Her eyes cling to Keeann’s, and although I may be wrong, I think they’re carrying out a silent conversation. After almost a full minute, she replies, “No.”
Is it me, or was her pause a couple beats too long?
Keeann glides his hands down his mate’s face before turning toward Lorcan, who suffuses the air between us with the black coils of his smoke.
“Cian, gather the Siorkahd.” The Crow King pivots but doesn’t pound straight off into the darkened hallway. His gaze strokes over my upturned face before falling to the stone beneath my feet.
He crouches, and my heart screeches to a halt. Using his middle and index fingers, he clinches Antoni’s folded note and carries it upward.
I assume he’ll read it, or confiscate it, or . . . I don’t know,swallowit.
He holds it aloft.
When I don’t take it, he circles my wrist with fingers that are as cool and soft as his smoke and presses the parchment into my palm.
You’re not even going to look at it?
He closes my fingers over the paper with the gentleness of a man handling breakable things.I trust you.
Except the King of Crows trusts no one.
As he swirls down his torchlit hallway, becoming one with the shadows, I call out, “Since when?”
Without so much as a backward glance, he says,Since you walked into my bedroom unclothed. You said it was symbolic, that it showed you meant me no harm. I choose to believe this, Behach Éan.
Heat crawls up my collarbone, floods my neck, and submerges my cheeks.It wasn’t real!
I wait for him to retaliate with a quip dripping with his usual velvety barbs, but all I get is booming silence. When I turn back around, Bronwen and Keeann are gone, and I am alone.
Alone with Antoni’s note.
What did Lorcan mean about trusting me?
He trusts menotto read it, or he trusts me not to keep what’s written from him?
Rumpling the paper in my fist, I return to mybedroomcell on feet gone numb from the icy stone.
One would think summer would warm the Sky Kingdom, but between the altitude and the narrowness of the windows, the Lucin heat doesn’t permeate the pale gray rock.
As I near my door, it unbolts as though by magic—except it’s not magic, it’s a bare-chested Phoebus. “I’m off to find some food.”
And here I expected to find him burrowed beneath a mound of pillows. “Some food, or some Connor?”
“If I’m lucky, both.” He sends me a saucy wink that makes me shake my head but that also makes me grin, something I haven’t done in too long.
“Hey, Pheebs?”
“Yes, Picolina.”
“Thank you for sticking around, even if you’re only staying for . . .the food.”
He chuckles. “I’m staying for you.Foodcan be had anywhere.”
“Bring me back some?”
“This may come as a surprise, but I don’t care to become a eunuch.”
“Um, what?”
