Page 109 of The Jasad Crown

Fury spilled over him, the sudden rush of it startling me a step back. The white scar on his jaw seemed to glow with his anger. “How do you expect I would collect on this debt?”

Arin advanced, stalking toward me with the single-minded intent of a wolf cornering its kill. “You tie me to a wall and beat me bloody, you abduct me, your kitmers drop me into a cursed realm I have managed to avoid my entire life, and then you allow a dulhath thatyoureleased to nearly eat you!” By the end of his rant, Arin’s voice had risen to a roar. “IwishI had a good reason for saving you. I wish it was logical or rational, informed by any semblance of reason. I wish more than anything my first thought when I emerged from the water was not of you, that I hadn’t been prepared to tear through every grain of sand and burn every tree in this damned place until I found you.”

I stared at him, truly speechless for possibly the first time in my life. Blood rushed to my head, blurring the edges of my vision. Gripped with the same sensation I had felt while watching Arin rip apart the soldier in Mahair who had tried to kill me, two contrary forces struggling to meet in my head.

“I didn’tallowthe dulhath to nearly eat me,” I mumbled, dropping my eyes to the sand. “I tried to bite him first.”

Catastrophe lay pressed between us. One step forward, and we would dissolve into it.

“You don’t have your magic here,” Arin repeated, as though my words had only just penetrated.

My throat felt too brittle to contain the forces vaulting for freedom from my chest.

“You sound relieved. Were you afraid you’d lose again?” I said shakily.

Arin stepped into my space, forcing my gaze up. “You torment of my soul,” Arin growled. “I am afraid I will win.”

Without my magic’s pressure against the back of my head, I could hear myself think for the first time in a long time. I could identify the ache spreading through me, burning through the layers of armor I had carefully built around myself from the minute I watched my mother get dragged into Bakir Tower. His honesty undid me; what remained was unbearably fragile. Something raw and ruined that hurt if I tried to pick it up. The last real piece of me, protected for longer than I’d known it still existed to protect.

A thumb grazed my cheek, and my wet eyes flashed open to find Arin mere inches away, his hand curving around my face. With a jolt, I realized he was touching me, bare skin to bare skin.

“Stupid risk to take,” I managed. “Even in the Mirayah, my magic could still have killed you.”

“Yes.” Arin smoothed his thumb over the tear beading in the corner of my eye. “It could have.”

Frigid water lapped around my ankles as the tide advanced across the shore. “Do not toy with me. This—this is the last piece of my heart I have left, do you understand? I don’t know how to protect it once it is outside my body. If I trust you and then you cast it into the dirt, it will be the death of both of us. What is left of me will kill what is left of you.”

“I am becoming oddly partial to your death threats,” Arin mused. “I seem to hear in them different words entirely.”

“Then you should have your ears checked,” I muttered.

“Essiya,” Arin sighed. “Look at me.”

I sniffed, wiping my nose with my sandy sleeve and swinging my gaze back to him.

Arin undid the top button of his shirt, revealing a triangle of smooth skin. As I watched, Arin wrapped his hand around something beneath his collar. His gaze traveled over my head, as thoughinspecting a problem manifesting in the horizon. I waited, mystified, until his features settled in weary resolution, and he dropped his hand.

A tiny violet-and-black fig necklace laid against the pale skin below his throat.

The necklace I’d bought off the Omalian merchant during the second trial. The necklace I had gifted Arin the night of the Victor’s Ball.

He kept it.

Arin of Nizahl, who did not tolerate a loose stitch or a crooked collar, who inspected every grain of dust that dared settle over him, had been wearing a cheap piece of Omalian jewelry under his punishing layers of clothes. No eloquent words or theories or complex pieces of strategy could explain it.

I never stood a chance.

I grabbed the sides of his ridiculously perfect vest and yanked Arin forward, closing the remaining distance between us. A laugh rumbled through the chest pressed against mine, warming me down to my toes.

I calculated my odds of reaching his mouth, and I was strongly contemplating climbing up his chest like a nisnas when Arin exercised an ounce of mercy and lowered his treacherous, beautiful mouth to whisper, “Tell me what you want, Suraira.”

I flushed, my grip on his vest tightening. “I want to pull your arrogant head off your smug should—”

He kissed me.

A hush stole over my mind. The world shrank until only Arin remained. Only Arin and the arm he slipped around my waist, drawing me tight against him. The heat of his mouth, reducing me to ash as rapidly as a feather dropped into a hearth.

I gasped as broad hands gripped the back of my thighs and lifted me. I allowed myself to go pliant, wrapping my legs around hiswaist. When air became marginally more important than exploring the swell of Arin’s bottom lip, I dropped my forehead to his cheek as I caught my breath.

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