Page 142 of Lady of Ashes

Sorin sheathed his own blade, closing the distance between them. “You are not going to master this in a few days, Scarlett. It is no different from how you trained to harness your power. You are still learning to do that, in addition to trying to ?ght with it.”

“I understand that, but you’re going easy on me. I don’t need you to do that,” she argued, her hands coming to her hips. “In fact, I need you to do the opposite.”

“Of course he is,” a male voice drawled from the stone archway, and they turned to ?nd Cyrus leaning against it. He pushed off the stones, coming toward them. “He’s not going to attack you, Darling. You’re his twin ?ame.”

“That is not why,” Sorin replied, reaching over to adjust a strap on the leathers she was wearing. The High Witch had gotten heranother witch-suit along with the lighter-weight witch-leathers she preferred over Fae leathers or mortal armor.

She batted his hands away in frustration. “Then what, exactly, is the reason?”

“The reason, Princess, is that I do not want you tapping into your shadows and white ?ames as much, because you refuse to—”

“If you sayfeed, I am going to knock you on your ass,” she warned.

“Mmm,” he hummed. “My favorite kind of threats: empty ones.”

He caught the ?st that came swinging for his face a moment later, Cyrus chuckling beside them.

“And you say I throw temper tantrums,” Sorin teased.

Scarlett snatched her wrist back and stuck her tongue out at him.

And if that didn’t make him start envisioning all the other uses she’d found for that tongue lately …

Scarlett smirked at him as if she knew exactly where his thoughts had gone, and she likely did, considering his mental shields had been slipping more and more these last few days.

“You’ll never learn a thing if you are constantly stopping to dothat,” came Eliza’s annoyed voice as she came into the pit.

“I’m not going to learn anything because he’s too afraid to push me,” Scarlett retorted.

“As I have already stated, I am not afraid to push you. I am far more worried about the fact that you refuse to acknowledge the need tofeed,” he replied, watching the ire ignite in her eyes at the word. They were still silvery-blue, but muted and dull. She may refuse to acknowledge it, but she’d used her shadows plenty this last week. If she didn’t do something about it, icy blue eyes would look back at him soon. She’d still be able to access her Avonleyan gifts, but they wouldn’t be nearly as powerful as they could be. As they should be at all times really, now that they knew what they were dealing with.

She took a step away from him, and when he moved to regain that distance, his foot slipped out from under him, and he ended up on his ass, on a layer of ice beneath his feet. Cyrus and Eliza were roaring with laughter, and Scarlett leaned down over him with a wicked glint in her eyes.

“Tell me about empty threats again,” she purred.

His hand snapped out to pull her down with him, but she leaptback with a ?endish laugh, sending those very shadows he was so damn worried about raking sensuously down his face, his neck, his torso. It was as though her own fucking ?ngers were dragging lower and lower.

“It’s no wonder you aren’t getting anywhere if this is how you spend yourtraining hours,” Cyrus said. “Although, I shouldn’t really be surprised considering the things I walked in on during your magic training in Solembra.”

Scarlett sent him a droll look, throwing him a vulgar gesture.

Sorin had managed to get back to his feet, melting the ice beneath him, as Eliza said, “He is always going to go easy on you. He physically cannot intentionally hurt you. It would go against the twin ?ame bond.”

“He didn’t go easy on me when he was training me in Baylorin,” Scarlett grumbled.

“That’s because he was trying to deny his feelings for you and thought torturing you would help,” came a voice from the far shadows of the pit. A voice of silk and honey. And Scarlett whirled towards it.

Nuri appeared from a shadowed corner of the pit, and Scarlett was racing towards her. The two females embraced each other, their grips ?erce. Nuri was clad in her usual black, gloves in place, but her hood was down, letting Sorin see her eyes close as she held Scarlett close.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Scarlett hissed at the female.

“Here and there,” Nuri answered, neither of them willing to be the ?rst to release the other.

She had asked Sorin about her every day. And every day his answer had been the same: Nuri had been busy tending to the children, making trips to the markets for necessities for them. But even he had been surprised the female hadn’t carved out some amount of time to come see Scarlett. He was told she’d checked in on her, on Cassius too. But somehow the two females always managed to miss each other.

“I know what ‘here and there’ means,” Scarlett replied softly.

“It is ?ne, Sister,” Nuri answered, ?nally pulling back, a half-smile tugging at the corner of her lips. She took a step back, drawing her scimitars from where they always sat at her sides. A wicked glint entered her eyes that Sorin recognized all too well. “Shall we?”

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