Chapter 27
Ryker
The moment our eyes locked, a violent sensation lit through my veins, setting them ablaze.
I’d met people who’d survived lightning strikes. They’d described the exact same experience.
I knew my power could stop my heart from pounding, but I was unwilling to do it just yet.
Along with the pain came relief at being in the same room as Allie, and I wanted to bask in that temporary glow for as long as I could.
Because I felt the storm brewing in her gaze, and I knew she’d strike me.
As I closed the door, Allie turned toward me in her chair, uncrossing and crossing her legs.
It took all of my well-trained control to keep my gaze trained on her face.
“Hello,” she said, voice more sickly-sweet than I’d ever heard it–and wrong. The only memory that came close was when she’d traipsed barefoot all over the fortress, calling out to me loud enough to wake the dead in the crypt.
That had been a play at naivety.
This was also a game.
One made to hurt.
She wasn’t wearing any shoes now, either, feet snuggled on the thick pelt-carpet.
“Hello,” was all I said as I leaned against the door, waiting for the maelstrom.
She took a sip of wine, watching me over the rim of the glass like she already knew where to strike. Then she licked the bloodred drops from her lips and I had to swallow the sound that crawled up my throat. “Still as fetching as when you left.”
She looked like she was ready to shred me like her cousin had with her wedding dress.
“Thank you,” I said, playing along. Waiting for the first lash.
A corner of her lip curved upward, like her smile held all the secrets in the world. Her long dark hair was fiery and untamed, but she felt like ice.
“You look amazing,” I said.
Damn the gods for creating perfection.
Damn Zandyr’s principles for this entire situation.
And damn myself for not figuring out a way to make everything better.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said, challenging me.
She looked like a reckoning. Mine.
I kicked myself away from the door, my steps heavy against the stone floor. Her Huntress gaze tracked me to my seat at the other end of the table, like I was her next prey.
I swore I could glean a shimmer of disappointment in her eyes that I wasn’t heading in her direction, but she clenched her jaw and it was gone.
As soon as I sat down, she opened her mouth again, and that sickly-sweet voice scratched against my ears. This wasn’t Allie or The Huntress, and I felt out of my depth. “How was your trip?”
Such a sham of a normal evening.
Acting like the perfect couple when we both knew a sword dangled above our heads.
My head, actually.
“Eventful,” I said. “Yours?”
“Enlightening.”
That single word cracked through the room.
“In what way?” I asked, not knowing which step would bridge this awful, cold chasm between us.
“Oh, you know.” She set the glass down and rolled her wrist. “In the way that I have to fight with myself not to burn everything to the ground.”
The thunder was beginning to rattle.
“Allie.” I sighed. “I’m sorry–”
“Dax sends his apologies for not being able to attend this dinner,” she cut me off, her grin sharpening even more. “I wanted you all to myself. He was quite disappointed.”
And probably in a murderous mood. I’d have to watch my back around him.
The room delved into an ugly, expectant silence.
Her, sitting there, watching me.
Me, trying to anticipate her next move.
Like two predators waiting for the other to strike first.
But stalling the discussion would only make it worse.
“We can’t dance around the subject all night while you play with that blade as if you’d rather stick it in me,” I said.
She batted her eyelashes, the perfect picture of perverted innocence. “What subject?”
The room, the meal, her dress, everything was a carefully orchestrated evening of punishment.
A contortion of a nice dinner spent alone with my future wife, who looked like she too had murder on her mind.
“What happened at the wedding,” I said.
“How was it? You had a front row seat, after all.” Her eyes went wide, faking true interest. But in those green orbs of hers, I saw the storm she barely kept leashed.
“Same as almost all Blood Brotherhood weddings,” I said curtly. “Necessary."
I only became aware of my mistake when a flash of hurt darkened her gaze.
I leaned forward. “I didn’t mean ours–”
“It was eventful, too,” she said, looking down at the wood shavings the dagger gouged from the table which had seated countless of my ancestors, like she wanted to carve out my heart itself. “Life-altering, one might say.”
“Aren’t all weddings?”
“For the bride and groom, usually. But Evie’s weddings have a way of upending everything around them. Curiously, through no fault of her own.”
That, nobody could deny.
The Lost Daughter, a slip of a being, had been thrust into this Clan world without the basic skills of surviving political machinations, and now she lived in a city where Banu and Valuta ruled more than anyone wanted to admit.
It wasn’t just unfair. It bordered on criminal.
But this wedding had protected her, whether she or Allie wanted to believe it. Banu and Valuta’s gazes would no longer be trained on her, enough to guarantee her survival until we rid Malhaven of them.
And I still didn’t fully trust the Lost Daughter.
She’d been remarkably righteous and kind, of all things, but her appearance was orchestrated to cause mayhem. Whether by her own hand or someone else’s, that remained to be seen.
“So what happened?” Allie’s voice pierced the silence once more.
My blood pumped so hard through my veins, it roared in my ears.
I fisted my palm, my power gliding through me to even it out.
There was enough rage in this room.
“You already know,” I said, as if not speaking the words could take some of the sting of what had happened.
Her gaze narrowed. “Nothing like a good witness to transport me to that blessed event.”
Thunder clung in the air. Only the crackle of the embers dared to break the stillness.
She wanted me to say it. The whole heinous thing.
“The Dragon married your cousin. And Banu and Valuta’s daughter.” I finally yanked the words out of me. They sounded worse out loud. “As you already know.”
Allie closed her beautiful eyes.
That hurt more than the rage.
Better to have her gaze set on me in fury than not at all.
“I do. But I didn’t hear it from you,” she whispered, and I hated what I heard.
Sadness.
Anger.
Worst of all, disappointment.
“I couldn’t tell you,” I said, too fast. “Believe me, I couldn’t. That’s why I offered the palaver portal–”
“Believe you?” She huffed a sad laugh. “That’s rich, after everything.”
Then she finally speared me again with that wild gaze of hers. All the pretend joy was gone, replaced with rage so pure and potent, it slammed into me.
“She had no clue what she was walking into, did she?” Allie’s calm whisper hissed through the room.
The storm had come.
“No,” I said. “She only found out when she reached the throne room.”
“Did she cry?” She asked, looking on the verge of doing so herself. Not because of sadness, but because of the sheer strain of not erupting.
“No.” I swallowed deeply. The Lost Daughter had been too strong for tears, but we’d all seen the heartbreak she’d tried to hide.
Allie nodded and licked her lips.
I braced myself for the next blow. I’d take each one she sent my way.
But instead of more accusations, she simply leaned back in her chair, all her attention now captured by the fire, refusing to look at me.
The longer the silence stretched, the tenser I got.
I expected yelling.
Warnings of revenge.
Possibly the dagger hissing right next to my ear.
The quiet was worse than anything.
I watched as the fire’s reflection danced in her eyes, gliding over her dress, and making her look like a burning sea nymph, come to enact revenge on everyone who’d wronged her.
There was no mortal explanation for the pull she had on me. How my gaze wanted to drink all of her in, watch every flutter of her eyelids, inhale her every breath.
Perhaps she was aware of it.
The dress, this evening, this was her armor, which she wore brilliantly.
Which only made her silence that much more concerning.
I leaned my elbows on the table, knowing I was invoking a tempest and being powerless to stop it. “What are you thinking? Tell me.”
So I knew how to fix this.
Fix us.
She shrugged, still not sparing me a glance. “Just wondering who you think I am.”
Of all the replies–“You’re Allie. The Huntress and the true heir to the Protectorate throne.”
“Not my titles. Me.”
She stood in one jarring movement.
I parted my lips to argue, concerned she would leave before we’d mended what had been broken, but she surprised me once more.
She lifted her glorious leg, skin glistening in the firelight, and stepped up onto the table. She stood as straight as a goddess, looking at me like the mortal I was.
She was the storm incarnate.
“You upended my life when you brought me here.” She began walking on the table, plates cracking under her feet. “For safety or not, it was an earthquake that shattered the life I knew.”
I leaned back slowly in my seat, jaw clenched so hard, the pain spidered toward my temples.
I smelled the danger, heard it in each one of her cold words, but I was morbidly fascinated about what she’d do next.
So I kept watching.
Waiting.
“And I understood. Eventually.” Allie lifted her foot and twirled her ankle, sliding the wine decanter toward the edge of the table. The glass scraped against the wood.
Her gaze didn’t stray from mine.
She was daring me to stop her.
I didn’t.
I would let her unleash whatever she wanted.
The decanter shattered against the floor in a crystalline burst.
“That didn’t change the fact that I woke up in a coffin, in an unknown place,” she went on.
The glasses came next, all crashing against the stone.
The closer she got, the more destruction she left in her wake.
Not the food, though. She was too principled to waste Mrs. Thornbrew’s efforts.
But everything else was fair game–including me.
“Then you kept this–” She raised the heinous dagger, baring her teeth. “–a secret. You investigated it behind my back.”
Spoons and forks clambered to the ground.
“Again, I tried to understand. I was a former enemy and you knew I'd burn down your city if I suspected you had been involved in my father’s assassination,” she hissed. “Which I would have, I didn’t know you. I wish I didn’t know you now.”
My heart galloped, threatening to rip my chest open like she seemed to want to.
She twirled her leg again. The pot of tea burst against the floor, drops landing into the fire with a sizzle.
“Then you got all dressed up, held me in your arms on the roof, and left for my cousin’s wedding.” She stopped in front of me, tall and unflinching. I tilted my chin as far as it could go to keep looking into her furious eyes. “And you didn’t tell me anything. No warning.”
Slowly, with the precision of a predator, she crouched until we were eye level, leaning forward.
She stopped when her mouth was only a breath away from mine.
As if on command, my lips parted.
“Do you remember all of that?” she breathed into me.
“Yes.”
“Good,” was all she said before I felt the tip of the dagger press into my neck.