“Do it,” he rasps. “End me.”
I should, but I’m finally close enough to see his eyes.
They’re bright blue, not faded, and flecked with shining silver, a distinctive trait belonging only to the Silversten family.
I grip his shoulder harder, inflicting more pain. “I know you. I saw you when you were a boy.”
When I was a boy too.
The memory is brief, fleeting images flashing through my mind. My mother was holding his hand. He couldn’t have been more than seven years old. The same age as my sister at the time.
He and my mother were in the throne room, where my father towered, resplendent in his white robes, his fingers dripping with silver rings.
Mother was pleading with Father, asking him to let the boy stay in the palace. She said the boy was living on the street because his courtesan mother had died.
I remember the whispering sound of her pale-lavender gown trailing across the stone as she dared to step closer to Father.
“Take him in,” she urged Father. “It would be the smart thing to?—”
He slapped her hard enough to knock her across the floor.
His laughter was mocking. “Why would I take in Iker’s bastard son? Do you wish him to be well fed when he meets the sword?”
My feet were carrying me out from the shadows of thepillar at the side of the room. I wasn’t supposed to be there. The throne room was forbidden to me.
Mother saw me and gave me a sharp shake of her head. At the same time, this boy…now a man…stepped in front of her, his little hands balling into fists, glaring up at my father, who snickered down at him, a remembered sound now snatched away by the wind.
The boy was sent away and I didn’t know what became of him.
Now, I consider the man the boy became. “What is your name?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he rasps, visibly fighting the pain I’m inflicting on him.
I increase my frost power, determined to make him admit his lineage. “Who. Are. You?”
“Nobody.” He grits his teeth so hard, it sounds like they might crack. Then, on a sigh, he admits, “I wasn’t given a name.”
“But you’re here to kill me.”
“I volunteered.” The nameless man’s eyes are watering, but it’s so cold that even his sweat turns to ice, white powder whipping across his face.
I can’t stop my cruel smile as I speak aloud what must have motivated him. “Iker’s youngest child turns twenty in ten days, doesn’t he? He and his siblings will come for you first. You might not be recognized as a legitimate heir, but that won’t matter to them. They’ll kill you for fun. And to make sure they’ve tied off loose ends. That is, before they turn on each other.” My lips twist. “You thought I would give you a quicker death.”
Just as Lilis did. Fighting for a fast end to a life of misery.
The nameless man grins up at me, blood trickling from his mouth. “I had to try.”
I give him a nod. “It was a good try.”
He may have only held his own for a mere minute, but it was longer than most assassins. Except for Lilis. I never pinned her like this. I drew her blood, wore her down, but she never stopped fighting.
The nameless man stares up at me. “Get on with it.”
I withhold my power for the seconds it takes me to strategize, my thoughts racing.
After the day my mother brought the boy to the palace, what stuck with me was my mother’s insistence that taking him in would have been the clever thing to do.
It was my first lesson in strategy, even if she’d likely intended it to be a lesson in compassion.
