“And this ismy house, Killion!” she shrieked. “You cannot tell me what to do in my own house.”
“Tyra,” he said, but it was in the low soothing tones reserved for children and cornered animals. “You need to calm—”
“Don’t you dare tell me to calm down, Killion Hastings.” Stalking forward, she sliced through the elites to stand amongst priestesses. “Not in this house. Not today. No,” she hissed. “No.”
“Tyra,” he said, and spread his hands. “You’ve had an exceptionally trying day. And you know I’m happy to help in any way I can, but—”
“Sasha killed him,” Tyra said, chin tucking in, spittle strung between top and bottom lip. Her eyes rolling white. “You know she did. And”—she laughed, high, and leaning toward shrill—“after everything he did for the little whore, now Harper’s son will grow up fatherless.I demand justice!”
Quirking one steely brow, the Lieutenant General hummed. “Do you now?”
For a moment, it seemed Tyra had run low on fumes. That she was wilting before her audience of powerful men protecting their most prized possessions. I could see it in the way her wild, dark eyes swept the women. Flicking from face to face to face without ever really seeing anything at all.
Until her crazed glare landed on me.
And flicked down to my lips.
Lips that were still absent-mindedly curled around a misty smile I’d forgotten to bottle.
Incandescent fury ignited in the widow’s eyes. “You asked what you could do to make it better,” she said, and stood tall. Spine going straight and elegant. Proud. “That’s it,” she said, lifting one trembling arm to point—atme. “I want blood.”
21
Achilling silence filled the dining room. Quiet that lasted for three heartbeats and a thousand years.
And then Lieutenant General Killion Hastings began to laugh.
Head thrown back, he stepped into the circle of elites, scattering priestesses as he cut a path to stand before the Tilcot widow with long, confident strides. Cruel, unforgiving when he took her cheeks in cupped hands—a new mother still ragged from childbirth—and offered nothing in the way of empathy for her pain. Her loss.
“That you think I would tolerate losing a single priestess is absurd, Lady Tilcot,” he murmured, deadly soft. Thumbs stroking the ridge of her cheekbones. “But to insist I should voluntarily offer up their lives in some kind of… romantic publicity stunt? That tells me you’re delusional.”
She spluttered. “Killion—how can you say that?!” she cried, clutching at his formal jacket with desperate, hooked fingers. “By decree of Caledonian law, murder is an offense punishable by death—”
“Shh, shhh, shhhh.” Thumbs stroking, he hushed her gently. “To say the late general’s slave was even capable of murder is merely a working theory, as of yet unproven by anything other than wishful thinking and womanly hysteria.”
“Womanly hyst—Killion! How dare you suggest—”
“Evenifthey possessed offensive capabilities,” he said, and pressed her back, clear of the tight cluster of priestesses. “Even if there was undeniable proof before an auditorium of blood-soaked witnesses that a priestess had committed murder with her bare hands, I still wouldn’t entertain your silly commands.” Without breaking eye contact, he clicked his fingers and summoned a soldier. “Please escort the Lady Tilcot to her rooms and see that she is made to rest.”
Wary, braced for violence, the soldier put hands on her shoulders and tried to turn her toward the exit.
Fingers curled into claws, she lashed out at the soldier and snarled, “This isn’t over, Killion!” as she was dragged from the room. “This isn’t over!”
But the Lieutenant General flicked her threats aside, and said, “I’ll make arrangements to meet with you in private. That will be all, Lady Tilcot.”
When the dining room had cleared of her crazed shrieking, the Lieutenant General clasped his hands at his lower back. Head tipped toward the ceiling as he took a moment to centre himself.
And then, “It would seem that things in the North have been allowed to devolve under the late General Tilcot’s reign. Slaves running about unchecked, and worse”—he laughed—“the elite soldiers of the Caledonian empire, seemingly reduced to doting nursemaids who balk at the notion of just punishment.”
The man who offered reparations cleared his throat. “With all due respect, sir, I don’t think—”
“No,” the Lieutenant General spat. “Apparently youdon’tthink, Patelle. This is a sentencing, not an open forum. I’ve already made my decision. And after seeing the way you lot coddle these slaves, I can see it’s intervention sorely needed.”
The tension in the air grew brittle enough to snap. I could almost see it floating there, crinkling on each held breath.
But I was apart. Drifting as the captain’s hands held my body pinned in place, while my mind was somewhere else entirely. Observing from a lonely island in the middle of an ocean of scarcely contained power, while a leviathan circled my tiny refuge. Swimming at such an impossible speed that the wake of his every lap was nearly enough to drown me in crashing waves of liquid fire.
Locked away in the privacy of our linked minds, he watched me with the unflinching focus of an apex predator. Daring me to move, as if I could manage to simply draw a breath without his allowing it.
