CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I kept my face passive. Neutral. I wouldn’t let my racing heart and scattered thoughts show. I had forged myself into a honed edge, created for this very moment. And I would not falter. “Tell me what to do.”
“Not like that,” Griffon said a few hours later.
I was drenched in sweat but already more confident with the dagger, its familiar contours a tiny piece of home tucked into my palm.
He demonstrated how I should have ducked under a swing and properly adjusted my feet afterward. “Got it?”
“Probably not,” I muttered, but practiced the footwork.
“What do you want?” Griffon barked, his tone suddenly dripping ice.
My head jerked up, then followed his gaze to the door.
Beck was framed in the archway, his fists balled up at his sides. My heart dropped at the circles beneath his eyes, and the way the skin around them tightened as he looked at me. “I just came to see what you’re training her for.”
Griffon pointed at the dagger in my hand, his expression putting Beck’s, “I think you’re stupid,” look to shame. “To fight.”
Beck’s jaw ticked. “Why?”
“Because she’s terrible at it.”
I smacked his arm but couldn’t keep my lips from quirking up.
A shadow passed over Beck’s face. “Let me rephrase that. Why do you give a shit if she’s terrible at it?”
I whipped back to Griffon and shook my head the tiniest fraction. His eyes narrowed, but he returned his dumbass gaze to Beck and shrugged. “Either come learn something or fuck off. Preferably the latter.”
Another stupid grin stretched across my face at him using my words, and I was still too pissed to object to them being leveled at my best friend. Griffon’s gaze tipped to me and the same mirth danced in his eyes.
Beck stared at the six of us, his entire demeanor screaming that he would much prefer to fuck off, but he shoved off the doorframe and jerked his arms out of his cloak. “Sure. Why not.”
“Unfortunate,” Griffon muttered.
Charlise shot him a “put your dick back in your pants” glare and I choked on my laugh.
She guided Beck to a mat as far away from us as she could get and began walking him through the basics.
Alexei joined them, and Laney fell into position in front of Mirren.
Griffon put his back to Beck and grinned like a bastard. I rolled my eyes.
After another hour, the dagger slipped out of my cramping hand and I doubled over. “I’m done,” I panted. “Can’t even…hold the blade.”
Beck grunted and Charlise squealed, “Sorry!” from where they still worked across the room. “That is another good lesson, though. Distractions will get you killed.”
I glanced around Griffon’s bulk to find Beck rubbing his chin as they walked back over to us. I cringed at the expression on his face. To anyone else he’d look content. Bored, even. But I knew anger always simmered beneath that bland look.
He flashed Charlise a brilliant smile. “It was my fault. Thank you for the instruction.” He gathered his cloak and tossed us a half-wave. I barely caught the snarl that twisted his features as he turned to leave. “Fucking stonetalons,” he muttered under his breath.
I shouldn’t have been able to hear it. But I did. So did the others.
“Hey!” Griffon barked. “She’s a ‘stonetalon.’” He thrust his finger in my direction and Beck’s head jerked with it.
I whipped toward Griffon. “What the fuck!”
“We’re going to go,” Mirren muttered and dragged Charlise toward the door. “Nice meeting you both.” They disappeared into the hallway and left me torn between scurrying after them and roasting Griffon on a spit.
“How’s that ironclad loyalty now?” Griffon demanded, his gaze still trained on Beck.
Beck’s laugh was a dagger to my chest. “She,” he said, “could never and would never be a stonetalon.” He said it with so much damned conviction. As much as I’d believed it with. He turned his gaze on me—waiting.
I swallowed hard and poured every ounce of my vitriol into the glare I leveled on Griffon, but he just watched me with cool indifference. And shrugged. The bastard.
My gaze slid back to Beck and I jerked my palms down my pants again, now slicked with sweat for an entirely different reason.
His expression slowly morphed from confident to absolutely horrified.
“I can’t say what you want me to.”
“What?” he demanded.
“I would just shift and show you. But I’m not very good at getting back yet.”
Beck’s gaze darted between the four of us as Laney and Alexei fell into step on either side of me. Beck took one back. “Why are you saying this?”
“Rounders,” Laney whispered in my ear.
“Oh. Right.” I sucked in a long, tight breath, and popped one of the flimsy lenses out of my eye.
Beck lost his balance with his next step away from me. He twisted to catch himself, and when his eyes found me again my heart splattered on the floor.
Every line of his face was contorted with disgust. I was something foreign. Worthless. Something he’d carelessly step on and not bother to check was properly squished. Not in a thousand of my endless lifetimes would I have imagined that look aimed at me.
He tore those cold, unfamiliar eyes off me and fled the room.
I rounded on Griffon. “What the hell!”
He just shrugged again. “You deserve to know who he is.”
“I’ve known him my entire life, I think I know who he is!
” I dug around in my eye, trying to shove the rounder back in.
It finally suctioned down, and I blinked it into place.
“This is just great. Thank you, Griffon. Thank you for forcing me to have this conversation on your terms, instead of mine.”
I turned on my heel and left the unapologetic bastard behind.
My heart was flinging itself against my ribs by the time I stood in front of Beck’s door, begging for escape so it didn’t have to suffer through this conversation. I spent all of five seconds trying to school it into submission before I gave up and rapped on the door.
Silence. I prodded it open.
Beck paced in front of the balcony doors, his hands gripped at the back of his neck.
“I suppose it’s time for that talk.”
He halted and pinned me with eyes drenched with so much sorrow and revulsion that I took one, tiny step away from him. “Now that we’re alone, just tell me it isn’t true. Somehow.”
“I still can’t,” I whispered.
He doubled over and yelled. I sagged against the doorframe, my very bones recognizing it as a cry of grief. Of loss. I was as good as dead to him.
“I’m still me, Beck. Can we just talk about everything? Please?”
His chest heaved beneath his cloak, his cheeks blotched red. “You had no interest in talking when I needed to, but now that you—” He pinched the bridge of his nose and jerked his chin. “Fine.”
My knuckles were bone-white against the deep mahogany of the doorframe. “I’m guessing you eventually started asking questions, when I didn’t come back to Vircann?”
He dug his fingers into his temples and stared at his feet, his eyes a million miles away, before he nodded sharply. “Didn’t start looking for days. Not like it was the first time you’d disappeared to go kill someone.”
I cringed at that. “And what did Bellan say when you asked where I’d gone?”
“That he was worried, too. He told me about the Tablors. I found the bodies.” A bitter note of accusation floated just beneath the anger.
“And the letter. So, I went to Dray’s and found those bodies.
But not yours. I hired a tracker from Bardon’s to decipher all the tracks.
He painted an interesting picture. One that ended with you disappearing into thin air.
I assumed you’d been taken by that stonet—” He drew a deep breath.
“I galloped back to Vircann, got annuleaf and Astra so I could break you out, and raced here.” He rubbed his eyes, his chest a little steadier.
“Bellan and I assumed it was all a setup. That whoever had tipped him off about the Tablors wanted revenge for someone you’d killed and paid the Shadows to get it. ”
“No,” I said softly. “There was no tip. Bellan set me up.”
Beck’s eyes flew wide, the lingering disgust on his face buried under an avalanche of shock. “How do you possibly know that?”
I sighed. “Because I turned the leader of the Shadows into salami. He told me my death was purchased by someone on the council. I worked out the rest.”
I plopped into a chair and backtracked, leaving out the phoenixes and the whole mess with Brie and Tavin. When I finished, I couldn’t find the words to explain the full depth of Bellan’s betrayal. I glanced up from my folded hands.
Beck’s mouth was hanging open so far I thought his jaw might have unhinged. “So, what,” he sputtered, his hands thrown wide, “you just planned to live out your life at Falcos?”
I stood from the chair. “I’m one of them! And I killed that girl, Beck.” The fire went out of me. “I lost my godsdamned mind and literally shredded her throat. So, yeah. For now, I belong here.”
He snorted. “You, ‘killed a girl’? That’s every other day for you, Lydia!”
My hand flew to my chest, those words a dagger tailor-made for all the little cracks in my heart.
“Why are you really staying? Is it him? You’re sure tossing smirks at each other like secret lovers.” He gasped, his face blanching of the fury that had stained his cheeks. “Are you fucking him?”
I threw my hands up. “Naturally, that is the only conclusion a man could ever come to!” I yelled. “And no, but if I was, it wouldn’t be any of your damned business!”
He stumbled away, his back ramming into the windowsill. “‘If I was.’ ‘If I was fucking the man who murdered my family.’ Listen to yourself, Lydia! How could those words ever come out of your mouth?” he roared.
My teeth ground together. “Because he didn’t do it.”
Beck slapped his hand over his face and dragged it to his neck, his eyes just tired now. “I can’t believe what I’m listening to.”
“Beck,” I said more firmly.
He dropped his hand and looked at me.
“He didn’t do it.”
He stilled, his expression smoothing into that mask he donned so easily in council meetings. “Then who do you think did?”
My stomach turned to acid. “Bellan. It was all Bellan.”
Beck was a statue for a breath. Two. Something in me shriveled at the laugh that burst out of him, a hint of mania coloring its edges. “They fed you a bunch of lies and you just lapped them up. Are you that desperate, Lydia?”
“No,” I snapped. “But I’ve gotten to know them, and their version of what happened makes a lot more sense! They would have gained nothing, while he gained everything!”
“You know what makes sense? The truth! The one you’ve always known! The stonetalons murdered us in droves on Solstice and then at Cyprian.”
My gut twisted. Half of that was true.
“Bellan and I did everything we could to find you after you went missing. Those are the truths.”
I was suddenly tired—so damned tired. “Those are just the lies he wants you to believe, Beck. He used us. Used me to…” I kneaded my aching temples.
“Gods, look at you,” he spat. “And to think, I almost fucked you last night.” His lip snagged on his revulsion at the idea.
“I was a gargoyle every single time you’ve fucked me, you ass. Because this is what I’ve always been and I’m no different now!”
He ignored me. “If Bellan did try to have you killed at Dray’s, maybe he was right.” He stalked toward me, his eyes consumed by something that shattered my heart more thoroughly than the disgust. It was hatred. “Maybe he saw something in you that I never could.”
Tears drowned my vision in an instant. “You can’t mean that.”
He shoved my shoulders, forcing me back into the hallway. “Go find a fucking mirror. And see how I could.” He slammed the door in my face.
They weren’t in the sparring room where I’d left them. Having to search stoked the white-hot anger searing my veins. How dare he. I eventually heard their voices drifting from that room of nightmares where Griffon stashed the Lakuro.
“Well?” Griffin asked as I stormed through the door. “Feeling enlightened?” He stood by the table, pulling a dart out of the box.
My anger was hot enough to keep my fear of that tiny thing at bay as I stalked over to him. “Practically omniscient!” I hissed.
“I want absolutely nothing to do with this,” Alexei said. He and Laney snatched up their bags and fled the room like I’d already set it on fire. The door clicked shut behind them.
“Apparently, it’s a damn shame Bellan’s little assassins didn’t manage to add my intestines to all the decorations we left in the fucking trees!
” I turned my back on him and pinched the bridge of my nose, drawing on every ragged shred of self-control I had left.
“I wanted to find a way to tell him gently, not shove it in his face.”
“Well, now you know he’s a disloyal prick.”
I whirled around and hurled my fist at his face. My knuckles connected with the hard line of his jaw, and I heard my bones break. My howl was lost in his colorful cursing and I doubled over, cradling my fist against my chest. “Godsdamnit! You fucking asshole!”
“What!” he bellowed. “My face did not attack your fist!”
I literally growled at him and flung my back against the wall while I waited for the pain to release its grip on my lungs. “Just stab me with your evil demon drug so we can get the next part over with,” I ground out once I could breathe.
“I’ve just been planning to have you shift.” At least he was still rubbing his jaw.
“What’s with the Lakuro, then?” I nodded toward the table.
He picked up the dart. “It isn’t. It’s ironweb. So you don’t burn the shit out of me again.” He dug around in the box and pulled out an herb. “I’ll give you annuleaf right after.”
I sighed, my anger dulled enough for fear to wrap its spindly fingers around my heart. “I attacked you multiple times the last time I shifted.” My head fell back against the wall, and I stared up at the ceiling. “We can’t just break each other until I figure it out.”
“So just like that? You’re going to take Lakuro again?” His expression softened; even his nicely bruising jawline relaxed. “You’ve done surprisingly well coming back in the past. It might not be necessary.”
I slowly shook my head. “No, I’ve managed to find my way back when your damned voice is bobbing along like a little lantern I can follow.
But I have to be able to anchor myself. Constantly.
Bellan owes me more than a pound of very, very crispy flesh, Griffon, and I won’t be some feral beast when I get to collect it.
” I swallowed hard. “So, yes. Just like that.”
Was that respect that flashed across his face?
“Alright.” He opened the lid of the box and withdrew a second dart. “Ready?”
I kept my lips clamped shut, lest I vomit on his boots, and shoved the memory I’d come up with to the forefront of my mind. Flirting with the idea of fucking Griffon was one thing—but the memory of the phoenixes was just too intimate.
I sealed my terrible decision with a nod.