I smile, careful not to let my eyes linger on his tightly coiled muscles.
“Thank you for explaining all of this. I’m happy to learn.”
He takes a moment to examine my posture, my expression, as if he’s trying to predict the flow of our conversation. “What do you see—when you look at me?” A deep breath moves his hard, bulky chest. And he doesn’t look away.
Odd. Such a strange question. What tactic of manipulation is this?
“I—”I don’t know.“Why would you ask me that?”
There’s a need in his stare. An unwavering need for my answer.
“Humor me,” he says.
I blow out a nervous breath. “I see—a carefully orchestrated game—I see—power—danger—warmth—I see—a man, under a lot of pressure.” It spills out without any real time to sit and think and consider.
Another beat of examination from his long, dark stare.
“Warmth, hmm?” A wicked smile.
Ugh. I definitely should have thought before I spoke.
“I retract that word.” I smile sweetly. “And what do you see when you look at me?”
His eyes lighten slightly. “Naive. Trusting. Young. Ambitious.Reckless.”
I scoff.“That’s a judgmental observation for someone who has observed all of two minutes of me.” I reciprocate his same mocking tone.
“Who says these are the only minutes I have observed?”
17. Exiled
I lie awake all night,palms pressed into my bedsheets, eyes drawn to the canopy over my bed posts, yet I haven’t lefthisroom.
In that chair. Hanging on to his lavender words.
Dessin.
My nerves spring back to life at the thought of his gaze—knowing, studying,observing. His face resonates with me like an old soul, a long-lost friend, and a favored memory.
Peeking through my bedroom door is a soft flickering glow from Aurick’s study. I figured he would have gone to bed by now, but he’s been cooped up since I got home. I decide we could both use a little company from our sleepless night, wiggle my feet into my slippers, and saunter over to his office.
He’s hunched over his desk, hovering a magnifying glass over a long map stretched over other papers.
“Is geographyreallymore important than sleep tonight?” I say.
Aurick smiles down at the map before looking up to where I stand in the doorway.
“That depends on your level of fascination for history.” He waves me over to sit on the other side of his desk. He taps on the map with his magnifying glass. “Do you know anything about the manifestation from Alkadon?”
I shake my head and lean in to peer down at the map. From what I can tell, I’m looking at two small continents, side by side, then a massive continent about two thousand miles east, followed by several islands scattered nearby.
“This is where we are… Dementia”—he points to the first small continent, north of its twin—“and the one below us is Vexamen. But over sixty years ago, we traveled here from a country called Alkadon—that large eastern continent over there.” He taps on the massive continent to the right.
“What happened to Alkadon?” I ask. Something must have caused our grandparents to leave and settle here.
“Nothing happened to them. It’s what happened tous. They banished our grandparents and forced them to seek out new land. Alkadon had five royal families and four sons of those families were banished, along with their followers for acts of disturbing the peace.” Aurick removes a leather book from a locked cabinet. The book is worn and thicker than three regular-sized books on his shelves.
After setting it on top of the map, he flips through dusty pages until he finds the painted portraits of those families.
