He was combing my hair with the attentiveness of a new mother, kneeling on the hard, cold dirt while I sat on his cushioned bed at his request.
It…it didn’t make any sense.
His fingertips reached a knot, where they patiently worked. “Oil makes it easier to remove the knots,” he answered, as if that was sufficient to explain why he was bothering to do this for me. The knot came apart, and he combed his fingers through the section. When they didn’t snare, he gathered more strands and repeated the process.
It should have been painful, him untangling my nest of hair. Instead, I found myself fighting a moan, frazzled by a blend of pleasure and bewilderment. But I shouldn’t be accepting pleasure at his hands, not after they’d caused this problem in the first place.
“There wouldn’t be knots if you’d allowed me to put the mud on myself.”
His methodical work continued around his blunt reply. “If I’d allowed you to put the mud on yourself, we may have missed our window.”
“It would have only taken seconds.”
“In situations of life and death, seconds matter.”
Perhaps they did, but his actions had still been brutish. Knowing he wouldn’t care, I didn’t respond, trying to remember my anger toward him instead. It was hard to do when he was being so unnecessarily gentle as he fixed my hair—something I never imagined possible, given he was a warrior, not a chambermaid.
“Do you do this to your own hair after battle?” I asked.
“If it’s necessary.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just cut it short?”
“It would,” he confirmed. He ran his fingers through the final section on the right side and began to work on the left.
“Why wear it long, then?” Harthon’s actions were led by strategy. There had to be some advantage to the long hair.
“Ease is not the only reason to do something.”
The cryptic reply was a reminder of how he’d hidden his and his father’s roles in the death of my parents. I’d figured that after discoveringthattruth, there were no more terrible secrets for him to hold. Yet he continued to be tight-lipped, here and now.
“Whatever you’re hiding can’t be worse than what you hid from me before.”
His fingers stilled. When he spoke, it was in a tone thick with caution. “Are you so certain?”
“For someone who wants me to support his cause, you’re making an awfully unconvincing case.”
“You’re speaking as if you have a choice about whether or not you’ll help me.”
So we were back to where we started all those weeks ago, when he first took me from Koerlyn. Well, if he wanted to be an ass, I could be one too. “And you’re speaking as if you know where the path is yourself. I could easily lead you astray.”
I jolted as a hot, oil-slick hand snaked around my throat, fingertips reaching up to my jaw. He didn’t constrict my air, but he could in a heartbeat. As it was, his hold was tight enough that he could undoubtedly feel every panicked flutter of my pulse.
Applying a touch of pressure to my jaw, he forced my head back. His eyes were turbulent, the chaos of the battlefield contained within them. It was that sight, not his grip, that made me lose my breath. The apple in my throat bobbed against his palm as he slowly enunciated, “You forget who I am.”
The Princeps of Fourth Territory.
The former mercenary who killed his way into power.
The warrior who ripped souls from bodies in the span of a mere blink.
That’s what he wanted to remind me of.
So I said, “You are the man I havechosento lead into the Domus. A leader who actually cares for his people, who wishes to end their suffering, and who may very well be the savior of this world. A ruler who I havedecidedto help.”
At that, the emotions contained in those gold-flecked irises only seemed to grow wilder. Perhaps the sight, or my very precarious position, should have stopped me from saying what I said next.
It didn’t.
