“I talk a lot, actually.”
“No.” His answer comes through the dark like frost in the air—so soft that I don’t know if Mika and Arwyn can hear him. Then I feel it, the pressure of his fingertips on my breastbone. “You are quiet.”
The urge to strike his hand away runs through me like ice down my arm, all the way to my curling fingers—but I don’t do anything, and his touch disappears after a moment.
“Quiet?” I echo. “Youhearpeople’s feelings, too?”
I thought he only felt them, like bubbles swelling through the air. That’s the picture I had in my mind, at least.
For a long moment, faint and soft bootsteps are all I hear—until his answer comes, and it’s so quiet, I almost doubt I even heard it, “Yours.”
I blink, once, twice. “You hear mine?”
Silence is the answer I get.
Maybe he nods in the dark and forgets I can’t fucking see him, or maybe he just stares at me in that way he does, sometimes annoyed, sometimes observant.
I press, “You hear my feelings? Do you hear others?”
Bootsteps, soft and treading on the road, then, “I hear you. You are… loud.”
An incredulous look crumples my face—because that definitely sounded like an insult. “I’m loud?”
“You are…” he pauses, as if to find the right words, maybe the right translation, then settles on, “clattering and clashing.Veryloud.”
A scoff catches in my throat and jerks my shoulders. “Don’t invade my world and kill all my people, then? Maybe that’s why I’m loud?”
Dick.
I don’t know why I’m so offended.
It feels like an insult, but there’s so much he’s done and said already that I should be pissed about—yet it’sthisthat rises something ugly in me.
His gravelly accent comes soft, “I heard you the first time I saw you. In my life, I have never heard pain or fear. It is grating.”
My upper lip curls into a silent snarl.
Before I can snap at him, he adds, “But most grating when you are quiet.”
The snarl fades.
My face softens into something blank.
I stare straight ahead into the dark, the rope swaying my wrist at my side.
“Sometimes,” I start, and slide a meaningful look into the blackout, “quiet is best. Sometimes, quiet is needed.”
I almost expect him to retort, to yank the tether just to trip me up, or give one of those spine-chilling snarls.
But moments pass by, and nothing happens.
No chill of his anger in the air.
No frost climbing up the cuff.
He’s just quiet.
So am I.
