Chapter 15 #3
“Maybe I should keep training,” I said, with forced nonchalance. “If we have as little time before the gods come for me as you say we do, I should be using every minute of it.”
“And here I was thinking that you had so little leisure time. I’m sure Atrius would be willing to—”
“Not Atrius. You.”
A jump of his brows. The smile bloomed over his lips, so bright it was actually jarring, before he tamped it back down to that permanent smirk.
I’d come to recognize that expression—a delighted sort of surprise.
He made it look elegant, but it was at its core the same expression I’d witnessed on countless gambling addicts when they saw a card table.
Septimus, I knew, liked the rush just as much, and I suspected that no matter how much effort he put into making himself seem in control of it, he was no more dignified than the men hunched over those chips.
“Me,” he repeated.
“Yes, you.”
“Oh, dove. That isn’t my job. I’m a prince.”
“Atrius is a king and apparently he’s not too good for it.”
“Clearly you don’t understand Atrius’s . . . complicated situation,” Septimus said, with a suppressed smile that implied this was some kind of inside joke I was not privy to.
“I do understand,” I said. “Other people pull the triggers. Other people get their hands dirty. But not you.”
“There are many ways to fight that don’t involve a sword at all.”
“Spoken like someone who knows they’d lose.”
He let out a tsk. “Come now. Are humans so weak that this kind of goading works on them?”
“It works on vampires too.”
His eyes really were something. They glittered now like rough cut gemstones.
“Not on—” he began.
And then I reached back and slid my palm over Zefiah’s blade. Blood gushed down my hand.
I relished the way Septimus’s smile disappeared.
He jerked sharply back across the hallway.
There was nothing calculated about that movement.
None of his typical performance. I watched the graceful muscles of his throat flex.
Watched those eyes go sharp, lingering on the smear of blood on my hand.
A few little ribbons of red rose into the air between us, his magic calling to it.
{Kyrene, do not be foolish,} Zefiah warned.
But I just smiled. I could taste the iron between my teeth as thickly as I could taste his hunger in the air between us.
Now, all his smug facades had been ripped away. In the end, he was an animal. Just like the rest of them.
And I loved that, in this moment, we both fucking knew it.
I drew my brows together in faux concern. “Are all vampires so weak?” I said sweetly.
A blink, and he crossed the hall in three long, smooth steps, effortless and graceful, his hand raised.
I had to steel every part of my body against flinching, because I was so certain that hand was coming to my throat.
Instead, he planted it on the wall behind me, his head ducking down against mine.
I didn’t move. Didn’t break eye contact.
This close, I could see all the different shards that made his eyes that unusual color.
I realized that they so shifted between silver and amber because there were countless threads of each woven into his irises—silver and steel grey, and then those flecks of amber curling around his pupils, reaching out from the center like desperate souls from the underworld.
What, I wondered, had made them that way?
I just met that stare and smiled. And a part of me, flawed, human, exhausted from the world I’d been enduring this last decade, dared him to do it—go on, end me. Let me rest.
“Tell me, Vindica Ultis.” His words were warm on my face. “What do you see, when you look at me right now?”
I noted his pupils—dilated. His breath—quickened. His eyes—lingering on my throat. Flicking down to my wet fingertips.
“I see weakness,” I said.
He laughed softly. “Maybe.”
His fingers curled around my wrist, cradling my bloody hand. Lifting it.
{Kyrene, stop him!} Zefiah barked, burning across my back.
Maybe it was curiosity, maybe it was pride; yes, maybe it was even just stupidity that made me stand there, back straight, unmoving, as I allowed Septimus to raise my hand between us. Because damn if I was going to be the first one to break.
I watched him raise it to his mouth.
A shock of pain, as he pressed his lips to the open wound on my palm. I tensed at the soft, full press of his tongue against the cut—a caress to the sharp sting.
He held my gaze the entire time, those shattered eyes peering at me from beneath fair, thick lashes, daring me to react.
I didn’t. Not so much as a flinch.
His tongue slowly ran from one end of the cut to the other. And then, just as gently, he lowered my hand back to my side.
“Hmm.” He made a show of licking his lips, one fang digging into the lower curve. The red of my blood smeared at the left corner of his mouth, and his thumb darted up to wipe it.
Then he leaned closer to whisper into my ear, “Tastes like desperation, Vindica Ultis.”
I opened my mouth to respond—
And then a crash shook the ground, drowning us in white.
Through it, I heard only Zefiah’s voice:
{They have come!}