KANE HAULED CRAWFORD UP BY HIS TUNIC AND THREW HIM DEEPER INTO
the room with a grunt. Then he turned to Rhett and Trevyn, the latter’s collar trembling at his bobbing throat. “Do not call for help.
Do not alert anyone that we are here or neither of you, nor your employer, will live to see daybreak.”
“Now, wait one moment,” Rhett began, voice weak—
Kane slammed the door shut with only that vicious split of shadowed mist, shaking the thin walls around us and producing a yelp from Trevyn. He crawled on all fours to the door, wrenched it open with quivering hands, and dashed out the other side.
“And you?”
Rhett wasted no time abandoning Crawford as well, even going so far as to close the door politely behind him. Kane smirked.
“You’re demented.” Crawford’s eyes shimmered with the first hint of fear as Kane stalked toward him, small tendrils of wicked power unfurling around his feet as he moved.
The burly noble didn’t waste a second to see what Kane had planned. He threw himself against the wall at the back of the room, sending two paintings in antique frames clattering down to the floor. Bathed in the dim candlelight, he tried to climb toward the window above like a scurrying rodent. But it was too tall, just barely out of reach even for a man of his stature, and his feet couldn’t find purchase against the wood.
Kane closed in on him with ease and turned Crawford to face us, wrapping a large hand around his throat and holding him high against the wall he had tried to scamper up, his feet jolting uselessly in the air.
“You’ll regret this,” Crawford swore. “I’ll keep your eyes in a jar in my villa.” He scraped and clawed, trying to grasp at Kane’s face, but Kane had the more significant arm span. Even Crawford’s kicks barely connected.
“The Blade of the Sun,” Kane said. “Immediately. Before this café becomes a pitiful pile of stone and playing cards.”
“I’ve never heard of such a weapon.”
“Bullshit,” Kane thundered, bashing Crawford’s head into the wall. I couldn’t help my flinch.
But the rest of his words were lost on me. Kane’s violence had dislodged a few paintings and debris from the walls, and something was poking through shattered glass on the floor. It looked—
No, that couldn’t be possible. It looked like a drawing.
A drawing of me.
The sound of wet pummeling echoed through the room as I knelt to examine the paper clipping. Sure enough, the parchment in my hands read Have You Seen This Woman? and below that, Wanted for Treason alongside a near-identical drawing of my face.
No, no, no—
A chill pumped into my veins.
“Fine, fine—” Crawford spit, heaving after another round of Kane’s blows. “I may know of the thing, but I don’t have it. I never did.”
“Who does?”
“If I knew, why would I tell you?”
Kane reared his fist back, thorns and shadow twining along his palm and up his forearm, before crashing it into Crawford’s jaw with force. Enough to break the bones, but not enough to knock him out. Or kill him.
Crawford bit back a groan. Coughing, he spit blood onto Kane’s other hand, still clenched around his neck.
Under my breath, and turning my face from Crawford’s bloodied, pulpy one, I whispered to Kane, “He has a wanted poster of me. It was framed on his wall.”
When Kane’s quicksilver eyes met mine, it wasn’t anger that simmered in them. It was fear. And that fear laced into his voice like poison as he turned back to Crawford and said, “Unfortunately, you’ve just become worth more to me dead than alive.”
Undiluted terror pooled in the man’s beady eyes. The realization that he would die this evening. That there would be no narrowly escaping with his life, no respite from the pain, the dread.
That it was over.
Crawford thrashed against Kane’s hold and his grim eyes cut to mine, pleading. I winced as Kane let his fist loose again, slamming into Crawford’s gut and then his kidney. He sputtered, unable to breathe, until he sucked in a lungful to moan in agony.
“Why?” he asked between breaths, bright red coating his teeth and lips. “Because of her?”
He spat again, but Kane’s choke hold only tightened. Gasping, he tore at the hand around his throat.
Kane was going to kill him before we learned anything. And all because he knew that I was—
Maybe . . . maybe that was it.
I moved toward them, skin tingling with fear and . . . anticipation. Some kind of grisly exhilaration. “You know who I am?”
“Arwen—”
I shot Kane a look in an effort to convey the new ruse we were playing. No longer subservient healer and dark king, but instead, powerful Fae outlaw and human brute.
Though he remained silent, there was an uncanny interest in Crawford’s beady eyes I had missed before. How could I have been so oblivious? He had looked at me just as Lieutenant Bert had. He had known I was Fae all along.
Kane tightened his grip.
“You knew all night.”
“Yes,” Crawford spat. “I have a dignitary friend in Garnet. He told me that you’re . . . different.”
“My king wasn’t lying. He’ll strangle you to death.” “It’ll be easy,” Kane swore, “like juicing a lemon—”
“But what I’ll do to you will be far, far worse. Give us the location of the Blade of the Sun, and leave with your life.”
Crawford studied me, and despite my racing heart, I suppressed the urge to fidget. Then his eyes landed on Kane. “Tell your animal to release me.”
I motioned for him to do so, and Kane only hesitated a moment before dropping the criminal without pretense. Crawford fell to the floor like a deflated ball, face slamming into the moth-ravaged rug, sputtering and puckering for air.
Kane wiped his bloodied hands on his pants.
“A year ago I heard it was in Reaper’s Cavern,” Crawford said when he had caught his breath. “Nobody was ever going to retrieve the thing without dying. So I said it was in my possession. People believed me. It was good for my image. That’s it.” He spat blood onto the floor and rubbed his jaw and throat.
Kane paced across the room to lean against the carved desk, and it creaked under his weight. “I thought Reaper’s Cavern was a myth.”
I prowled closer to Crawford’s hunched form. “If you’re trying to trick us—”
“No!” He cowered. “I’m not! It’s not.”
Playing with Kane had been one thing. The thrill, the hunger in it—but this was something I had never felt before. Crawford’s wide-eyed expression sent a wave of pleasurable sickness through my system.
He feared me.
Me.
He feared what I could do to him. I had never felt less like a victim in twenty years of being alive. No, I felt like a nightmare. A dangerous, tantalizing nightmare.
“The cave sits outside the town of Frog Eye, in the Peridot Provinces. I watched thirty of my men walk in there to recover the treasure. Not one made it back to Azurine.”
“I’m getting very bored, Crawford.” The raw dominance in Kane’s voice nearly bowed me into submission. “How do we get there?”
“How should I know? My men had the only map, and like I said, they all died.”
Kane pushed himself off the scarred desk, stalking over to us as he rolled his sleeves, and drove his foot into Crawford’s gut with enough force to send the man back into the wall. “Where do we find a fucking map?”
Crawford doubled over, retching onto the ground below us, putrid ale and stomach acid seeping into dark threads. Kane seethed at him, disgusted. “You’ll never know,” he croaked. “The Garnet dignitary I spoke of, the
one who told me what you are . . . They’re onto you. Unnatural abomination . . . Even when I’m gone, they promised me a piece of the Fae girl would live on in my collection.” Crawford’s eyes pinned mine. Fury, fear, and . . . acceptance.
No, no, no—
“They promised me her heart.” His grin, pinned on Kane, split his face in dripping red and pearly white.
I wasn’t breathing. My eyes shot to Kane. “Wait, don’t—”
But Kane snarled as he unleashed the power that had been so fiercely fighting to escape all evening, a thin rope of smoke ripping from his wrist and looping around Crawford’s neck. He fought—limbs spasming in every direction, reaching for Kane, for me, gripping at the rug. But it was useless. Kane bared his teeth in feral pleasure as the wisp of pure, black night tightened and tightened and tightened—
Until Crawford slumped over, gray and cold, his coin leaking out of his pockets like a greedy pool of golden blood.
Palpable silence rippled through the room. I wanted to look elsewhere.
Anywhere but those vulgar, blood-filled, vacant eyes.
But Kane’s expression was even worse. Crawford was vile, and surely deserved death. But it was Kane who looked . . . alive. More invigorated than he had in weeks. All because he had snuffed the life out of someone. Exiled them into nothingness.
Something that had destroyed me, shredded and shattered my soul so intensely that I was now a walking shell, Kane did effortlessly and without remorse.
And then, he grinned.
A wild, heartless smile that crept into his jaw and lips as his lighte receded up his forearms and back into his body.
I had run in here after a man like this? After all he had done to me? Out of some revolting need to make sure he wouldn’t be in danger?
“How . . . how could you have done that?” I wasn’t sure which of us I was talking to.
Kane sucked in a steady lungful of air. “Save your lecture. The map’s in here. He kept looking around the room.”
In a daze I swept the space. “Maybe the walls . . . they’re covered in—”
But Kane prowled over to that ornate, creaking desk. I watched, waiting for him to scavenge through the drawers, the papers crowding its face, the inkwell in its corner. Instead, he nudged it a few times. Tentative, studying
—looking for something. He prodded it again and I realized he was hunting for the source of the wobble. The weak leg that couldn’t sustain the weight of the hefty wood. When he found it, he knelt and yanked the thing clean off, toppling the desk altogether with a loud crunch.
I jumped at the sound—the papers floating across the floor, the ink that soaked into the carpet below.
Kane returned to me with the desk leg—an intricately engraved wooden stake—and held it out for me like a dog with a bone. His hand was shaking.
Before I could breathe a word, the door behind us flung open.
Trevyn rushed in, raising a silver machete that glinted in the candlelight. “Leave him alone!” he sputtered, red in the face and sweating furiously.
“Fuck,” Kane swore, unsheathing his own sword.
But Trevyn froze, eyes not on Kane, but rather on Crawford’s slumped body. He gasped, the machete now pointed out as if to keep us at bay rather than to attack, panic worming its way through his slender face and quaking limbs.
“Trevyn,” I cautioned. “You tell everyone Crawford choked to death on his dinner. All right? You found him like this. Live the rest of your life with that secret, and we’ll spare you.”
“We won’t be doing that,” Kane said, more tired than anything.
Guilt slid through my chest. Even a seedily employed man like Trevyn had a life he cared to live. Hopes and dreams and possibly those whom he loved. Those who loved him. And I didn’t want to see Kane murder another man. Especially not one who had only tried to protect his patron.
“If Trevyn swears to never tell a soul what he saw,” I said to Kane with as much severity as I could muster, “then we can.”
“Why should we?” Kane’s eyes were predatory on the crook. “Because I said so.”
I was placing a lot of faith in Crawford’s big mouth. In the hope that he had told his underling what I was. What I was capable of.
“I swear it,” Trevyn stammered. “Whatever you say.” The machete clanged to the tattered rug.
I stalked even closer to him, my hair beginning to feel a bit like static. “I will know if you’re lying. I know everything.”
“I believe you,” he whispered.
“If we find out you betrayed us, I will come to your home and drench all whom you love in blood. You’ll be cleaning them out from under your fingernails for weeks.”
“I think you proved your point, oh powerful one,” Kane said with irritation. “It’s time to leave.”
