The uncertainty in Atik’s eyes made Kasik smile smugly “Don’t you know?” he asked, pleased that there was something he knew and his tayta did not. “She’s with the emperor. Enjoying a cozy, quiet meal. He commanded that I take the night off and have Taruc deliver her to his rooms.”
In the shadows of torchlight that shifted over Atik’s face, Kasik first saw worry, then frustration. It was unclear who they were for or why he was so invested in Nina’s whereabouts, but it left him with a swirling suspicion in his gut.
“You didn’t know she went there,” Kasik said, almost to himself, his mind combing over the past with a kind of clarity he had not possessed before. “You always know where he is, who he speaks with, what choices he makes. It’s almost as though he is a tool.Yourtool.”
“He is young and impetuous,” Atik said, eyes hard and voice dangerously sharp. He took a step nearer, and Kasik took a small step back. “I have guided him with a firm hand as the gods have asked me to. I have doneeverythingthey have asked of me.”
“Do they ask so much of you?” Kasik asked carefully. He was trying to glean information, trying to understand the crazed look in his tayta’s eyes, the strange words that made it sound as though he communed with the gods themselves. Despite his dislike for the man, Kasik felt a tinge of panic.
Shayim had said Atik was like Dimas hunting Yuri to the ends of the earth, but Kasik had thought she meant it metaphorically. Was it possible that it had been meant very literally?
No, Kasik decided. If his tayta was that powerful, the man would have flaunted it without caution. He would not be stalking down halls in the dead of night and worrying about a capricious emperor.
Atik’s face quickly arranged back into its normal affectation of disdain. “It’s none of your concern,” he spat. “Your priority is to keep Nina alive. Can you manage that? Or should I see to her well-being myself?”
The thought of Atik anywhere near Nina made him want to punch a wall. Or his tayta’s face. “Don’t go near her,” he seethed. And then, because he was stupid and never learned, he added, “It is clear you cannot protect anyone, including my mamay.”
Kasik didn’t see his tayta’s fist heading toward his face until it was too late. It wasn’t the first time Atik had hit him, but it was the first time he had done it so aggressively, as if he had lost all control and Kasik, for once, had pressed a nerve.
Kasik doubled over, his hands on his knees, a glob of bloodied spit landing on the floor beneath him, his jaw throbbing and his head spinning. Atik crouched and placed a firm hand on his shoulder. Kasik couldn’t tell if he was being held up or down.
“Your mamay thought she could influence me. Thought she had power here, and it was only once my knife was deep in her belly that she realized she had none, and that I was not so weak. Do not tempt me,Son, to give you the same lesson.”
With a shove, Kasik fell back, the hem of Atik’s coat brushing Kasik’s cheek as he passed by.
The cold stone seeped into Kasik’s body and the nausea grounded him. He was awake, and what he had heard was not part of a nightmare. Atik had just confessed to killing his mamay. All the years believing that she had died during childbirth, too weak to fight an illness, too miserable to stay and fight for Kasik, and she had beenmurderedby the man he called tayta.
If he had known sooner, he would have gutted the man and left his entrails splayed on the floor around him and savored the sounds of his agony. He would have reveled in the irony of it, filling his tayta’s belly with his knife only to empty it in betrayal.
Had Aliyma known what was coming? Had she been scared? Had she had the chance to love Kasik at all?
How different his life could have been. How—
“Kasik?”
There was Chaska, the cloak she had been wearing when she disappeared behind the wall still atop her shoulders. There was concern in her eyes as she slowly came closer. He knew he looked weak and pathetic, blood dripping from the corner of his mouth and tears from the corners of his eyes. He hadn’t realized he was crying until Chaska had said his name and his heart had frozen in his chest thinking it was Nina.Hoping.
But it couldn’t have been, because she was with the emperor, and he was alone, as he wasalwaysalone.
“Come,” Chaska said softly, a hand on his arm. “Let’s clean you up.”
Kasik didn’t fight it when she tugged him into his room and sat him on his small bed. Much too small for him. The whole room, really, but he was barely ever there unless he couldn’t help it. Like tonight, when he had felt like there was nowhere else to go.
A moment later, Chaska was using a soft, wet cloth to clean the blood from his chin. He winced when she pressed against his jaw with her cold fingers.
Cold, because she had been outside, sneaking out of and back into the kancha she lived in. Perhaps visitingSamaq. Perhaps colluding with the kukuchi. Or, perhaps only to escape these walls and these people.
So many secrets. So many enemies. So many weak, spineless culprits.
Including him.
“Why did you offer to help Nina?” he asked quietly.
Chaska dipped the cloth into the bowl of water and then wrung it out. “I know what it’s like to be a woman in a world of men who use us to meet their needs. Whatever those may be.”
Kasik thought of his mamay and wondered what needs she had met. How had she ended up with a man like Atik? He couldn’t imagine there had been any benefit for her, any sacrifice that would have been worth her life in the end.
Unless shehadloved him, and it was Atik who she had sacrificed herself for.
