Evengi’s eye gets a twinkle in it as he smirks. “You could say that.” I’m not sure how to respond as he folds his long legs and looks up at me. “Look, I think we got off to the wrong foot, and I’m beginning to lose feeling to my fingers.”
I fold my arms as I step closer. “You’re a lot less intimidated than you were before.”
“I was never intimidated by you, darling,” Evengi says. He tilts his head as he studies me. “Is it true that you’ve never actually killed anyone?”
I suck in a breath and stumble back a step, nearly tripping over the end of my dress. “Who told you that?”
“You prefer to let your father do your dirty work.” He points to the skeleton. “Not that one. The living one.”
I sneer as I pull back. “I don’t know how you got that information, but clearly you’re well informed.”
“Not well informed enough to manage to avoid breaking into a necromancer’s house. But I’m trying to remedy that by getting to know you now. I know now that the Natasya I met last night wasn’t the real version of you, but I don’t think this is you either. So why don’t you put aside your ruses and we can discuss this civilly?”
I can’t help but smirk at that. What a surprise that must have been for him? “You think you have me all figured out then?”
“Oh, no, I would never claim that.”
I decide that it’s time for a change in subject. “What were you doing in my home, planning to kidnap me in an attempt to get my father’s money?”
He snorts. “As if I need your father’s money.”
“You’re a vagabond,” I point out.
“By choice.” He sighs waving his fingers, I think perhaps he is just moving them to try to keep the blood pumping to them. “I was looking for evidence that you were linked to Brom’s disappearance, but now…” He shakes his head. “If you didn’t kill Brom, as I have been told you have never actually killed anyone, and you aren’t currently holding him in this tomb, then where could he possibly be?”
I rest my hand on my hip, taking a half step back. “You say all this like you weren’t the one who made Brom disappear.”
“You didn’t take him, did you?” he breathes.
“Did you?” I ask in return.
He flicks his gaze up at me, staring at me for a long moment as if trying to size me up. I wish him the best of luck, no one outside of my family, and perhaps Taryn, has never been able to see past the layers I have built up around myself to protect me from thosewho would hate me for who I am. “If I tell you the truth, will you consider actually letting me go?”
I arch my brow. It’s cute that Evengi thinks he is in a position to make a deal with me, but then my father has always taught me to never underestimate a good bargain. Sometimes it’s just easier than doing things the hard way.
Still, I can’t just let him go, even if he has nothing to do with Brom’s disappearance he knows I’m a necromancer. I need to keep him close until at least I’m able to leave town with that spellbook safely in my possession.
“If you tell me the truth, I won’t harm you,” I say at last. “I’ll have no need to if I have the answers that I seek.”
His eyes dart to the corner again. “You’re not helpful,” he says out of the corner of his mouth.
I feel my eyebrow rise even higher.
As he turns to me with a sigh. “I suppose that is better than nothing, and I’m just left to trust the word of a necromancer.”
“If you won’t trust the word of a necromancer, then trust the word of a lady,” I say straightening.
Evengi’s eyes flick up and down my form slowly. “All right, I guess that’s the best I’m getting.” He shifts his position so that he is sitting straighter. “It’s true that I wasn’t entirely forthright about my reasons for entering Sunder Hollow.”
“I knew it,” I declare smugly as I step away, I turn in a small circle and grin triumphantly at Evengi. “I knew it.”
He is watching me with a somewhat amused expression on his face. As amused as anyone can be while being held in place by skeletal hands anyway. A strand of his chin length hair has escaped from its loose knot and is now falling into his face. Since his hands are otherwise occupied, I lean forward and push it out of his face.
This seems to startle him, and he looks up at me with surprise. I smirk at him. “It takes a liar to know a liar, Mr. Ichabod. And I knew you were lying almost from the start.”
“To be fair, my secrets were not nearly as dark as yours, my fair Natasya.” He smirks up at me. “I help people and serve the gods. You tinker with dead things.”
“Are you going to get on with it or preach to me?”
