I knew I was glaring at him. “Why are you saying it like that?” I demanded. “You’re making it sound…”
“Sound?” His voice was as cold as ice, and not the ice here, the ice back home, the hard, lethal kind.
“Sordid.”
He scoffed and shook his head as he looked away. Baxley glanced at me and subtly nodded toward the door, but Nicco saw him, and Baxley was on the receiving end of the glare for a change.
“I’m going to join Larana,” I announced as I stood. I walked away quickly before he could stop me.
In the streets where there were too many people for my liking, but I knew he was behind me.
“You’re following me?” I asked, not caring that more than one person looked at me in surprise at my tone and the fact that I was alone.
“Well, you don’t know where the baths are.”
I sniffed. I knew that. But that wasn’t the point. “Sonowyou want to be nice?”
He chuckled. “No. I just don’t want Larana to bite my head off because she already paid for you, and you’re going the wrong way, so you’ll show up too late.”
I was? I stopped walking. I refused to look at him. “Which way?”
“I can take you.”
“I’d like to go myself. Which way?”
“It’d be easier if I took you.”
“For who?” This time, I did glare at him, and he looked far too amused for me to try to be civil to him.
“Come on.” He turned and walked back the way I’d just come, and I considered not following him at all. “You want her to like you?” he called over his shoulder.
Asshole.
I hurried to join him.
“Will you tell me where he took you?” Nicco asked as we walked.
“I don’t know where it was. I’d never been there.”
“You? The trailfinder, you didn’t know where it was?”
“I was tied and carried over someone’s shoulder. It’s disorientating.” Which wasn’t a lie.
He said nothing, but his jaw flexed.
“He didn’t?—”
“He did not,” I confirmed quietly, my stare fixed on the snow on the path.
“You said he tried.”
“I said hetried.”
Nicco stopped walking, and I turned to face him. He pointed behind us. “The one with the red door.”
I looked back the way we had just walked and then back to him, knowing I wasn’t hiding my surprise. “You would have led me away from it just to have this conversation?”
He shrugged. “Enjoy your bath.” He walked away.
