Like the huntress she is, Auset just watches him.
Failing to get a reaction, Verus tries to match her placidity, but after a handful of minutes, Danes skitters up to his shoulder and he flinches.
When the quiet seems to grow to be too much for him, Verus asks, “Who are you?”
I don’t like how he’s staring at her. It’s as though he’s seeing a lifeline and not the threat that she is. My girl will teach him though.
Auset moves around the chair and over to the table by Curio where all of Verus’s armor and weapons have been laid out. She remains silent as she runs her finger over the light gray shell of his chest plate like she’s trying to find something familiar about it. Her stunning black eyes rake over the weapons as though she’s both searching through them and cataloging them simultaneously. Finding what she’s looking for, she reaches out and plucks the iron blade from the array.
She studies the weapon, paying careful attention to the bone hilt and the gleaming blade.
“You couldn’t pay most fae to put a pebble of iron in their pocket for more than a dozen minutes,” Auset observes as she walks behind the chair and out of Verus’s line of sight. “And yet you carry around a blade made with the noxious metal. How long did it take you to build a tolerance?”
“Years,” Verus grits out like the word is forcing its way past his lips against his will.
I grin, knowing the whinnip root is taking hold of his tongue.
“Who are you?” he demands again.
“Does it still burn you, or are you immune to even that?” she continues.
He doesn’t answer.
Auset shrugs like his silence makes no difference to her and then moves in closer from behind and presses the flat of the blade to the side of his neck.
A sizzling sound starts, and the distinct smell of iron-charred flesh wafts through the room. Verus hisses and tries to move away from the blade. Auset lets him, having found the answer to her question despite his silence.
“Not immune,” she observes as though she already knew this and is sweetly taunting him.
Verus clenches his jaw against the pain, his hands once again in fists as he grunts out, “Who are you?”
The shit stain clearly can’t let that go.
“You fight with it, but you’re not used to the bite of the blade?” she queries in that saccharine, silky, slightly taunting way of hers.
I’m intimately familiar with her candied contempt. I swallowed my fair share of it when we first met. She has an uncanny way of slicing you up with every word, judging you as lacking and beneath her, and all you want is more. It doesn’t matter that she’s cutting you to the quick, because she’s only looking at you when she does it, and it makes you want everything she’d offer if you could only prove yourself worthy.
Auset moves to the front of Verus, and his eyes track her like she’s a fresh stream in the desert. Slowly, calculatingly, Auset folds the sleeve of her tunic up until her forearm is exposed. She keeps her intense stare on Verus as she brings the flat of the iron blade to her inner arm. She stares at him with absolutely no expression on her face as the iron burns her skin and marks her as tougher than this fuck could ever hope to be.
She’s a strikingly ferocious little fae.
“I’ve known the bite of every blade I’ve ever used,” she declares, her voice perfectly even and casual as she finally pulls the iron from her skin. “I used to think it was more of a barbaric practice than a useful one, but I’m starting to see its merits. What do you think, Verus?”
Auset speaks his name as though she’s searching for something familiar in it. Interestingly enough, Verus looks as though he’s doing the same with the sound of her voice. All of us are tiptoeing around the rim of something unknown, waiting to see who will fall in first.
“Who areyou?” she asks, parroting Verus’s question.
There’s a fierce and determined look in her eyes that promises she’s going to get what she wants one way or another. Verus studies the iron blade in her hand, the burn on her arm, and then her face.
He clenches his teeth against the answer that’s trying to crawl out of his mouth. “Verus Hathwait, second son of Chief Hathwait. Sword in the first division of the Moon’s army.”
He stops, panting for breath as though each word was ripped from his innards, his glare icy and filled with spite.
“Soh thorah ruw erahda, sian hierreth vier ausooe fotil eiss,” he demands in a language I’ve never heard before.
I tense as it rings around the room, falling all around us like seedlings that have lost their guiding breeze. What shocks the ever loving shit out of me though, what knocks me across the jaw like a cheap hit, is when Auset looks him dead in the eye and then answers in the same lilting mystery tongue.
ChapterFifty-Three
