Chapter 17 Cut Both Ways
CUT BOTH WAYS
Kat
Kat stood inside one of the water closets in the Zizreni familial home and took her first full breath of the evening.
You did it, she said to herself. And no one died or anything.
Sure, she had been painfully nervous the entire dinner, but it turned out that focusing so hard on not breaking any expensive dishware or dribbling broth down her front meant the answers to intimidating questions just…
came out. She couldn’t remember much of what she’d said, but she knew it wasn’t bad because no one had kicked her out.
Yet.
But there was still cake.
Panic crept along her body all over again, tightening muscles and prickling at skin, and she could only be thankful this was happening in a tiny private chamber and not in the parlor.
When she whispered to Azrion that she needed the toilet, she knew there was no way her bladder would let her use it, but the solitude was what she was really after.
Just a few moments to not worry about whatever her face was doing and to escape all the sounds vying for her attention.
As she gazed at the closed door, she tried to conjure a familiar calming place in her mind.
But the imagined tower bedchamber from a favorite childhood story didn’t appear, nor did the windy seashore she’d only ever seen paintings of.
Instead, there was the smell of warm tea, the softness of many pillows in a window seat, and the sound of brush strokes.
How had her safe place become Azrion’s studio?
Oh what in the hells is wrong with me?
Many things, she would likely say if truly asked, and nothing at all if a certain demon were posed the question, but as it stood in the Zizreni water closet, there was at least one glaring issue: she had only just seen that studio, and she had no claim over that place or the demon who inhabited it—she couldn’t.
But it was the place Azrion had so slowly and carefully kissed her, and that was worth something. No one had ever been patient like that with her before, and certainly no one had ever made her feel so…so unrestrained.
I should have given Katarina the flowers instead.
Kat covered her face and grinned stupidly into her hands.
He had rambled for gods knew how long about nonsense to his family, but then he had gone all soft and sweet—so similar to that kiss he’d given her—and for once it didn’t feel embarrassing.
The kind tone, the compliments, the sincerity, none of it made her want to twist away and hide.
But then, it wasn’t real, was it?
I need to get a little less good at faking it.
Kat hadn’t entirely collected herself by the time she stepped out into the hallway, but if she spent much longer in the water closet, someone was probably going to ask about food poisoning, and that would be mortifying.
It wasn’t like she was ever fully collected anyway.
Soundless steps took her back down the corridor past a demon’s portrait, but the painting had none of the life or charm of Azrion’s work.
She’d yet to see one of Azrion’s paintings in the house, in fact.
Not the next landscape nor the still life after that.
He had mentioned keeping his art to himself, but it still struck her that not even one sketch had made it into his parents’ home.
Wait, where am I?
She turned to peer at the hallway’s other end—had that been the way she’d originally come?
“I haven’t seen my son in weeks,” a sharp whisper sounded. “You’re not going to turn it into months.”
I’m not trying to keep him away, Kat thought because she couldn’t say anything with her heart so tightly lodged in her throat.
“Do you really expect me to say nothing about who he’s chosen to court, Ayaderan?”
Oh, not me. Thank gods. Wait…
“Well, it would certainly be nice if you chose silence for once.”
Kat flattened herself to the wall outside the kitchen. It wasn’t the first massive manor she’d hidden in while a heated conversation went on in another room, but it had been a long time since that conversation had been about her.
“He’s acting as though he’s infatuated with that human,” Valinerath’s low voice grumbled miserably.
“Don’t call her that,” Azrion’s mother hissed back, and Kat’s innards got up and all switched places.
Their voices carried the same malice she’d heard that night so many years ago while she was hidden beneath the stairs.
Her mother had been complaining about Kaly again, this time because she refused to dress properly for a woman of her station.
Her father petitioned, rightly so, that Kaly was merely eight, and they should let their children be children for a little longer.
Her mother had turned her animosity on Kat then.
A needy little monster, she had called her.
Always crying and manipulating you with her tears.
“That’s what she is.”
Kat’s chest tightened, breath gone. Am I really so…oh, human. He means human.
“You could at least say it politely,” Azrion’s mother sighed. “And so what if Az is infatuated? Can’t you just let him be happy?”
“His idea of happiness is—”
“A soulbond,” she said, and the word came out beautifully yet bitter too. “Just because you and I never made it work doesn’t mean your children should be denied the opportunity.”
Azrion’s sketch of his mother flashed in Kat’s mind, despair and all.
“You think he’s going to bond with that…that girl?” His father scoffed. “She was being sold, Aya—who knows where she’s been, what she’s done? She’s poised to absolutely ruin him.”
Kat’s heart shouldn’t have hitched the way that it did. None of it was real, she couldn’t ruin Azrion if she wanted to—and gods, she wouldn’t dare—yet everything inside her constricted with the shame and humiliation of all that she was and wasn’t and could never be.
I’m doing this to fix things.
But no one would understand. No one except maybe Kalypso.
Kat bolted past the kitchen and into another corridor, her steps too loud but there was nothing left inside her to care. Through teary eyes, she found the grand entry that had given her passage to this terrible place.
“Kat?” Azrion’s voice echoed behind her as she flung herself outside and fled into the gardens.
With her skirts clenched in tremulous fists, her legs carried her, all she could count on. She ran between the arching trees, blindly choosing each turn, and like her memory had sharpened with desperation, she escaped the garden maze.
Despite her pounding heart and heavy breaths, the night she stumbled out into was eerily quiet.
Whatever had happened to drive them for cover was over now, no booming echoes or shaking ground.
It should have been reassuring, but if it was over, that meant there was nothing to be done about the outcome.
Kat pressed a hand to her chest. She’d always thought she could feel her sister, but they had been apart for so long…
“Darling, whatever has gotten into you?” Azrion’s voice called from somewhere in the garden.
“I have to find her,” she shouted and ran down the street. Long legs and a talent for ignoring pain granted Kat considerable speed when she needed it, and spying a plume of smoke was an even greater motivation.
Signs of destruction abounded the deeper into Heck she ran.
Crumbling walls gave way to smoking piles of ash, but the ruin was contained, and most of the city had been spared.
Demons milled about the debris, but there was nothing frantic about them unless one counted how they stopped to crane their necks and watch Kat run past.
Her next gasping breaths filled with an acrid stench.
The body of something lay in an alley, but with a quick glance, she knew it was far too big to be a demon and definitely not a human.
She splashed through a puddle and tried to ignore the rusty color that spattered her skirt.
It hadn’t rained recently, but that fact too had to be disregarded.
Then a sharp left at a crossway brought her to a scene of disaster.
Kat’s legs came to a stop, and the tingle of something otherworldly danced over her skin. A shiver ran right to the base of her spine, and when she blinked, a strike like lightning flashed behind her lids.
“What the fuck,” she whispered breathlessly, then took off toward the destruction.
“Whoa! Wait just a—hey!”
Kat expertly maneuvered around a tall blue demon and bounded over a pile of rubble. There was too much to see, too many suspicious puddles and fractured stones. A wall had been torn away, the dark innards of some shop exposed and broken stock scattered. But no bodies. Not yet.
She cleared a knee-high wall, determined to wade into the worst of it, a charred structure smoking against the night sky at the road’s end. Kaly would be there, somehow she knew, not least of all because her sister was always at the scene of the worst crimes.
But then she shrieked as arms around her middle lifted her off the ground. Her legs still tried to go, steadfast in their inexplicable mission, but that just left her kicking pointlessly into the air—an enraging embarrassment that lasted only a moment because then she was floating.
Kat blinked, slowly this time, and a pleasant heat flooded into her limbs, much kinder than the burn of running. She was turned away from the smoldering building, and the ground was placed under her feet again, but her legs had lost their spirit.
“Be at ease, human,” said a baritone voice that Kat might have called friendly if it didn’t belong to someone who had just touched her without permission.
Kat stumbled as she spun on her heels. A massive golden demon stood between her and the worst of the rubble, horns twisting menacingly and black eyes boring into her. “Where is she?” Her voice came out dreamlike as she tried to sidestep him.