Page 14 of Revealing Fate

His eyes narrowed. “What do you remember from last night?”

A fresh spike of pain pierced Felíne’s skull, and she winced. “I remember…” Trying to escape. A swallow lodged in her throat. She’d been trying to leave him. And then… “The star,” she murmured. “A star fell out of the sky and…attacked me. My skin was burning where it touched me. There was gold lightning and⁠—”

She sounded insane. But Kal wasn’t looking at her like she was crazy. He just watched with that steady, unreadable expression.

“Kal,” she said carefully. “Why am I tied up?”

“Because you kept taking off your clothes.”

Felíne opened her mouth. Closed it. That wasn’t the response she’d expected.

“Every time I attempted to put them back on, you wailed like a banshee and tried to gouge my eyes out.”

She paled. Dear blessed gods above.

Kal held out a hand, still a safe distance away. “You bit me.”

She what? Felíne was afraid to look. But sure enough, there on the side of his hand, in the meat of his thumb, was a crescent of teeth marks. Her teeth marks, apparently.

“I gave up trying to force you back into your breeches. Oddly enough, you were much more compliant when I put my clothes on you.”

“I’m going to be sick,” she said.

Kal got up and came closer. “You did a fair share of that, too.”

“I was being choked,” Felíne said, remembering. “I tried to scream, and gold lightning jumped into my throat.”

Kal untied the sleeves of the jacket she wore, and Felíne moaned at the ache in her shoulders. She rolled her neck.

“It wasn’t lightning,” Kal said. “It was me.”

She shot him an incredulous look. “You choked me?”

Kal held up the first two fingers of his right hand—the one she’d bitten. “Gagged would be more accurate, and be grateful I did. I think you threw up most of the poison.”

Poison?

“Why would you do that, Kitty?” His voice was hard. His eyes, harder. “It’s a coward’s way out.”

“What are you talking about?” It took a moment for his meaning to sink in. When it did, her jaw dropped in shock. “You think I knowingly poisoned myself?” Was he delusional?

A skepticism crept into Kal’s expression. “You poisoned the food.”

Felíne blinked, stunned. “You told me to season the potatoes!”

“Kitty, you dumped four different kinds of potent hallucinogens into that pot. And then you ingested them. All of them. What in the name of the gods were you thinking?”

“I don’t know! Maybe I was thinking what kind of psychopath keeps deadly, poisonous herbs just casually tucked away inside his bag? I thought it was seasoning!”

Kal gaped at her. The expression looked so ridiculous on his typically serious face that she barked a laugh.

“I think you’re still high,” he declared finally, shaking his head.

“If I am, it’s your fault,” she snapped. “What kind of person keeps drugs like that lying around?”

“They weren’t lying around. They were carefully organized in a sealed inner pocket of my bag.”

Guilt sank its teeth into her conscience. She would never have found them if she hadn’t been snooping for supplies. Kal’s tone implied as much. She deflected. “And you have them in the first place, why?”