Page 55 of Cursed Shadows 5

“After we deal with this,” Eamon sighs and gestures to the body.

I tilt my head and study what should be a bloodied, crimson floor or puddles and pools and a metallic stink. “Am I not seeing correctly,” I wonder aloud, “or is the knifepluggingthe blood?”

Melantha doesn’t look shocked by the knife stopping the blood somehow from pouring out of the head, or even remotely impressed by it.

“It is cleaner this way,” is all she says about it, before, “I will send Rune and Samick to clean up during the Quiet. Less eyes then.”

Eamon grunts his answer, but the clench of his jaw and the moodiness of his harsh expression tells how put out he is by it all. Not so much the stranger coming for me, but more the broken table, the dead body on our tavern floor before we’ve even opened, and the call of his family business when he’d earlier proclaimed we would finish the whole third coat of paint before next phase.

Instead, we leave the place as is.

And before we part ways on the street, Eamon to head for Hemlock House, and Melantha to escort me to the cheapest streets of Kithe, he swoops a farewell kiss over my brow.

And I suffer a walk with Melantha. I don’t manage the full length of the Square in silence. The air is too thick between us, too awkward.

And every time I risk a side-glance at Melantha’s profile, features sharper than knives, sculpted glass shards, I find that her jaw is that bit tenser than before.

I start with a short huff. “At some point, this is going to end, isn’t it?”

She looks ahead, unwavering, not a flicker to ghost over her blank expression, like I didn’t speak at all.

Her steps are in sync with mine, though hers are gentle and soft on the cobblestone where mine are scuffed and clumpy.

I stuff my hands into the pockets of my overalls. “All these bargains and murders and attacks—it’s over now, don’t you think?”

I need her to agree with me.

I don’t quite know why, but I need it with a fresh, hungry urgency writhing in my chest.

If she, Melantha, the mother, the authority figure, decides that no more attackers will come for me, and I will live my life in peace, I will believe it a little more than my own attempts to reassure myself.

Her answer is unsatisfactory. “Who else will hunt you but the dead?”

The wide-eyed look I swerve to her goes ignored. “How many more assassins could he have hired?”

Ridge.

The name thrums in my mind.

He didn’t accept the task for the monies. He wore that enraged revenge for himself. For Luna.

I understand that.

I would kill anyone who took my Eamon from me.

Now I know that I am capable of murder, of death and brutalities inflicted by my bare hands, I know how far I would go to avenge him or, simply, to spare him.

But Ridge wasn’t the only one.

Boil, the nameless beastly male, had a sketched bounty of me in his bag. So I know he accepted the task.

More, I’m sure. Most who took their chances in the Sacrament—but how many of them will continue to hunt on behalf of a dead lord? Sure, it isn’t the promise of the bargain that holds them after the death of Braxis, but rather the promise that his estate will still pay out that bounty, even in his absence.

That means the price is still very much on my head.

I have other enemies too, other threats.

I need to get my mind sorted, organised around the threats, priories them by likelihood, and be better prepared in future.

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