“How can you expect me not to run from you,” said Alizeh, still trying to shake off her apprehension, “when you threatened just hours ago to have my eyes sewn shut?”
He looked sharply away from her then, a muscle jumping in his jaw. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“And then you threw me off a cliff,” she said, her voice a bit breathless even to her own ears.
“You wouldn’t stop threatening to kill me,” he said angrily, turning back to face her. “I was merely trying to change the subject.”
“By having me devoured by dragons?” she nearly cried.
Cyrus scoffed at that, arching a brow. “You were never devoured by dragons.”
“I was, too,” she shot back. “Your little joke resulted in some nasty bites all along my left side. Your mother was kind enough to mix me a medicinal bath.”
Cyrus studied her then with an inscrutable expression. She thought he might demand to see proof of her injuries, but he said only, “Dragons are gentle creatures. They don’t bite unless provoked.”
“Well,” said Alizeh, averting her eyes. She was feeling petulant, and there was only so much eye contact with Cyrus she could handle. “I don’t think the animalmeantto bite me. But I was rolled onto its back teeth with rather gruesome results.”
She felt, rather than saw Cyrus go suddenly still, and for the length of a wild, charged moment she thought he might do something unhinged, like apologize.
Instead, he said, “You seem well enough now.”
“I’m fine,” she said, irritated.
“Good.”
“And I’m not sorry,” she added bitterly, turning to face him. “I’m not sorry I made a deal with your mother to murder you.”
His lips twitched, his eyes flashing. “I’m not sorry I threw you off a cliff.”
“Excellent,” she said, matching his anger.
He only smiled in response.
Alizeh tried to steady herself, to calm her chaotic heart. She didn’t know what was happening here, between them, but whatever it was, it was making her wary. She and Cyrus were no longer speaking to each other like mortal enemies; instead, they were tolerating each other with an ounce of civility. It was almost as if they’d—inadvertently—initiated a reluctant truce.
She didn’t trust it.
Still, she was beginning to believe there had to be more to Cyrus than the stories she’d heard—than even the horrors his mother had described—for it was becoming clearer by theminute that he was a character more complicated than she’d expected. She studied him as he began to pace, as he dragged a hand through his hair, mussing the copper locks in a show of agitation, and was forced to wonder why someone so young and intelligent and capable—someone who, by his mother’s own admission, had grown up beloved by his parents, and had the beauty of Tulan and its people at his disposal—
“Cyrus,” she said suddenly.
He halted at once, meeting her eyes.
“Why, exactly, did you make a deal with the devil?”
Cyrus blinked slowly, visibly thrown by her question. “I thought you didn’t care,” he said. “I thought you said I wasno doubt suffering the consequences of my own sins.”
“And are you not?”
This, he didn’t answer, not at first. He seemed to be assessing her, deciding whether she was worth an honest response before he said, quietly, “I was desperate. And stupid.”
The nosta agreed with this, and Alizeh took a tentative step closer. “Why were you desperate?”
Cyrus laughed, but there was an ache in it, a tension in his smile, in the lines of his body. He locked eyes with her, holding her entirely in his thrall before he said, in a softly lilting voice—
“Should you choose to tell her why, you’ll only ruin all my fun. Soon thereafter you shall die, bit by bit and both are done.”
Alizeh felt the grip of a familiar terror. “Iblees,” she breathed.
