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ORAYA
Raihn knocked at my door just a few hours before dawn.
I knew it was him right away. I’d spent the rest of the night after that conversation with Septimus waiting for him to show up. That wasn’t the end of the fight. Any minute, I told myself, and he’d be at my door, trying to force me into this.
I was ready for it.
I didn’t get up, of course, when he knocked. Prisoner or not, I didn’t feel like rising to meet my own punishment.
Click, click, click, click, as the locks released. The door swung open. Raihn stood there wearing a dark cloak, a pile of fabric over one arm.
He tossed it on the bed—a matching cape. “Put it on,” he said.
I didn’t. “Why?”
“Because I said so.”
“That’s a shit reason.”
“Ix’s tits, princess. Put on the damned cloak.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, confused and trying not to show it. A few hours ago, he’d been all but threatening to torture me.
“I’m not sure why I’d go anywhere with you or do anything you ask me to,” I said curtly. “When you’ve already made it so clear you’ll just force me to do whatever you want.”
He sighed. “We can’t have this conversation here. Just put on the cloak and come on,” he said, raised his hood, and left the room.
I sat there for a few long seconds, then cursed to myself under my breath. Mother damn that human curiosity.
I put on the cloak and followed Raihn. He’d gone next door, to his chamber. He held the door open for me, then closed it behind us.
I had never been in this room. The apartment had been empty when I lived here as a child—Vincent would never let anyone but himself so close to me, considering the fragility of my human skin and the draw of my human blood. There were only two chambers in this wing, so keeping this one unoccupied left me isolated—safe.
It was a mirror image of my own—a small sitting room, a washroom, a bedchamber. I eyed the open door to Raihn’s bedchamber—much messier than I would have expected, the sheets and blankets a pile on the bed—and tried not to think about the fact that our rooms shared a wall.
Raihn strode to the other end of the sitting room, where two large windows stretched to the ceiling. He unlatched one of them, letting it fly open. A rush of dry desert air rustled his hair around his face as he climbed up on the sill, turned to me, and offered his hand. With a puff of smoke, his wings unfurled.
I didn’t move.
“Come on,” he said.
“Absolutely not.”
“We both know you’re going to agree. So let’s skip the part where we go back and forth about it. We don’t have a lot of time.”
“Are you asking me or are you commanding me?”
His mouth tightened. “Can I really command you to do anything? If you really want to go back to your room and sit there by yourself, you can do that too. Your choice.”
He pulled his hood up a bit more, the shadow over the top half of his face highlighting the smirk on his mouth, the strength of his jaw, the light pooling in the lines of the scar on his left cheek.
Mother damn him, I wished he wasn’t right, but he was.
I approached warily. He reached for me, then hesitated.
“May I?” he asked, his voice a little rough.
I nodded, trying very hard to look nonchalant.
It wasn’t the first time Raihn had flown with me. But it was the first time since… the end of the Kejari. The thought of being that close to him, the thought of allowing him to hold me… it…
Fear is a collection of physical responses, I told myself, trying desperately to slow my rapid heartbeat before he could sense it.
Even though this was a whole different kind of fear than the adrenaline rush of bodily danger. Harder to numb.
I stepped onto the sill, and he pulled me into his arms, one tight across my back, the other under my thighs. I wrapped my arms around his neck in a way that felt far more natural than it should have.
He smelled the same. Like the desert and the rush of the sky. The warmth of his body felt the same, too—firm and stable.
For a brief, terrible moment, we paused just like that. His muscles tightened, as if struggling with the instinct to pull me closer, to make this a real embrace. Such a subtle movement, but I still felt it, because my awareness of him was so agonizingly acute.
My attempts to slow my heart had failed, and Raihn undoubtedly heard it. My eyes fell to his throat—right at the angle of his jaw, where muscles flexed as he swallowed and turned his head slightly to look at me.
I didn’t want to meet his eyes, because that would have put our faces far too close together.
His thumb rubbed that single circle on my upper back.
“You’re safe,” he murmured. “Alright?”
He sounded a little sad.
And then he hurled us into the night sky.
He brought us, to my surprise, to the human districts. He kept us out of sight during the flight and landed in the yard of an abandoned building. As soon as he set me down, I took two steps away from him, eager to put space between us.
Our hoods had fallen back in the wind. Raihn casually replaced his and started walking to the main streets. “This way.”
“Where are we?”
I didn’t recognize this part of town. I’d been all over the districts, but this was near the outskirts of Sivrinaj’s borders—far even for us, during our nighttime training sessions.
“I want to show you something.” He glanced over his shoulder, the hood obscuring all but his profile. “Oh. And I brought these for you. In case you want to have some fun while you’re here.”
He held out two sheathed weapons—blades.
Shock stole my steps for a moment, then I had to half-run to catch up to him. I snatched the weapons from his hands in case he thought better of it.
I unsheathed them. Watched the light play over the carvings on the black steel—Nightborn steel. The good shit.
Not just any blades. My blades.
I’d thought it would feel right to have these in my hands again, like being reunited with an old friend. Instead, I had to brace against the sudden, visceral memory of what I had done with these very weapons the last time I’d held them.
“Why would you give me these?”
“I figured you’ll need them. No poison in them, though. I haven’t had time to track any down, but maybe we should call it a precaution.”
Raihn was walking fast. I didn’t have much time to admire them, stumbling along as I affixed the sheaths to my belt while keeping up with him.
Leathers. Weapons. Human districts. It was all eerily familiar, and yet, so wildly different.
We emerged onto a denser street, little clay buildings packed together like crooked teeth. “Keep that hood up,” Raihn muttered, though there was no one around, and crossed the street to a rickety building with four stories that all seemed to be a little misaligned, like a stack of unsteady bricks. A single lantern swung in the breeze at the door, the suggestion of light seeping between curtained window panes. Raihn opened the door without knocking, and I followed.
It led us into a small, dim lobby, with a single desk and a narrow staircase. A rotund, middle-aged human man dozed at the desk, an empty glass of very pungent-smelling alcohol drawing amber circles on scattered papers.
Raihn ignored him, and I followed his lead as he went up the stairs. At the top floor, he reached into his pocket and produced a key. Apparently, the lock didn’t work very well anymore, so he grumbled through three attempts before the door finally swung open.
He gave me a sly smile beneath the hood. “After you, princess.”
Tentatively, I stepped into the room.
It was an apartment. A stark contrast to the one we had just left in the castle—the entirety of the place was smaller than the bedroom alone there, the only furniture a single small bed, a dresser, and one tiny desk that I suspected Raihn probably couldn’t even fit at. It was clearly occupied, though—the desk held books and papers, one half-open dresser drawer revealed a glimpse of crumpled fabric, and the washroom lantern was still lit. The bed was a little messy, like someone had slept in it recently and made it very hurriedly.
I walked around the room slowly, brow furrowed.
“Who lives here?”
Raihn closed the door and latched it behind us.
“I do.”
I halted mid-stride. My brows lurched.
He chucked softly. “It’s still satisfying to shock you. Fine. Maybe ‘living here’ is a bit of an exaggeration.” He unhooked his cloak, tossed it onto the bed, and then fell backwards onto it with a grunt of satisfaction. “It’s… somewhere private to go.”
I thought of all those days that I never heard Raihn’s footsteps return to his rooms.
“You sleep here?”
“Sometimes.” A pause, then, “Sometimes I can’t… sometimes I just want to get away from that place.”
I watched him practically deflate onto the bed. He did immediately seem more at ease here. Like the remnants of whatever mask he wore within the walls of the castle had finally fallen free.
I didn’t want to see this version of Raihn—the version that reminded me far too much of the man I’d…
I cleared my throat, stuffed my hands into my pockets, and wandered the perimeter.
“No one knows about it,” Raihn said.
“No one but me,” I corrected.
I could hear the smile in his voice. “No one but you.”
“Stupid of you.”
“Maybe.”
“Since I’m a traitor and all.”
“Mmm.” The bed creaked as Raihn sat back up. I turned around to see him giving me a stare that made me jolt. All seriousness.
“We need to talk,” he said, “and we needed to do it somewhere I knew no one else would hear us.”
“I thought you said everything you needed to say. Or Septimus did, at least.”
My words were pointed, the accusation clear.
“I say what I need to say, in front of them.”
“You manipulated me,” I snapped. “You’ve been playing games with me since the begi
Raihn’s face hardened.
“You committed an act of war, Oraya.”
I let out a choked laugh. “I committed an act of war? Me?”
This was a mistake. I shouldn’t even be here. I was armed now. I could—
He winced, then raised his hands. “I—let’s not. This isn’t what I’m here for.”
“Then what?”
He stood, went to the dresser, and pulled something out of the middle drawer—something long, wrapped in fabric. He lay the object over the desk beside me and unwrapped it.
My heart caught in my throat.
The Taker of Hearts. Vincent’s sword.