Page 55 of A Flame of the Phoenix

“You don’t ask about me, I don’t ask about you. Don’t go back on that now,” he said coldly.

He would not risk spilling his past. Nothing personal could come out between them.

Izaiah stood looking into the small room. At his pause, Tynan tried to go in first, but Izaiah’s arm extended to stop him.

Locking eyes with his disgruntled stare, Izaiah reached into his pocket, producing a bloodied piece of black clothing. He didn’t know if it would work, so his body tensed as he reached it toward the open entrance.

A ripple distorted in front of them. Tingles crawled down his arm with the faintest resistance, but then…the ward dissipated.

“Faythe’s blood?” Tynan deduced.

Izaiah relaxed. “Mm-hmm.”

In the small room with bookshelves built into each wall, Izaiah tried to pretend Tynan wasn’t here. When the dark fae shut the door, however, he couldn’t deny the excitement that stirred in him.

“What are you looking for?”

“I should kill you,” Izaiah said, hooking a book off the shelf. “You already know more than you should. What would you prefer—teeth or claws?”

“Teeth,” he said, the warm impression of his body creeping up behind him. “Definitely teeth.”

Izaiah turned before Tynan could lay his hands on his waist. He thrust the book against his chest. “Not this time,” he said.

The rejection flexing around Tynan’s eyes disturbed him. It was all the more reason to keep his distance.

“Malin’s parents… I have never found a marriage certificate,” Izaiah explained. It was the first thing to come to mind, and a truth nonetheless that he’d gathered from the king’s study. “Odd, don’t you think, for such an important royal document to be missing?”

Tynan shrugged. “Can’t say I know much about royal anything. It wasn’t exactly in our teachings to overthrow the continent.”

Izaiah hadn’t thought about that—how differently they’d been brought up to view the world. Yet despite being raised as nothing more than a soldier, Tynan didn’t seem all that cold and immoral.

He found himself peering at the dark fae, who began flipping aimlessly through a book. It was then Izaiah realized by how fast he was turning, only lingering on the occasional picture…

“Can you read?”

Tynan stiffened at that, continuing to examine the pages as if he were debating whether to deny it. “Kind of,” he settled on. Then irritation locked his jaw, and he thumped the book shut. “Why would you care?”

“I don’t,” Izaiah said, plucking another book from the shelf.

Liar.His mind tormented he did care, though not for the reasons Tynan seemed to be guarded against. As if it could be used in ridicule.

“It wasn’t exactly in our regime. They told us what we needed to know,” he defended.

It wasn’t necessary for him to explain, but Izaiah didn’t console the insecurity Tynan let slip.

“They told you what they wanted you to know,” Izaiah said.

There was no telling how much of it would have been warped truths about their world and its past conflicts, painting the darkfae as the only victims to feed the thirst of vengeance in their soldiers. It was a frightening thought.

“What if I said I could teach you?”

Izaiah wanted to retract the offer as soon as it left him. He turned away from Tynan, swallowing against the burn in his throat that formed hateful words instead to fill the cracks in the wall between them.

“Why would you want to do that?”

He didn’t. He shouldn’t.

Yet he said, “So you can make your own judgment in this war, I guess.”

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