66. Ayres
Ayres pushed open the door to the seamstress’s shop, his eyes sweeping over the large colorful room. There was a small reception desk at the front of the room, and behind that, rows and rows of fabric in different colors and patterns lined the walls.
As he neared one of the racks of fabric, he recognized one. Ayres reached out and rubbed his thumb over the black, sparkly fabric Rorax had worn the night of the Selection, and during the Seksitan dance. It must have been his imagination, but his pants suddenly seemed a little tight.
There were two dressing rooms, and they were both wide open and empty.
Rorax told him she’d sent her leathers here to patch the holes where the arrows had struck her during their first hunt, and to pick up a new dress, but she wasn’t here. The shop was completely empty.
An ugly feeling niggled in his gut. She wouldn’t miss training, and she sure as hell would never miss her afternoon ritual of going to the library. Something was wrong.
Ayres was just about to leave when a secret door, or maybe a door he’d missed because it too was covered in colorful bundles of fabric, shot open.
A woman not over five feet tall, barely a pixie of a woman, stormed up to him. Her curly blonde hair had come loose from the bun on the top of her head, and it bounced in ringlets around her pale face. She wore a fashionable but loud, red and purple striped dress, and red stiletto sandals laced up her ankles. “Where have you been, you’re late!” she wailed impatiently.
He hadn’t scheduled an appointment with the tailor, but Ayres still eyed the clock by the reception desk and frowned. “Late?”
“Late! Rorax Greywood passed the shop hours ago with a cut on her neck, and blood running down her back!” The woman shrieked at him, throwing her hands up in exasperation.
Her large blonde bun rolled around the top of her head in a threatening whirlwind. “Her violet haired companion was with her, and they were leading a man down the road at knife point. Rorax didn’t even come to pick up her dress!” The woman shrieked again, pointing a small finger at a short, obscenely sparkly, yellow dress. “That girl loves her dresses. She could be hurt or in trouble, and you took a century and a half to get down here!”
Ayres ignored the woman’s jabs as a cold fury settled over his senses. Had the man hurt her? Why was she bleeding?
The woman started tapping her foot, looking up at him like she was about to strike him if he didn’t get moving.
“Which direction did she take him?”
She waved her hands up in exasperation. “Probably back to the castle, boy! Seeing as she can’t go anywhere else!”
The tailor was right, Rorax was limited by her blood oath with the Guardian unless she was with him or Cannon.
Ayres spun on his heel and was pushing his way out when the seamstress called after him.
“Make sure Rorax comes and gets her dress and her new lingerie tomorrow. I made it just how she likes it—with extra lace.”
Ayres froze in the doorway. His whole body went haywire. He needed to go and to find her . . . but lingerie? Extra lace on Rorax? Did she wear those things under her dresses? Her armor? What kind of fabric had she used?
His chest and neck felt hot, and he was breathing a bit like a dragon as he forced himself to turn around and face the seamstress. She gave him a saucy wink before snapping and waving him out the door. “Shoo, boy.”
When Ayres reached Rorax’s room, he hesitated for a split second outside the door. Then he heard muffled voices inside, and when he heard a distinctly male voice, he burst through the door.
Jia was sitting on the edge of Rorax’s bed, Kiniera and a man he didn’t know were occupying the two armchairs, and Rorax stood in the middle of her room with her back to him. He took in the rivulets of blood streaking from the nape of her neck down to the small of her back, coloring her long blue dress in vertical stripes of red down her spine. As she whirled to face the door as his eyes zeroed in on the angry red marks on her collarbone and shoulder. And there was a cut on her neck.
A hand, a man’s hand, had made angry red marks around her throat.
Somewhere in the back of Ayres’s mind he was surprised to see the man alive. Rorax could more than take care of herself, she was the Spine Cleaver for gods’ sake.
But if she wasn’t going to defend herself, he would happily do it for her.
Ayres’s limbs trembled with the intense desire to reach out to his power and rip the soul from the man’s body. He wrestled it down. Instead, he looked over to the man and said, “I hope you enjoyed your last day with breath in your lungs. I’m about to fill them with blood.”
Rorax stepped in front of Ayres and placed a hand on his forearm. Ayres didn’t look away from the filth standing in the middle of Rorax’s room. The man had the good sense to look alarmed.
“Ayres,” Rorax murmured. She rubbed a thumb over his skin.
Ayres didn”t look away from the man who sat there like a ghost, a fragment of one who had missed too many meals and seen too many things. His light brown skin seemed sallow and pale, and deep purple bags colored the skin under his eyes.
He looked familiar, but Ayres was too far gone to connect any vague dots in his memory. And the truth was, Ayres didn’t give a flying fuck how broken the man was or what had happened to him. He had laid his hands on his Contestar and hurt her.
Rorax rubbed her thumb over Ayres’s skin again, and where she touched felt tingly and hot. She was trying to soothe him, and it was working.
“Ayres.” Rorax pulled at his arm, and he reluctantly looked down at her. There was worry pinching her eyes, but there was something else, too. Something that gave her eyes an extra light. Gods above, she was beautiful.
“Ayres, this is Karan. This is Sahana’s mate.”