She tried again. “I’m sorry for your loss. Sasha was…” Hesitating, she shook her head and laughed. “She was a woman of many talents, and a close personal friend. I’ll miss her. And her gifts.”
Despite myself, I was drawn from my sulking to ask, “How did you know her?”
A quick flash of straight, pearly teeth, and Alicia stooped to retrieve a fresh towel from under the vanity. One that hadn’t been used more times than I could count. A towel that smelled of fresh laundry and not stale mildew of a man left to clean up after himself. “She saved my life,” she said with a tiny secret smile.
Quiet, I waited for her to continue, but when she merely began to set up a box full of paints and brushes, I said, “And?”
“Talk and work, priestess. Turn, so I can fix your hair.”
I moved to snatch the towel from her hand, scrubbing at my hated silver-blonde locks to force them dry.
She slapped my hands away with a hiss. “Stop that. You’ll cause breakage. I got shot in the battle for Elora,” she added, and produced a brush. “Not by an elite, of course. Wouldn’t have been enough left of me to bother saving, and none of the good bits,” she added with a lewd wiggle of her brows, making fleeting eye contact before she frowned at my hair and began to work on the snarls. “No, it was my father who did the honors,” she murmured, and a quiet mist descended over her elegant features. “When the Caledonians kicked in our front door, he said he’d rather I were dead than serving the Empire. As if it were his choice, and his alone.”
I made a sympathetic sound at the back of my throat.
“Lucky for me,” she continued, “the old man was a terrible shot. Only managed to leave me writhing in agony before he turned the next shot on himself. The bastard.” She finished brushing, then gathered my hair in one hand, and wrapped the towel around the ends. Gently squeezing it dry. “Woke up in a field infirmary with Sasha in all her quiet glory. Poor thing covered in blood, doing her best to stop the bleeding, despite the black eye she couldn’t see from.”
My lip curled. “Tilcot—”
“You’d think so,” she drawled, a tiny, sad smile hovering at the corner of her lips. “But it was me, actually. Apparently I came in swinging. That’s what the captain tells me, anyway. And he’d know, I suppose, being the one who carried me in.” She laughed, then, and it was bitter as she unwound my hair from the towel. “My father. So desperate to ensure I wouldn’t fall into Caledonian hands, and he all but handed me over to them himself.”
Shifting, I inspected my nails. Unsettled by the similarities from her life to mine.
“I’ve been with the captain ever since,” she added with a sigh.
For a moment, I merely watched her as she worked. Pulling at my scalp as she began to twist my hair in a complicated braid. And then I said, “You’re in love with him.”
Her lips twitched. “Hold this. Don’t let the ends come apart,” she said, and guided my fingers to pinch the end of one braid, while she moved on to another. And then she sighed. “I was,” she admitted, at last. “For a long time.”
Too curious not to ask, I couldn’t stop the question from slipping through my lips. “But not anymore?”
“Why?” she sang, waggling her brows. “Jealous?”
My face twisted, cheeks still pink with the stain of elite lust. “Morbidly curious,” I returned, and my teeth clacked together with an ivory snap. “What changed?”
“Well,” she said, and plucked the braid from my fingers, adding it to her complicated twisting. “The Caledonians have a strict social class and an obsession with the breeding of their coveted, elite bloodlines. Always eager to produce a new generation of more deadly elites, most of their marriages are arranged by the royal family. These… designer couples are expected to produce offspring inside of the first two years, or see the union dissolved so another pair might have a shot.”
I gagged. “Animals, all of them.”
“And bloodthirsty,” she added with a merry little smirk. “The women, most of all. They only carry the power genes,” she said. “There are no female elites, but that doesn’t mean Caledonian women are meek. Not by any stretch of the imagination.”
Every priestess who has ever been has the potential to become an empath.
At this, I went very still. Too raw to do better than that to conceal the deadly secret I held. A truth I was only beginning to understand about energy wielders. That Asher was right—we were merely two sides of the same coin.
This is a truth they can never know…
Alicia laughed. “No, I have no desire to find a knife between my ribs simply because I burned a candle for a man who could never return the sentiment. Time is our womanly curse,” she said with a gusty sigh. “And I do feel for their women. To an degree. That they must battle each other for the rights to bear the offspring of men whose eyes will never stop wandering…”
“Huh,” I hummed, and was made to see Carina in a new light. A desperate, pathetic sort of glow, yes. But one that lent her actions a little more reason. “Well,” I said, and folded my hands in my lap. Over the apex of my thighs, where I was still wet and shamed with seed that could not root. “Not a danger for me, then.”
Alicia went white. From one breath to the next, her brow glistening with a sheen of shock when her lips parted, her jaws hanging slack. “M-Mila,” she gasped. “I’m so,sosorry. What an asshole thing to say, I cannot believe—”
I waved her off and found something of interest on the far wall. “Barren priestesses owned by an empire obsessed with breeding people for power can only be a good thing, I think.”
Color rushed back into her cheeks. “I didn’t… I wasn’t the one who told him,” she whispered, and it was her turn to find something interesting to stare at. “That… you were… untouched.”
Jaw clenched, I sneered where she couldn’t see, but couldn’t muster the venom to snap at her. Couldn’t be bothered to tell her it was me who’d told him because it didn’t matter. But I wasn’t moved to ease her guilt.
