Page 30

The club comes up fast, crackling with ward-light. I catch his wrist before the strike lands. The shock bites across my palm, hot and unpleasant, but it breaks against the infernal current beneath my skin and dies there. Talen gasps. His eyes dart from my hand to my face, and this time he cannot quite rebuild the sneer.

I squeeze just enough to make the club drop.

It clatters on the stones between us.

“Do not touch her again,” I say, each word low enough to scrape. “Speak around her if you must. Bow if you’re ordered. Breathe in the same room if no one can spare me the annoyance. But if you put your hand on her, if you corner her, if you make her flinch because your pride is too small to carry itself, I will find you.”

His face has gone pale beneath the rain-damp grime.

I release him before the hunger can convince me that restraint is just cruelty aimed in the wrong direction. Talen stumbles back, clutching his wrist to his chest and watching me with the stunned resentment of a man who has never considered that one of his victims might bite.

“You threatening estate guard?” he asks.

“I am offering behavioral guidance.”

“You think Vaerith won’t hear about this?”

“I’m counting on Vaerith hearing exactly enough to wonder why his guard needed guidance from gutter trash.”

His lips peel back from his teeth in a look too frightened to be a smile. “You don’t know what he does to things that interest him.”

That should be a warning.

A faint gleam shifts in the darkened window above the scribe’s office before the rest of the thought can settle. I see it because my eyes are not fully human, because gold light changes how reflection behaves, because the world has become a place where anything polished might be watching. The window is black from the outside, curtains drawn behind it, but the surface ripples for half a breath with silver-blue light.

Scrying glass.

My blood cools despite the heat under my skin.

Talen sees my attention move. His expression gives him away before he can school it, satisfaction slipping through the fear in one ugly little flicker.

“You knew,” I say.

He says nothing, which answers better than words.

The silver-blue shimmer fades, but not before I feel the cold brush of attention behind it. It is elegant, invasive, and faintly perfumed with old magic, like silk dragged over a knife. Someone powerful is looking through that mirror. Someone patient. Someone who wanted to see whether the lower-district hybrid would bare his teeth when prodded.

Vaerith.

My anger surges so fast I nearly lose the shape of my own breathing.

The passage seems to lean around me as my senses reorder themselves around the new threat. Talen becomes less important than the watching presence above us, and the hunger in me strains upward, furious at being studied, furious at being provoked, furious that Isolde was correct before I had the sense to be. Embarrassed men become loud, she said. She did not add that clever monsters use loud men as bait.

“Son of a bitch,” I whisper.

Talen moves while I am distracted, stumbling toward the passage mouth. I let him go because chasing him would be exactly the point. His footsteps slap through puddles, uneven and panicked, until they vanish into the courtyard noise.

The mirror above me flickers again.

I look up.

For one moment, the darkened glass shows a face that is not a reflection. Pale violet eyes. Silver-white hair. A mouth curved with the small satisfaction of a man watching an experiment begin to confirm its premise.

I do not move, even though everything in me wants to.

The hunger climbs into my throat, pressing against my teeth, and the ember lines beneath my skin begin to glow through the backs of my hands. The wall beside me warms where my shoulder brushes it. My pulse hammers so hard I can feel it in my horns beneath the glamour, each beat threatening to crack the illusion apart and show every hidden thing at once.

Vaerith smiles.