“Damn right!” Nim declared, wrapping her arms around them both. “I told you that you were my sister!” she whispered to Alanna, loud enough for everyone to hear.
Never in her life had she ever felt wanted, so at home. She was surrounded by people she loved and who loved her back, with Val beside her.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Get out of my way!”
Mathos laughed and gripped the bridle harder. “Absolutely not.”
Dornar’s stallion skittered backward, hooves ringing on the cobbles in the stables, as the skittish horse reacted to the angry men arguing around him.
“I’m leaving, and if you don’t move, you’ll die here,” Dornar replied calmly.
“I wouldn’t do that, son,” Ramiel’s deep voice replied from the entrance to the stables as he stepped forward. “You must know that if I see you commit a murder in front of me, nothing you say will save you.”
Dornar didn’t bother to reply, but the stallion’s nostrils flared, his ears flicking angrily, riled even further by the rising tension and the rumbling of Mathos’s beast.
Scales flickered along Mathos’s arms, and his beast let out another long, low-pitched growl at this proximity to Dornar.
Ramiel stepped up to beside Mathos and tipped his head toward Dornar. “Let him go.”
What the fuck? “No! He’s going straight back to the palace—”
A heavy hand landed on his shoulder, and Mathos swallowed the rest of what he was going to say. Even he knew when to keep his mouth shut.
“Let him go,” Ramiel repeated. “There’s nothing we can do to keep him here.”
Scales spread up Mathos’s neck in a wave, and he clenched his jaw hard to stop himself from saying something rude to the man who had played such a key role in saving all of their lives.
He unclenched his fist and let the bridle go, stepping back as Dornar threw a mocking salute and nudged his stallion out the door, loud hoofbeats ringing through the courtyard as the new Lord High Chancellor made his escape.
Bollocks. Mathos folded his arms and let his head drop.
Ramiel gave his shoulder a hard squeeze before taking his hand away. “It’s not as bad as you might think.”
Mathos did his best not to roll his eyes as he lifted his head to look at the older man. Not everyone was as good as Tristan was at dealing with his particular brand of respect for authority, and he had a feeling that Ramiel would be rather less accommodating.
Ramiel chuckled. “We wanted him to go. All he could do here is cause trouble. And with Dornar gone, the others will leave too. Surely you’d prefer for your friends to get married tomorrow without them here?”
Mathos sighed and had to agree that the wedding would be much more pleasant without worrying that Dornar was nearby. “That’s true. But he killed the king, I’m certain of it. He should be held accountable—even if he was intending for it to be Val that died.” And even if they were all better off with Ballanor dead… but he kept that to himself.
Ramiel frowned as he led them from the stables. “Nothing is ever as black and white as that. Did he kill the king, or did the king kill himself?”
“Can you genuinely doubt that Dornar was responsible for the poison?”
“No, but, then again, he never admitted anything.”
Mathos couldn’t stop his exasperated grunt. Gods, he was starting to sound like Tristan. “Only because he’s a manipulative liar. You should have forced him to reply straight out.”
Ramiel paused in the middle of the spacious cobbled courtyard that formed the center of the barracks, and Mathos came to a stop beside him. “Even if he had said, straight out, that he didn’t do it, it wouldn’t have made any difference.”
Mathos couldn’t help his incredulity. “Why not?”
Ramiel watched him, silently assessing.
Eventually he seemed to reach some kind of conclusion and continued in a low voice, “You already know that a Nephilim truth seeker can only tell if a person believes what they are saying, not if their belief is fundamentally accurate.”
Mathos nodded slowly. Years of campaigning with Jeremiel meant that he had some idea of the limitations of the Nephilim gifts, but they were, understandably, secretive about it all.
