“Then forgive me for my breach in good manners on several occasions today.” She gave him a deep curtsey and, when she rose, she met his shadowed glance. “Most notably that I did not sooner make my bows to the master who has come home.” Still she did not evoke a response.“My Lord Avon.”
Silence—so searing she felt the stab of old wounds.
“You found Percival Avon’s ghost?” he asked sharply, the sudden flash of lightning once more revealing his angular features and rapt eyes.
“No, I have not found him.” But she understood better why he had been so eager for this quest, for this particular ghost.
His father.
With that confirmation, St. Silas schooled his face once more, wearing the same expression he used when taking his confessions—a studied casualness, as if he was an indifferent observer to someone else’s misery.
Then he did something that Leena didn’t expect.
He smiled, dark eyes suddenly dancing as if they were once again sharing a jest. He narrowed the space between them in two long steps. “Miss Al-Sayer, you are still shaking.” His voice was laced with silky concern. He reached for her frozen hands and cupped them in his own, bringing them close to his mouth to breathe on them. “Never mind all of this. Come here—I shall warm you.”
A charge went through her the moment he touched her, and she forced herself to jerk away from him.
What St. Silas did not realize was thatshe,too, had begun to know him, to unravel the workings of his mind as perceptively as he saw hers. He was trying to make her doubt her own convictions by distracting her. This was the Saint of Silence as he was, layers of subtle manipulation to conceal the truth.
“I am warm enough without more lies,” she said, her anger once more building in her refusal to be diverted by him. “You are Percival Avon’s son.”
The smooth smile dropped. His eyes were alert again, their dark flecks enhanced in the storm’s gloom.
“That changes nothing.”
“It changeseverything,” Leena whispered fiercely, head tilted upward to meet his, to ensure that he didn’t mistake the earnestness on her face. “You are master of the last fortress in the north; all the land until the sea is yours by birthright. Your father was Percival Avon. You come from a lineage as old as the First Marquess of Avon, traced back nine hundred years.”
Another sudden blaze of light, then the distant roll of thunder. The electricity in the air coursed over her skin again, raising tiny hairs at the back of her neck.
She felt exposed under St. Silas’s eyes, every pore on her skin vibrating under his focused attention, until she felt as charged as the lightning.
“What do you want from me, Leena?” The sudden change fromhis indifference—the fervency with which he asked the question—roared in Leena’s ears. She remembered when she had asked him that exact question not long ago, how it had torn through her own throat and left blood marks from how badly she’d wanted to know.
“The truth,” she responded, just as low. “Nothing else.”
He returned her curtsey with a low bow of his own. Even as he did so, his eyes lingered on her neck, sliding momentarily lower, his pupils dilating.
“The Seventeenth Marquess of Avon, at your service.” He even spoke like an aristo. She’d always wondered about his cultured accent—his voice a drawl, like wine spilling into a glass, while Leena’s tongue gnashed at herRs and tasted herTs like grit. “Does it displease you to find out I am an Avon?”
“No…”
“Are you angry?”
“Anger is a very useless emotion,” she gritted back—the same words he had used on her long ago. “No, I am not angry. I am not even angry that you withheld this information. I would be a hypocrite if I were to deny that we all have painful secrets we wish to hide.” Leena could see that he had not been expecting that answer, but she pressed on before he could interrupt.
“Do you know about the Avon curse? Do you know what the First Marquess of Avon promised to the demon living under Weavingshaw?”
There was no change to his expression; it was as if they were merely speaking of polite nothings over dinner. “This is the history of my lineage. I have known it since I was old enough to speak.”
She could not keep the astonishment from her voice. “So if youknew,why are you looking for a way to reclaim Weavingshaw? No, do not deny it; this entire hunt for your father was always about taking back Weavingshaw.”
“Because it is mine.” The words were not a statement but a proclamation of war.
The rain outside had sharpened its onslaught, breaching the defenses of the cave, a few droplets reaching them. It had turned into sleet. Soon, it would start to snow.
Even as they argued, Leena was aware that St. Silas’s gaze struggled to remain on her face, continuously dropping below her collarbones before jerking up again, and her face flamed. But still she persisted.
“It was also Percival Avon’s,” Leena returned, and the hollow cavern twisted her words into a dark echo. “And I saw a memory of him standing over the lake in the crypt,pleadingwith the demon to stop feasting on him.”
