You have two types of deities,he could recall his father once saying,those who care about their titles, and those who do not.
Shivani struck him as one who most certainly did. The hunger for power burned like a torch in her eyes.
“Your skill set is of an amateur’s,” he continued to taunt her. “If you plan on taking the title from my elder brother, you still have a long journey ahead of you.”
“You believe yourself to be in a position to mock me?” She jolted her tight grip on his strands, ripping shreds out in between her fingers.
It was brief, but Finnian cringed.
Shivani drew back slightly, her sneer turning into a narrowed gaze,noticing.
A bolt of regret zapped through Finnian’s chest. He forced the tension on his face to loosen, his expression to become impassive.
Shivani’s lips parted into a gut-churning smile, and she delicately brushed her long nails through Finnian’s locks. “My, what beautiful hair you have.”
He swallowed hard, watching closely as Shivani plucked a switchblade out of the pocket of her cargo pants. She ran the steel side of the blade down the length of his hair.
His pulse spiked. The knowing of what was to come churned in his not-yet-regrown stomach.
He’d done well to avoid giving away a piece of him that she could break off and devour.
The first time his mother had dropped a hundred sea urchins on him for losing a battle against a middle god in her arena, Finnian thrashed around on the sand with his airways closing. Panic blared through his pulse as he flailed and tore at his throat. It took hours for the poison to leave his system, during which he became accustomed to the burning quench in his lungs. It taught him how nothingcouldtrulyharm a deity.
Apart from one thing—the blood of his own nephew, a demigod from the Himura clan. A poison to all deities. A poison he possessed a syringe of, hidden away safely.
Shivani twirled a strand of Finnian’s hair around the sharp edge of her blade. “Where is it?”
He eyed the dark tuft of his hair between her petite fingers, his anger manifesting with a need to rip forward and crush her windpipe.
She pulled out the slack of his long hair and sliced through it. The severing of the strand reverberated in his skull and echoed in his left ear.
White-hot panic dotted his insides like ink and curdled in his stomach.
Shivani closely tracked every inch of his face, and whatever she noticed in his expression was confirmation she’dfinallyhit a nerve. “It seems you place a high value on being autonomous.”
Growing up, he never had allowed the servants to touch his hair, despite his mother’s orders to do so. What was his was preciselyhis.No matter the amount of times Mira had threatened him.
Shivani bit her bottom lip back to contain her sickening, gleeful smile and began hacking off layers at a time.
Every forceful tug and purposeful nick of the blade against his scalp constricted the muscles down his neck and arms.
He channeled his concentration to a single point on the wall straight ahead. Beneath the dancing flame of the sconce, there was an unmoving moth with mottled brown wings.
The unwelcome heat bred from Moros’s inferno nipped at his nape, making it easy to determine how short his hair was. The ends curled and frayed over his forehead, behind his ears.
Shivani paused and leaned in, nose-to-nose with him, as if to demand his attention. “Tell me, Finnian,” she said, slow and tantalizing, “how does it feel?”
She waited until he lowered his eyes onto her before cutting the final lock of his hair.
He swallowed the fire back down his throat. “How doeswhatfeel?” He forced out through a vacant tone.
“To be powerless.”
Her words piled into the pit of his core like stones, uprooting the memory of the day he watched Alke’s life end. A sense of helplessness he had spent his whole life trying to avoid jarred through his body.
Before he could react, Shivani cocked her arm out to the side and forcefully thrust her blade into his left ear.
Finnian’s bodywent limp against the support the shackles provided. He chased his breath. Oxygen, though unnecessary, provided a welcome relief to his exasperated synapses. A distraction from the pulsing agony of the blade protruding from his head.
