“Have you been charming the kitchen staff again?”
“Guilty,” he said, taking up his spoon.
Their meal was mostly silent, punctuated by the crackle of the fire. The flames gilded his skin and lent him a startling allure, so much that she kept sneaking looks, veiled through her lashes. One wasn’t enough, so her gaze returned to him repeatedly while she tried to decide when he’d become so beautiful. It wasn’t any single feature, but she loved the long spill of his dark curls now, and the breadth of his shoulders, the tight-coiled springs of his beard, and the crinkles at the corners of his eyes when he smiled.
As he was doing now. At her.
“What?” she mumbled.
“You’re staring. Do I have stew on my face?”
“No.” It was an awkward wedge of an answer, stuck in the intangible door between them, but her sudden curtness didn’t dim the twinkle in his night-dark eyes. They were beautiful too, the deepest brown, fringed in ridiculous lashes and topped with thick, slightly intimidating brows.
“Hardly.”
Using the edge of his spoon, he scraped his bowl clean, seeming untroubled by Thalia’s scrutiny. “Then what is it? And if you can’t tell me this, tell me something else, a secret nobody else knows.”
Raff didn’t think Thalia would respond with a real answer. He expected a joke or a quick dismissal, but to his surprise, she bit her lip, deeply pensive. Then she scooted closer, as if the walls might seriously have ears. In this place, maybe he shouldn’t rule out the idea.
Eldritch politics were a lot deadlier and more convoluted than he’d bargained for. Raff still hadn’t completely wrapped his head around the fact that her half-sister had been hiding in plain sight and plotting Thalia’s downfall for how many years? Unheard of among the Animari—tempers ran too hot for that sort of treachery. In Pine Ridge, if you pissed someone off, the two of you fought it out and let it go.
“I’ve been wanting to tell you this anyway,” she whispered. “But I couldn’t figure out how…and maybe it won’t matter to you—”
“Just spill it,” he cut in.
Must be something major if she’s this nervous.
“I don’t have a gift,” she said, low.
Holy shit.
From what he’d gathered about Eldritch culture, this would be akin to revealing that she was Latent. Raff knew that gifts developed in early adulthood and that using the preternatural ability too much equated to burning life force. Korin had briefed him about the Eldritch Noxblade, Zan, who sacrificed himself for the Golgoth Prince during the Battle of Hallowell. His mind raced, weighing the implications. If her people knew, would they still support her push for the throne?
“That’s why you use the bracers,” he guessed.
She nodded, staring pointedly away from him into the fire. “I do have a certain mechanical aptitude that lets me design and build unusual things, but no innate power.”
“Did Lileth know?”
“She was the only one, until you.”
“Why’d you tell me?” Raff had asked for a secret, but he never could’ve predicted she’d share something so momentous.
The level of trust it indicated stole his breath. Right then and there, he decided it didn’t matter whether her people would still back her; they’d never hear of it from him. Plus, if she’d come all this way on sheer determination and charisma, then in his book, she’d more than earned the dubious benefit of an antiquated Eldritch title.
“You asked.”
“That’s an excuse, Lady Silver. You could’ve shared something else, like a little story about stealing cookies as a kid.”
A fleeting, wistful smile flickered at the edges of her mouth. “Lileth never let me get away with anything like that.”
“Sounds like she ruled your childhood with an iron fist.”
Thalia nodded. “There was no other choice. I would’ve been crushed if she hadn’t kept me safe, taught me all the skills I needed to survive my father’s court.”
She made it sound onerous…and unbearably lonely, a truth reinforced by the deep blue of her eyes. Sometimes they looked purple, but now, wrapped in that white towel, they were like the sea just before dusk, open and empty, as she gazed inward, across an icy tundra of desolate years. There had likely been no friendships, no roughhousing like he’d gotten from packmates, no solace from roving the hills.
He pictured her holed up in the library, endlessly reading. Given her prowess with the blades, he added to that mental image, placing her in Noxblade training from a young age, drilling alongside those who had to see her as better, stronger, and smarter, no matter what. If she fell, she had to get up twice as fast, if she took a wound, she had to pretend it didn’t hurt and examine the damage alone—while her mad father plotted to restore the glory of the old days, when the Eldritch ruled over the rest of the Numina.
How did she come out whole from that special hell?
It was beyond Raff not to reach for her, slowly, in case she wanted to be left alone. When she curled into him a second time, just as eagerly as when she was crying, his heart lurched in his chest, clenched and tightened. She felt so delicate and small, fragile compared to an Animari lover, but he already knew she was stronger than she seemed. Her heart raced against his, more proof that his touch did things to her, and her scent warmed, ripened, sheer chemical enticement.
“You like it when I touch you.”
It wasn’t a question, only an observation, and not even a surprising one. Raff was good at giving pleasure, but it rarely meant anything, and close skinship had never filled him with such euphoria before. She let him approach when no others were allowed the same privilege. Only he saw her softness and her faltering moments, and it was a kind of compliment that he couldn’t have envisioned receiving, before.
“Why state the obvious?” she muttered.
“Don’t sulk, I like it too. Your hair especially. Shall I fix it for you? Summoning your dresser would ruin
