I withdrew the card he’d handed me earlier and slid it down my lap. With one finger, I tapped the face card. “I dragged myself into this, remember?”
His silent chuckle shook against my shoulder. “Do you know how to play poker, Miro?”
“I understand the concept.”
He cut hard eyes at me. “Not good enough. You can’t beat the Empire on concept. You need to be holding all the winning cards when the time comes to reveal your hand.”
I shrugged, aware of how my shoulder brushed his, of how close we sat. Of how everything had changed in a matter of hours.
Everything you think you know is a lie, I realized.
“Then how do we win?”
He sighed and leaned his head back against the seat. “We bluff.”
“I don’t like that option. What are the other options?”
His smile pulled at something deep inside me. “The only other option is learning how to wield their secret and use it against them.”
“Learning how to use…magic?”
“Winning is always a gamble, Miss Miro. It takes risk.” He rolled his head against the seat until he was staring over at me, a mischievous gleam in his eye. “To beat them without bluffing, we’ll need to learn everything they know about magic.”
“That might take a while.”
He nodded solemnly. “Right now, they don’t know about Myth. And even if they find out, they won’t knowweknow what his flame can do. Whatever happens, we have to feign ignorance.” His head rolled on the seat until he was staring at me. “Ari.”
I looked up.
“It’s what they’ll expect, so we play into their expectations. If they come for Myth—wait, listen.” He lifted his hand to silence my protest. “If they come for him, we have to pretend we don’t know what his flame can do.”
The train rattled down the tracks, shaking me gently, doing its best to lull me to sleep. In my lap, my fingers fidgeted madly. Finally, I muttered, “So we learn about magic, without a guidebook, and we test my dragon, without getting caught, and we somehow do that in a way that enables us to stay alive when the Empire decides we need to die?”
His sigh expressed what I felt. Both his hands raked down his face. “Something like that.”
“Short of a magical cure for death, how exactly do you propose we stay alive when that time comes, Rushland?”
He cracked his knuckles. “Give my father a reason to keep you alive. Make yourself an asset.”
I snorted. “Asset? How could I be valuable to your father?”
“It’s that or prepare to beat him when he tries to kill you. Asset or assassin, those are your two choices.” He flicked my leg with his finger. “Like it or not.”
I couldn’t believe he was using the word assassin in the same sentence as his father. “Your father wouldn’t…”
“He would. He has. He…” Rush rubbed his face. “I’ll just say this quick. He had a son with another woman. Years ago. It was all a big secret, but when the young man showed up at our house, with a letter from his mother that claimed he was my father’s child, my father shot him. In the chest. I was seven.”
“Oh, saints,” I said, clamping a hand over my mouth.
Rush stared at his lap. “He was older than Reggie. If my father had accepted him, he could have inherited everything. But my father showed us that day what he’ll do to keep his secrets.”
I was speechless. Rumors circulated about the duke’s ruthless manner as a businessman, but this was…so much worse. Finally, I managed to mutter, “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged, his knee bouncing rapidly. “So when I say he’ll kill you if he thinks you know too much, he will. He’d probably even kill me if he thought it would serve his purposes.”
Rush had watched his own father murder his half-brother, and I couldn’t imagine what that would do to someone. But it didn’t mean I could stomach the idea of taking out the duke. “I’m not going to kill anyone,” I mumbled.
“Then I suggest you start shaping up to be someone he can’t kill when he gets the chance.”
