Page 8 of House of the Iron Reaper

I think of us locking eyes, the moment I caught the scent of her. The moment before I hit her.

“You had a damn smile on your face,” Novalie says.

I stare at her.

“That… that is untrue,” I whisper.

“I am a liar, then?”

“No!” I hurry to say, shaking my head. “I… I just do not remember doing so.”

“I remember very clearly, despite your best attempt at knocking all sense from my head.”

I flinch at her sharp tone, but when I raise my eyes, the corner of her mouth ticks up. I suddenly have the sense I’m in the presence of a glass statue rather than a dragon, with edges you cannot tell are smooth or sharp until you touch it and come away with blood on your fingers.

“You are of House Glass,” I murmur out loud.

Novalie narrows her eyes.

“How do you know that?” she asks sharply.

Dragon glass is not like glass found in other realms—it is made with sand only found in the Dry Sea and forged with dragon fire straight from the throat. It is one of the finest resources Coalsburgh exports. Clear as a song and utterly unbreakable.

My eyes trace over the delicate features of Novalie’s face before landing on the swollen part of her cheek where she pushed her own tooth back in without blinking.

“A hunch,” I say quietly.

Silence stretches between us. I almost think I should leave when Novalie finally speaks again.

“It was a fair hit,” she says, pulling the blood-stained cloth away. “It was a good hit. You got me. So stop acting the meek little mouse and admit you enjoyed the fight.”

Novalie gets to her feet with surprising grace for a woman covered in her own blood. Wiping the last of it away from her nose, she looks down at me.

“If you truly did not enjoy it…” She shrugs. “Do not come back.”

Without waiting for me to respond, she stalks away.

Chapter 3

Novalie

Dinner in House Glass consists of a private, painful affair between myself and my mother, the House Elder. More often recently, now the Rites loom like a storm on the horizon, Aythora joins us. Although I fear she did not quite realise her role is more of a conversational buffer than anything.

Night after night, the same polite clatter of cutlery and polite compliments on food none of us cooked. Except tonight, I have the truly wonderful addition of a relentless throbbing pain in my face, as opposed to just the one sat opposite me.

Forced to breathe through my mouth like a cave-dweller, I slowly blink down at my food, my eyelids swollen from the bruising. I turn over the events of the previous night in my mind, round and round and round.

I hesitated, just slightly, when I threw my punch. Enough for my fist to glint off her cheek, enough to give her an opening. Enough for her to strike back. I replay it back, studying my mistakes. But I keep pausing on that one moment when our eyes locked. A moment trapped in amber.

The entire evening, she kept her gaze locked on the ground, as though there was something spectacularly interesting about the sand. When she looked up, it was with wide, dolorous eyes.

But the half-moment before she struck, it was as though two great doors opened wide—eyes as grey and hungry as a storm about to swallow a city.

And that fucking smile.

My mind snags on the picture of it and refuses to shake it off. I stab my dinner with a fork.

“Novalie.” Mother’s voice cleaves across the table, bouncing off the glass walls. “We have a guest. Do not be rude.”