“Actually, yes.” Ignoring his startled look, she continued, “It makes sense the spy would be someone close to you, and with how little you interact with the other mages, that suggests it’s probably someone on the council. Vera is clearly gathering information against you for the Conclave. If we tell everyone at the next council meeting that you intend to do something she can use against you, they’ll want to take that information to Vera, and the only way to do that is through the portal room door. If we watch the door, we’ll have them.”
May and Allaster were both staring at her by the time she finished.
“Is this what goes on in your head?” Allaster asked at the same time May said, “No wonder we had no idea.”
There were times during a con when your body simply refused to cooperate. This was one of them. Kasira felt her cheeks go hot with embarrassment, an emotion she hadn’t thought herself capable of anymore. To be embarrassed required you to care what someone else thought of you.
“Is that a yes or a no?” she demanded.
Allaster downed her drink. “Yes.” He set the glass on the floor and stood. “I’m going to check on my brother.”
As he and May returned to the infirmary, Kasira collapsed against the portal room wall, the last of her adrenaline fading. Without it, she felt vacant, a fragile shell imitating life. She let that feeling subsume her, too afraid to look at what lay beneath, and closed her eyes for one moment of perfect, uninterrupted peace.
Then she felt him.
Not through magic, or by sound, but from the way her skin prickled in familiar warning.
“You look a little on edge, Kas,” Thane said softly. “Bad day?”
Her eyes flashed open, and she seized him by the arm. She teleported them both to the northern garden, flinging Thane as hard as she could into the railing. He rolled off it with a grunt and turned to face her, but she already had a knife at his ribs.
“I ought to gut you here and now,” she growled.
“By all means,” he said with a laugh. “Hand Vera the final nail in your precious Librarian’s coffin.”
“He is not—”
“Stop lying to yourself, Kasira!” Thane surged forward against the knife, knowing as well as she that she couldn’t kill him. “Why else would you be here threatening me? For your dear love of a backwater town you’ve never set foot in before today?”
Kasira’s hand trembled, and she spoke each word very carefully. “You interfered in my con. You sent me into a situation I wasn’t prepared for.”
Thane laughed again, sharp and loud, and shoved away her hand. She tracked his every step back to the railing, thought about what it would feel like to send him hurtling over the edge. He leaned his hands against the railing, staring out through the waterfall’s mist at the burst of color in the darkening sky as if it were a beacon.
It was there only for a moment, that longing, before he snuffed it out.
Kasira stiffened, flashing back to the first morning after her release from her cell. How she had simply sat at the edge of her Malik camp and stared at the horizon for hours as the dark brightened into day. She had watched every sunrise and every sunset with a ferventdedication the priests would have lauded, her entire world strung about that light.
She understood Thane’s yearning, well enough that she began to wonder if there was another way she could approach this. They had been family once, after all, and they had the same goal. If they could work together instead of as enemies, they could both get what they wanted.
“I … am sorry, Thane,” she said. “For what I did to you.”
When he looked at her, his blue eyes softened by the gathering dusk, she could almost see the man who had pulled her and Loraya off the streets, given them a home. A family. For a while, he had made her feel safe for the first time in years.
Then he’d taken it all away.
Slowly, Thane came toward her, and she made herself look hopeful and open and not as if she was struggling not to flee. He extended a hand, cupping her face. “What is it, exactly, that you think you did to me, Kas?” His voice was so very soft, almost broken, and she wondered how much of it was real. How much of her betrayal had truly hurt him and not just his ego?
“I took away your freedom,” she replied. “Your network. The woman you loved.” She forced herself to meet his gaze. “I took away your power.”
“That’s right.” His nails curved against her cheek, and like a layer of frost melting to reveal what lay beneath, his eyes turned clear and pitiless as the moon. “And if you think a false apology and a little shallow comradery will make me forget that, you are a fool.”
Kasira flinched back, leaving Thane’s hand hovering in midair.
“Don’t try to con me, Kasira,” he warned softly. “I taught you everything you know.”
She gritted her teeth.Not everything.
“I’ve been watching you, and I know what it looks like when you’ve lost yourself to a performance.” He leaned toward her, and she retreated against the sydara. It rattled, reaching out thin-stemmed flowers between them. “By the time I’m done with you, Vera will throw you in a hole so dark and deep, you’ll forget your own name.”
