“You may as well come out,” she shouted. She allowed sincerefear to leak into her tone. Her throat burned from unshed screams, and Petrina’s name pulsed behind her clenched teeth. “I’m tired of running.”
Tomas appeared, crouched, and hooked an elbow atop one bent knee. His black cloak filled with wind and fluttered away from Petrina’s head, dangling at his side. “But we were having fun.”
“This isn’t fun.”
“Are you sure?” He gave her a mock frown. “I was going to allow you one more disguise. You almost fooled me with this one. I even lost you for a while.”
Selene stepped toward the building where he crouched, maintaining eye contact. “Why are you doing this?”
Tomas paused as if considering. Finally, he waved a hand. “I may as well tell you. Thorne paid for your heads.” He gave Petrina’s head a hard pat. “He wasn’t happy about your escape, and we worked out a very lucrative deal.”
“You had a deal with Augustus, too.” One step. Two. “He paid you a lot of coin up front.”
“And if he survives, maybe we’ll give it back. We’re men of honor—wouldn’t want to sully our reputation.”
Her fingers curled into fists. “No. Wouldn’t want that.”
Tomas sighed and shifted as if preparing to stand. “It’s not our fault that bigger and better offers were made. It’s what we do, Selene. We go where the money is. I won’t apologize for it.”
Selene held his dark gaze. “I wouldn’t dream of asking you to.”
The wind gust came in from the sea at Tomas’s back, and the building groaned. He didn’t lose his balance, but his attention went to the roof as the structure leaned.
Selene sprinted at the pole right in front of her and heaved—the wood, like everything else around here, was weathered and salt-rotted. The bottom was only hooked into the cobblestone. One good push freed the pole.
The building whined and moaned as she ran into the second support pole.
The structure pitched toward her, and the rust-colored roof tile slid off, bringing the Bladesworn with it.
Tomas landed with a grunt on his back. The building was coming down atop him. His eyeswidened?—
He rolled, and not easily—Petrina’s final fuck-you as her head hindered his progress before spiraling free of his body.
Selene sprinted into the center of the road as the locals screamed. She pulled two long-bladed knives from her sheaths.
The building splintered and crumbled in a cloud of dust and a ricochet of splintered wood.
Tomas, gray with dust, lay on his stomach just outside the rubble and began pushing to his knees.
Selene straddled his body and crossed the blades at his neck. She yanked each blade back, slicing through his neck, and his blood sprayed across the cobblestone.
As he lay gasping for breath, she bent toward his ear. “I was always the hard one to kill.”
Before she became fire, she was water.
Quenching the thirst of every dying creature.
She gave and she gave
until she turned from sea to desert.
But instead of dying of the heat,
the sadness, the heartache,
she took all of her pain
and from her own ashes became fire.
