I’d do more than that once I could breathe again. As it was, I struggled to keep his face from swimming in my vision.
“Wind’s knocked out of you,” Dorian said above me, wiping the blood on his pants. “You’ll get a breath in a moment, but it’ll feel like an eternity.”
I know that,I wanted to snap—if only I could breathe to say it. I’d grown up in the southern district; getting the wind knocked out of you was a rite of passage. But that didn’t make it any less shocking.
Meanwhile, my brain wrestled with two realities:
I had executed a perfect attack. Everything about it was correct. I’d stabbed him with sunlit iron.
And yet here I was, once again at Dorian’s feet.
The edge of his lip curled as he watched me writhe with my mouth open. “That’s twice now I’ve spared your life. Not to mention the three days spent in a wagon with your moaning my only company. What’s that count for? A lot, I should think.”
The only thing worse than a monster was one who thought he deserved thanks for not devouring you.
If I had the power to start fires with the heat sparking in my breast, this one would already be aflame.
Finally, finally, my chest unlocked and I sucked in air so loud and hard it hurt almost as bad as being thrown. I sat up, breathing fast, knees to my arms, head down. Times like this, you were reduced to one thought, one feeling—right now that was gratitude for air.
I shook my head, my voice a rasp. “My knife…” Dorian’s eyebrows rose as he waited for me to finish. “It’s sunlit.”
“And?”
He was supposed to be burning ormelting or poisoned oranythingbut what he was doing right now, which was standing in front of me with the tiniest red nick on his neck.
Dorian’s brow lowered. “Oh, you thought…” He let out a breath, head tilting. “Your iron hasn’t been sunlit in four hundred years. That’s just a blunt bit of metal you’ve got.”
I stared, unblinking. He was wrong. Sunlit iron was produced in the northern district, where all metal came from. It was carefully melted under the sun, shaped only during the day, and the weapons laid out for a month before they were sent off.
Dorian turned away, regarding the dresser. “I see you rooted around in the drawers.” He stepped up to it and shut one that sat half-open. “But only managed to dress half your body. There’s a thing called ‘pants,’ you know.”
My eyes dropped to the knife on the floor, looking duller by the minute. If there was proof of sunlit iron being bullshit, it was Dorian harassing me about my clothing with that fucking nick mocking me from beneath his hair. “None of it—none fits.”
A piece of clothing dropped into my view beside me. It was black leather. A pair of boots followed. “I figured as much.”
I eyed the clothing. This was a farce. “Just kill me now and be done with it. If you had a soul you wouldn’t torture me like this.”
“Hmm.” His black boot tapped once, twice on the wood. “The Sylvanwild Court isn’t fond of torture. Now Noctere, on the other hand…”
Finally, I lifted my face to him. I felt exhausted. “Noctere?”
He pointed to the tapestry I’d studied last night. “If you went through the dresser, then I know you stared at the pretty picture.” I hated how he predicted me, how he always guessed right. He tapped the shadowed quadrant. “Noctere. The ones who never left the dark.”
A cold weight settled in my gut. I followed his finger to the darkness on the tapestry, and for the first time, I wondered if there were worse places to end up than this bedchamber.
Then I remembered, like a slap:
They—he—killed your mother.
I snatched at the leather he’d dropped. “If you want me to put this on, you’ll turn and face the hall.”
His eyes held fast on mine. For several beats he didn’t move, until finally he gave an exaggerated turn with his hands clasped chastely in front of him.
My fingers slid toward the pants—and my knife.
“For the love of Irin, put it away,” he said. “Remember what I said? Three times as strong and twice as fast.”
I flinched, gaze darting up to his back. He was still facing away. “How do you do that?”
