“What are you doing?” he demanded.
“Going home,” I said. “Or at least seeing if I can make another bridge.”
“You can’t do that here. Not around all these people.” His grip tightened on my ankle. “If there’s anyone with any significant power nearby, they might sense you the minute you remove those pearls. And if you try to create something as powerful as a bridge, you’ll alert everyone forleagueswho has even the smallest amount of talent with essence. If you fail at creating a bridge, you’ll draw our enemies right to us.”
And if I succeeded,Imight escape, but I’d be leaving Radven here to deal with the consequences and the danger.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked, ashamed by the desperation in my voice. “Stay here forever? I can’t do that. I have alifeback home.” Not much of one, if you asked Esmer…but that didn’t mean I was ready to give up everything I’d left behind.
“We’ll find a way,” Radven said, his contact-altered eyes boring into mine. “We’ll go somewhere secluded, far away from everything, and we’ll find a way.”
There was a promise in his voice, an assurance I never would have expected from Radven, of all the brothers.
“Why?” I heard myself ask. “Why are you going through all of this trouble to help me?”
He sat back slightly, but his hand was still curled around my ankle, the pads of his callused fingers pressed into my skin. His eyes, despite the contacts, were as sharp and observant as they’d ever been, and it felt like he was looking into my soul, right down to the deepest parts of me.
“You brought us home,” he said finally. “Everything has a price, butterfly, and I have no objections to paying you what you are owed.”
“You make it sound like an obligation.” I tried to pull my ankle away from his grip, but he didn’t release me.
“It’s not an obligation. It’s how I believe the world should work,” he replied. “One act of generosity for another.”
“Or a secret for a secret,” I said, referring to our very first meeting. God, it felt like ages ago, even though it had only been a day.
He smiled at that, the wicked, feral side of him returning.
“Yes,” he purred. “A secret for a secret. Do you have another you’d like to share?”
“Are you offering another secret of your own?” I countered, more and more aware of his hand on my ankle. “How many more secrets do you have?”
“More than most people,” he replied. “Enough for a lifetime. Perhaps two.” He leaned close again. “Why? Is there something in particular you wish to know about me?”
If I were being honest, there were quite a few things I wanted to know about Radven—like how he’d become this man, the one Octavian said had been forced to “make choices no one should ever have to make.” Or how his life had become intertwined with those of Octavian and Alastor. Or how many people he’d killed, and why.
“Not all secrets are shared with our voices,” he said after a moment. “Some secrets are shared in other ways.” His thumb brushed against my ankle, skimming lightly across my skin, and my skin prickled with pleasure.
Sweet jesus, I was right before. Anklesareerotic.Every second that he touched me there, my skin grew hotter and more tingly.
But I hadn’t lost all of my faculties yet. “You don’t care about Octavian—Oak?”
His eyes, which had been watching the slow path of his thumb against my skin, snapped back to my eyes. “What about Oak?”
“We kissed,” I reminded him. “You saw us.”
His shoulders relaxed again—I hadn’t realized they’d tensed up until that moment. He shrugged and smiled, dismissive. “Oak kisses lots of women. It doesn’t mean anything.” Then he looked at me, and he grew serious once more. “I mean it. Oak would never intentionally deceive a woman—he’s too honorable for that—but he’s not looking for love. All he does is leave a trail of broken hearts in his wake, I suspect because—” He cut himself off abruptly, looking almost surprised with himself for nearly letting his tongue slip. “Trust me on this.”
That certainly didn’t make me feel any better, and I didn’t know how to respond. “I just don’t want to get in the middle of anything. Whatever competition you have going on between the two of you, I don’t want any part of it.”
He sat back, looking genuinely surprised. “Competition?”
“Chasing after the same woman. Or whatever.” Having never been in the situation before, I wasn’t sure how to describe it. “I don’t want to be part of whatever game this is.” At least my head didn’t—my body had different ideas, but I’d been doing a pretty good job of shutting it down so far. “And I don’t want to come between you.”
“Ah,” he said. “If that’s what you’re worried about, then you’ve got it all wrong. No woman, no matter how exquisite she may be, willevercome between my brothers and me.” His tone had grown dangerous again, his words tinged with an edge I hadn’t heard since the previous night at the masquerade.
I hadn’t meant to imply that, but it still didn’t fully address the situation at hand. “Well, it might not be a competition, but I don’t know how I feel about being part of any sort of ‘consensual sharing’ situation either.”
He released my ankle then, sitting back on his heels. His wicked smile had returned, but the sharpness in his eyes suggested I still needed to be on my guard.
