Ashterion stilled, as if I’d struck something he hadn’t expected.
Slowly, he turned his head, meeting my gaze.
“I wonder.” His lips curled. Not quite a smirk, not quite a sneer. “Do you truly believe I owe you an answer?”
My hands tightened on the armrests. “No. But I’m asking anyway.”
He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “You assume it was a kindness,” he murmured. “That I warned you out of some sense of pity, or regret.”
“Wasn’t it?”
He looked away.
I didn’t relent, my voice quieter now, but no less pointed. “You didn’t want me to die.”
“No.”
A confession. A breath.
As soon as the word left him, regret brushed over his face.
His shoulders stiffened and his expression closed off as quickly as it had cracked. He leaned back, fingers tapping idly against the arm of his chair. “Don’t mistake that for mercy, Isara.”
I scoffed. “Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Ashterion studied me with unsettling intensity as the firelight danced across his features. For a moment, neither of us spoke, the silence that stretched between us almost alive.
“No,” he finally said, “I don’t believe you would.”
I held his gaze despite the unease crawling beneath my skin. This close, I could see the subtle patterns in his midnight-blue eyes, flecks of sliver, stars embedded in an endless void.
His expression remained the same. A game he was used to playing. A mask he wore effortlessly.
But I had seen the crack in it.
I leaned forward. “Why do you seem so irritated when your wife has you hurt us?”
Ashterion’s smirk returned, slow and knowing. “Why would you think that?”
“Because you flinched.”
The smirk on his face weakened.
“You didn’t watch what you were doing. You looked away. Like you didn’t want to see it.”
His features tightened for a heartbeat before he smoothed it away.
A near-silent chuckle escaping Ashterion as he studied me anew. “You’re observant.”
“And you didn’t answer my question.”
Silence stretched between us, heavy and humming.
“I find her tiresome,” he murmured finally, his tone was smooth, but the words were jagged underneath. “And when you’re as accustomed to cruelty as I am…” He sighed, almost bored. “Indulging her less creative methods is rather dull.”
The chill started slowly, curling down my spine as the realisation took shape.
Not because of the statement itself, but because of the way he said it.
