Never Keep (Sins of the Zodiac #1)

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

T here was a wild and furious storm battering the keep again tonight. I floated on my back in the highest pool in the Poseidon Spa, the towering stone effigy of Scorpio curling around the basin that held the water I lay in. Above me, a glass roof gave a view out to the dark sky and I worked on casting raindrops with my magic, letting them cascade down over me in a mimicry of the storm. My mind kept slipping back to the memory of that Flamebringer, The Cobra, being so brutally executed in the Heliacal Courtyard. He had killed a Raincarver during the fight he had started at the Astral Sanctuary. Though I hadn’t known the girl who had been killed, a bitter kind of hatred had found me at knowing The Cobra had murdered one of my people. But watching the vicious execution hadn’t brought me the satisfaction I’d expected.

Instead, I’d felt sickened by the display, and found myself thinking about my own death. If I killed Kaiser Brimtheon between these halls and was found out, a terrible kind of execution awaited me too. But despite knowing that to be the case, I couldn’t find it in me to make the sensible choice and halt my pursuit. Who knew when I would be in this close proximity with him again? I may never get such an opportunity again in my lifetime. It might be now or never, so it would be now. Just as soon as I felt trained enough to face him.

The bathhouse was quiet this evening, the conscripts all peeling off to rest after another day of cardinal magic instruction followed by a brutal session of elemental training out in the ocean again. This pool was a favourite of mine in the Poseidon Spa, a place few other Fae ventured to even during busier times.