“You have my attention.”
“I can kill him,” says Asher.
His declaration is followed by a single stroke of quiet. And then Lys laughs.
And laughs.
“It’s a compelling offer. You’ll never get close enough.”
“I don’t need to be close,” says Asher. “I’m a sure shot.”
“Confident,” notes Lys. “Unfortunately, I can’t stake my legacy on arrogance.”
Asher doesn’t back down. “It’s not arrogance if it’s true.”
“Maybe. I’d rather not take your word on it.” Lys casts a glance toward the wide bay windows. The glass is ferned in moonlit whorls of ice. “It’s cold out tonight. Frost like that will lock up a scent, make you harder to track. If you’re quick, you might survive a hunt.”
Shea’s stomach drops. “Lys, you can’t—”
“Can’t I?” His voice knifes through the hall, silencing her. Some of the darkness has bled back into his eyes. His pupils dilate, thinning the iris to a single thread of gray. Eventually, even the white of his sclera will be gone. He’ll be a terror again, with a demon’s eyes.
“Put your fists away,” he says. “You’re not in this fight.”
“The hell I’m not.”
“The guys in my garrison have a name for me,” says Asher, rushing to speak before Shea can dig them both deeper. “They call me Sunshine.”
Shea half expects Lys to laugh in his face a second time. Instead, he goes still, fixing Asher in a flat, circumspect stare. “Bullshit.”
“I promise you, it’s not.”
“The sunshine sniper has a confirmed kill count of over a hundred.”
“I use wooden slugs,” says Asher with a shrug.
“Handmade?”
“It’s old-school but efficient.”
The words ring hollow in Shea’s ears.Confirmed kill count. Over a hundred.She is struck, once again, by how severe this new Asher seems—how formidable, even bound.
He’s nothing like the boy from down the road, who liked her mother’s shortbread and who made her promises by the woods and who once helped his sister and her friends make a splint for an injured rabbit. That boy has been scraped away and replaced with someone new. It dawns on her that she doesn’t knowthisAsher at all.
But then, he doesn’t know her anymore, either.
“I don’t buy it.” Lys’s voice is just a touch too loud, and Shea realizes he’s been watching her. “It takes stealth and precision to be a marksman. You look like you’d trip over your own two feet.”
“I can take out Keeling,” insists Asher. “He’ll never see it coming.”
Lys sniffs. “If I wanted Keeling dead, I’d have already done it myself.”
“I don’t think so. You’re smarter than that.”
Amusement crosses Lys’s face. “Am I?”
“You are. Keeling controls the southern Flatwood—that’s a significant territory. Most of your kind are loyal to him, and no one wants to fall in line behind an insurrectionist. You kill him, you make yourself the enemy. It has to be someone else.”
“I don’t need you to explain the stakes to me,” says Lys, but he looks intrigued. “I’m assuming there’s something you want in return.”
