Heat licked behind her eyes, and she drew a choked breath. “You and Noceo did.”
“I inherited Clevsin’s power and then some. Noceo had no ability with lightning, but his voice reached Seventh-Tier even as a child. It takes a great deal to fight Coercion. That made him extremely useful for the Clan’s dealings. Drug distribution—blazeleaf at first. Women for Clevsin.”
She was scrubbing herself raw, she dimly realized. “Were those your dealings too?” she whispered.
His fingers paused on his buttons. “An aptitude for bloodshed and limited remorse afterward marked me as better suited to enforcing.” The dark look he leveled on her left her in no doubt as to what that was.
Torture and elimination of the Clan’s enemies.His last contact with them had been eleven years ago.He would have been thirteen.
“I caused the strike on the manor eleven years ago. Dalvia informed Clevsin of my plans for escape, and he cornered me. I reacted. He, the manor, and its spoils, burned.”
She swallowed. “Why didn’t you take Noceo or Dalvia with you?”
“I had reason.” The dark intensity edging into Kadra’s gaze said that the tale was an ugly one. “I expected for him to seek vengeance, but after eleven years, I grew complacent.”
“Anyone would,” she murmured. “Why is Dalvia a part of this? She doesn’t seem to want any bloodshed, and so far, she’s acted like a strong wind would scare her.”
“She believes that, in killing Clevsin, I left her and Noceo powerless in a city of predators.” His voice was hard.
“But what good would it have done her to cling to a power that ugly and which wasn’t hers?”
“Because she felt safest with it.”
As she reeled under that simple, bitter truth, Kadra shrugged off his robes, the ripple of his muscular frame sending her pulse into a gallop. There had always been an innate elegance to his movements, not a whit of wasted motion. Her throat burned.He’s former nobility. Their pasts had nothing in common after all.
She realized she had said it aloud when his eyes darted to her, starkness penetrating the ice in their depths. He leaned over the washbasin with a jerk of his head, almost blindly going through the motions, and she saw it then. Saw what it was like to see him afraid.
Oh.
When she left the tub, he barely looked at her, seemingly girding himself for war by the vicious set of his features. While he got clean, she wrapped herself in one of the bathrobes in the closet, still reeling. She had let her insecurities get in the way of seeing the truth.He really thought I’d leave.
His was an ugly past, but no more than she had guessed during her short stay in Komis, and she had long known that Kadra’s hands were bloodstained.Thiswasn’t what he had kept from her. There was more. Something that had made him avoid broaching the topic from the start. She saw it in the tension coiling his muscled back as he emerged from the bath and drew on a robe. He seated himself in an armchair by the bed with unconscious grace, dark hair spilling over his forehead. She wondered what he would have looked like back then.
“I think my younger self would’ve found you quite handsome at thirteen,” she mused.
Kadra’s fingers fell from the stern line of his lips. He blinked when she strode over to him, and knelt, dropping her cheek on the velvety fabric over his lap.
Face turned up to his, she smiled sadly. “You were little more than a child, Kadra. An intelligent one, no doubt, but a child forced to make adult decisions.”
He exhaled roughly, a calloused palm settling on her hair to stroke it with breathtaking tenderness and a strange finality before letting her go. As though his next words would alter them irrevocably. Dread wove through her ribs when his lips parted.
“Eleven years ago, I created whitesleep.”
True.
Her mouth opened. Closed. She raised her head, the threads comprising the past eight months unraveling and weaving themselves into a different tapestry. His knowledge of the ingredients. His strange tension during raids of whitesleep dens. The coin he allotted toward healers treating addiction.
Wood creaked on either side of her as he gripped the arms of his chair. “Clevsin needed a new product.” All emotion had fled his eyes. “I dried beetle venom to powder and concentrated it.”
“Did you distribute it too?” Her tongue felt like a ship’s anchor.
He lifted a shoulder in an elegant shrug. “An irrelevant distinction. I would have, if escape had failed.”
“Whitesleep has saved as many as it has destroyed. A bladesmith can’t be faulted for how the wielders used their swords.”
That winded him. She saw it in the slackening of his grip on the chair.
She rested her chin on his knee. He didn’t seem to notice. “Anything else?”
