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“Oh, they’re all me.” Now it was his turn to give me that look—the kind that picked me apart. “Meanwhile, you look like someone has shoved you in a pen with a bunch of lions. Do you actually have your hand on your blade right now?”
I yanked my fingers away from the hilt at my hip and placed my hands on the table. “No.”
“You’re safe, Oraya. Relax.”
It could have sounded dismissive, but his voice was unexpectedly tender.
You are safe. I could not remember the last time those words were uttered to me. It was never true, after all. And strangely enough, even though these people were so much less dangerous than the predators that surrounded me every day, I felt more exposed here than ever.
I looked out across the room. “Did you used to come to places like this? When you were…”
“Human? Yes. Often.” His gaze slipped out over the room. “They looked quite a bit different back then, though. A lot of time has passed.”
“How much time?”
A pause. “A couple of hundred years.”
He said it very casually, but I knew that pause. It was the same kind of pause I made when he asked me how long I had been coming to the human districts. He knew exactly how long it had been—years, days, minutes.
“But I still come to places like this regularly. I get a bit exhausted by vampires, sometimes.”
“Do you miss it? Humanity?”
It was only after the question left my lips that I realized how oddly intimate it was. I thought he wouldn’t answer. He was silent, watching the patrons laugh and drink.
“I miss the sun,” he said at last.
And for a moment, he wore the same expression that he did when I would come back to the apartment at dawn to find him looking out the window, long after the light would have been eating at his skin.
I didn’t know why I felt the urge to pull away from that uncomfortable question, as if I’d prodded a wound. I took a sip of my beer. Thick bitterness flooded my mouth. I made a face, and Raihn laughed.
“Ugh. That’s disgusting.”
“Disgusting and amazing.”
“Just disgusting.”
“You have no taste, princess.”
Despite myself, I chuckled. Maybe he had a point, because I took another sip.
“Mische probably also used to be human,” I remarked.
A warm smile curled the corner of his mouth. “She makes it obvious, doesn’t she?”
“I haven’t met another vampire like her.”
“Nor have I.”
“Were you the one who—”
The warmth disappeared from Raihn’s face. “No,” he said, sharply enough to cut off the rest of the question and any further follow up on that topic, then took a long drink.
I watched him closer than I allowed myself to let on.
Raihn had told me that he wanted to ally with me because he was curious about me. And I hated to admit this—even to myself—but I was curious about him, too. It had been a long time since I found myself wanting to know more about someone, even if it was only because they were so confusing.
He set down his drink—already mostly empty—and we sat in silence, observing the patrons.
Eventually I asked, “Why did you enter the Kejari?”
Such an obvious question, and yet none of us had ever asked it of each other. It was like once we entered the Moon Palace, the outside world and the circumstances that had brought us there ceased to exist.
“I have a lot of people depending on me, and Turned Rishan from the slums don’t get many options.” He shook his head. “Never make deathbed promises, Oraya. Always bites you in the ass.”
Turned Rishan from the slums. I was often so focused on the suffering of the humans within the House of Night that it was easy to forget that vampires suffered here, too. I’d thought that most would enter the Kejari for the glory of it, but maybe it was really desperation fueling all of us.
“Family?” I asked.
“In a sense. And I exhausted all other avenues. Joining this fucking barbaric spectacle was not high up on my list of things I wanted to do with my pathetic never-ending life.” His mouth twisted into a wry smile. “I wouldn’t even be here if Mische didn’t force me into it.”
My eyebrows leapt.
He chuckled and took another drink. “Look at that face. You thought I was the—what was your word?—brute who Turned Mische, carted her around Obitraes for a few hundred years, then dragged that poor, i
“Yes,” I said, without hesitation. “Absolutely.”
“That fucking girl.” He shook his head. “No, this was all her idea. And she knew I’d never let her do it alone.”
I struggled to reconcile this information with the version of Mische that I knew. Tried to imagine the girl who put flowers all over the apartment and giggled uproariously whenever anyone made a sound that vaguely resembled flatulence dragging Raihn to the Kejari.
I had wondered many times over these last weeks why both of them were here. They clearly loved each other deeply—neither, I was certain, would be willing to hurt the other. But then again, it wasn’t unheard of for close friends to enter together, if their interests aligned. Two chances at victory were better than one.
“Then… why is she here?” I asked.
“Because she’s a manipulative little thing,” he grumbled, as if to himself.
“Manipulative?”
“Right. Like someone else I know. Trying to get me drunk so you can ask all kinds of invasive questions.” He took a drink and shot me a wary glare. He set down his mug, and with every second of silence, I grew more surprised.
“And now,” he said, “you’re waiting for me to ask you why you’re doing this.”
“A bit,” I admitted.
A human in the Kejari? Anyone would be curious.
“Well, I won’t. I know already.”
My brows rose. “Oh, you do?”
“I’ll admit that before, I was wondering. I was thinking, ‘Why would this human put herself in a situation where she was surrounded by predators? Near certain death?’” He smirked. “Or, more accurately, ‘Why would Vincent put her in this situation?’ Easy, viper.” He raised his hands at the glare I shot him. “I know. But I was curious about a lot. Like, why were you here at all? You’re an adult. Vincent clearly doesn’t keep you literally locked up. Why did you remain in the House of Night, instead of crossing the Bone Seas to the human nations, where you could live a real life?”
A real life, he said, as if my life wasn’t real.
The truth was, it had barely even occurred to me that it was an option to leave the House of Night—leave Vincent. Only once, when I was seventeen years old, did I consider it. Ilana had raised the idea. It was shortly after… after. Those days were a blur of grief and pain. But I could still remember exactly how she had looked that day—so uncharacteristically serious, so worried. She had taken my face in her rough hands, pulled me so close I could smell the cigar smoke on her breath, and looked directly into my eyes. “You don’t have to live this way, my love,” she had said. “I made this choice, but you didn’t. You can choose another life, in another world, where you’d be just a person.”
I had only stared at her blankly before turning away.
The thought was incomprehensible. Where else could I possibly exist but the House of Night?
“I don’t want to leave,” I said.
“I see that now, after watching you here. You don’t see yourself as human at all, do you? So why would you leave to go live with them?”
I didn’t like that tone at all. “There are problems that need to be solved here. I’m not ru
This kingdom was a part of me, and I, whether it wanted me or not, was a part of it. I was the daughter of its king, blood or no. The bones of my parents were buried in this country. No matter how many times the House of Night bruised my skin or my heart, I would stay. Just as all the humans who lived here—who did not have a choice but to live here—would stay.
This was where I belonged. Here. Not some foreign human land half a world away.
Raihn examined me, a thoughtful expression on his face. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen that look, and every time, it made me uncomfortable. Like he was letting a facade drop for just these few rare, quiet moments, and revealing just how much he analyzed the world around him, typically hidden beneath violence and swagger.
I didn’t especially like being the subject of that analysis.
“You have balls, princess,” he said. “I will give you that.” Then he leaned across the table—so small compared to his frame that even that slight movement put him right in front of me.
“Here’s the other thing I have never understood about you. Vincent.”
I drew back, already defensive, every muscle tensed at the mere mention of his name.
“You’re just some human girl,” Raihn went on. “And the King of the Nightborn, well-known to be a cold, ruthless bastard, just… has a moment of compassion and decides to take you in? Why?”
His brow furrowed, and his eyes searched my face, like he was really looking for an answer to this question—and like he was already concerned on my behalf for what that answer might be. I glimpsed something in that expression, the faintest edge of something strangely familiar, gone in seconds.
“Of course,” he continued, “I know some vampires have a taste for human sex, but—”
“Vincent is my father,” I cut in, disgusted.
“Right. At least if he was fucking you, I could make sense of it. But by all accounts, including yours, he’s not. So…”
If I wasn’t so offended, I would find it a bit fu
“Mische is your family, even if she isn’t your blood. It shouldn’t be so hard for you to understand that.”
“I understand it. I just didn’t think our oh-so-great-and-powerful divine king did.”
“Because you know him so well.” I scoffed. “Of course you think poorly of him. You’re Rishan. He unseated your people from the throne.”
“I’m sure the two dozen extended family members of his that he executed to take that throne feel somewhat strongly about his commitment to familial bonds, too.”
Oh, please. As if every vampire king didn’t have to kill to get that power. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was reality.
“And how many people are you about to kill to fulfill those ‘responsibilities’ you talked about?” I smirked at him, gesturing to myself. “And you still took in a human stray, didn’t you?”
He finished the last of his beer.
“Oraya, there is nothing stray about you. I think you know precisely where you’re going, even when you don’t know you do.”
And I was about to ask him what, exactly, that was supposed to mean—