22
“Come to my house tomorrow night to meet with my treasurer and collect your gold, Escrain,” Roxior told him. He set the pipe down on the table and lost interest in us, focusing instead on the cheese slices arranged in a radial pattern on a plate beside the fruit.
The captain took off his cocked hat and dipped into a deep, theatrical curtsey. “With great pleasure. Thank you, Master.” He straightened his back and smirked at Amlach and me. “Farewell, lovebirds. Play nice.”
His men gathered the unsold prisoners and left the room, likely heading to the Masters and Mistresses in the other private rooms.
One of the two slaves near the family and the two young men approached us.
She was in her seventies, with sunken green eyes and drooping eyelids.
A web of fine wrinkles covered her stern face, and a few blonde strands remained among her short gray hair.
A rust-colored tint stained her lips, mirroring the hues of her dress with ochre embroidery.
“Come with us,” she said, and with a sharp nod, she ordered her companion to get the couple with children and the boys moving.
We followed them to leave the room, and I caught Roxior’s dark gaze before crossing the threshold.
“And that’s how you negotiate for your own life, Elf,” Amlach mocked me as we walked through the corridors to leave the temple.
I cut him a glare, and he smirked.
“Do you speak Elvish?” I asked point-blank.
He frowned slightly, his eyes focused ahead. “What makes you think that?”
“The fact that you know what I told my soldiers before the battle began.”
His eyebrows went up as he gave me an indulgent look. “I took a guess, Nauriel.” He paused, then jerked his eyes away from me. “And I’m a good watcher. Your brother seemed quite annoyed, so I assumed you gave an order he disapproved of.”
I observed him suspiciously. “I don’t believe you,” I said in Elvish.
Amlach stopped abruptly, grabbed the chain linking us, and pulled me toward him. “Why the fuck did you just speak to me in your language?” he growled under his breath, trying not to draw even more attention from onlookers.
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” I replied harshly in the common tongue, my heartbeat racing and every fiber of my being screaming for me to get closer to him.
To cling to him.
Amlach shortened the distance between us, and the back of his fingers brushed mine. He leaned over me until his warm breath puffed against my cheeks. “So now you don’t believe me anymore? After all that we’ve been through together? After I literally saved your ass in that fucking room?”
I looked away, overwhelmed by the noise, laughter, scents, and colors that made it hard to think clearly. “Amlach—”
He grabbed my chin with two fingers, generating a rattle between our shackles, and forced me to turn my attention back to him. “Do you still trust me or not?”
I got lost in his gaze, so furious, so mesmerizing, so good at working its way into me and making me doubt everything.
So good at making me feel vulnerable.
And mysteriously safe.
That’s when I realized that, just as I had protected him, Amlach had also looked after me in the best way he knew how.
“I do,” I said in one breath.
And I dreadfully understood that I would always trust him.
“Good,” he replied as quietly.
However, his expression became even more hostile as he moved his thumb toward my lower lip and . . .
“You two!”
Roxior’s old slave’s booming, raspy voice snapped us back to reality. I pulled away from Amlach with a move so sudden and forceful that the chain between us stretched with a crack.
“Don’t stay behind,” the woman scolded us.
I stared at Amlach, deeply upset by the earthquake of emotions shaking me. By the angry intensity with which he first watched the distance I had put back between us, then me.
He wanted me to get close to him again; I could read it in his eyes.
But before he could pull the chain again, I suddenly set out for our waiting group, dragging Amlach along with me.