“It was for your own good,” she said to Kaelan.
A sharp smile edged his lips. “Is that so?”
“I think I’ll just...” Damion tromped away, leaving Magda and Kaelan glaring at each other. She’d expected him to be angry, but she hadn’t expected a hot flare to be licking up her own spine.
He tossed his wooden swords lazily into the sand. “It would’ve been nice to have a little warning that I was about to be imprisoned.”
“It should’ve been six,” she said hotly. “You don’t know what it’s like when a Rae is in her Shine. I did it to protect you.”
“Protect me from what?”
“From doing something we’d both regret.”
His gaze pushed away. Every lean muscle on his sand-encrusted torso flexed.
For as angry as he appeared, she kept expecting his emotions to reach out and impact her. Yet they remained elusive.
She took a step closer. “Look, I am sorry. I can’t imagine that being tied up for two days was a particularly pleasant experience, but—”
“Forget it,” he said, returning to Cae’s dark haired, silver-eyed façade. He brushed the sand from his arms, slightly thicker than his real arms, as was his chest, though he was also a bit shorter. “It’s not important.” He flashed a careless smile, one that was so Cae her pulse tripped at the sight of it. “We have bigger problems, wouldn’t you say?”
Yes, like how his shift from anger to apparent indifference, and from himself to Cae, was tangling her up inside.
“I’m going to clean up,” he said, cutting a slantwise path wide of her.
“Kaelan,” she said, sidestepping to intercept him.
“Cae,” he corrected, gazing down at her with silvery-flashing eyes. “That’s what you can call me today.”
The smirking grin was very Princely, but not particularly Kaelan. It made her teeth clench.
She shifted back from him. “What’s happened to you?”
He crossed his arms. “You mean besides you sending your cousin and a brownie to tie me up with gorgon rope?”
“Please try to understand . . .”
“I understand,” he said with another flash of anger that burned out as quickly as it had appeared. His eyes cooled, turning hard and flinty. “We need to talk about what’s going to happen after.”
“After . . . I vie for Radiant?”
“What happens if you succeed and what happens if you fail,” he said.
“What happens to us, you mean?”
He gazed down at her dully, as if it were obvious.
“Well,” she said, tone hardening to match his, “if I have to fight Lavana and I fail, I’ll be dead so...”
His stony exterior cracked. “You didn’t die the last time.”
“Only almost,” she said. “Since I was underage, Alanna was allowed to send me into exile. I was only even allowed to vie because my mother had been Radiant.”
“But you might not have to fight,” he said.
“That’s one possibility. The Crown could name Lavana Radiant. In that case, I’ll probably also be dead, or at least hunted. I’ll probably have to return to exile. It’s very difficult to challenge for Radiant, fail, and survive.”
“And if you don’t fail?”
