jakobav didn’t turn toward the whispers, didn’t betray her with so much as a twitch of recognition. Instead, he set his cup down with quiet care and smoothed his features into stillness, a choice she recognized instantly, and hated how deeply grateful it made her.
He leaned closer, near enough that the warmth of his presence brushed her skin. His gaze went from her mouth to the whitened grip of her hand, before returning to her eyes.
“Ella,” he said, her name shaped as both question and vow.
