Chapter Nineteen #3
They came away with blood, and she groaned at the sight.
“What were you thinking?” he asked and moved her aside so she could sit against the wall. He stayed standing where he was, towering over her like she was an insolent child.
“Do you think I meant for this to happen?”
“Well, you certainly didn’t leave the castle alone with good intentions in mind.” Reyes ran a hand through his hair and turned away with a sigh. “Gods, Solana, you could have died.”
She tilted her head against the wall and closed her eyes, secretly enjoying his attention. “That would put a damper on your grand plans, wouldn’t it?”
Though she couldn’t see him, she could imagine the way his jaw tensed with frustration, and how his fists clenched to keep from striking the wall, or perhaps her. “Our grand plans. We agreed to a truce. Don’t act as if I’m pinning you down and taking what I want by force.”
“I don’t mind being pinned down,” she said suggestively, eyes still closed and dangerously imagining what it might look like if it was her hands tied to his bed instead of that stupid table in his stupid torture chamber.
A much better use of our time, she thought.
Except, she might have said it out loud, because Reyes asked, “Are you drunk?” with all of the judgment reserved for a jealously sober person.
“That’s none of your business.” Solana yawned and peeked open an eye.
Just as she thought, Reyes’s perfectly chiseled jaw was tensed, and his nostrils were flared as if it was taking all the patience in the world to speak to her.
“I was doing a perfectly fine job of keeping myself alive before you and your band of hooded men arrived, thank you very much.”
The hooded men were loading the muki’s body onto the stretcher as she spoke. Nikolas glanced at her. “It was a great kill,” he said with a glove-covered thumbs-up.
“Eyes on the job,” Reyes ordered, and Nikolas made a face behind his back before returning to the task at hand. “There are more important things to be focusing on right now than your desire to drink yourself into a—”
“It’s always something, isn’t it? Solana, kill the demons, Solana, give us your blood, Solana, reverse the curse and save everyone, Solana, your father is actually still alive and trapped in the underworld, but don’t do anything about it.
” She snapped her mouth shut and looked away from Reyes’s shocked eyes.
“All I want to do is finish my contract and get the fuck away from this place. Why is that so difficult for everyone to understand?”
Reyes snorted, and when she looked back, she saw not pity, but disappointment.
Perhaps even disgust. “You’ve made it very clear what you want.
What I don’t understand is how someone like you was given such a gift when all you do is spit on it.
” Reyes scoffed down at her, as if she were nothing but a pile of stinking horse shit, and turned and walked away.
“Someone like me? What’s that supposed to mean?” she called after him, uncaring of Nikolas and Oskar, who were trying not to look like they were listening but absolutely were.
“Yes, Solana, someone like you.” Reyes didn’t turn as he spoke. “Someone selfish and too afraid to do what’s right. Someone undeserving.”
“I didn’t ask for this,” she said through gritted teeth.
This time, Reyes did turn, but partially, so that she could only see the side of his face.
As if she wasn’t worth his full attention.
“None of us asked for this,” he said, gesturing toward the walls and city beyond them.
“And yet there are those of us doing everything we can to change the unchangeable. You are no different than anyone else. Your suffering is not greater than theirs. Your choices not more impossible.”
He was right, Solana knew that, but there was a part of her that felt different.
Like she was moving through life as a separate entity with an anchor tied around her soul.
One that she was deeply, achingly, afraid of.
What if the darkness consumed her like it consumed everyone on Supay, and she became the thing she hated most?
Worse—what if she embraced it?
That demon had spoken to her. It had called her by a name that felt as familiar as her own. What if she was already rotting from the inside out?
Reyes didn’t wait for a response before he was walking away again.
“Aren’t you going to heal me?” Solana yelled after him. “There’s demon poison coursing through my body as we speak!”
“Walk it off. You’ll be fine,” he threw over his shoulder, and then he was around the corner and out of sight. She looked at Oskar, who shrugged his shoulders, and then Nikolas, who asked, “Want a ride back to the castle?” with a waggle of his eyebrows.
“Pass,” she grunted, done with men and their many desires.
“Suit yourself,” he called, and then they disappeared around the corner as well, dead muki in tow. The king would not be happy about that, but he would simply have to join the list of people disappointed in her. Solana found that she was done caring how long it got.