Page 99 of A House of Fangs & Deceit

“Nothing at the moment.” I winced as I dipped my fingers into the large cut on my arm and then drew a symbol on my knee with the blood.

I chanted the words for a simple healing spell and fought the urge to scratch my knee as the torn tendons and skin pieced themselves back together. This spell might be a life-saving one at times, but I still hated how itchy it made me feel.

Alaric kept a close watch on me as I slowly healed my injuries. Ideally, I could use a top-off of blood after this, but I wasn’t going to ask Alaric for that, and I wasn’t willing to ask Vail or Nyx either.

“What do you want to do about Vail?” he asked.

“Nothing for now. We still need him.” I pursed my lips. “I’ll just have to be extra careful to not be in a situation like that again. Vail may not come back next time.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Vail

I could feelNyx’s eyes on me as we approached the boundary of Moroi and Furie territory.

They hadn’t brought up Samara’s accusation at all over the last two days. Not even when we stopped to rest for a few hours at an outpost. Technically, we could all go a week without sleep, but even getting a few hours would help keep us more focused. It was worth the loss of time.

Plus, I needed to set my head straight.

I’d been waiting for an opportunity like that with the kùsu for over a decade.

The few times my sleep wasn’t plagued by nightmares, it was filled with wonderful dreams of watching Samara get torn apart by monsters. She’d stopped me from saving my parents. I didn’t care what she thought. IknewI could have saved them. I should have let her fucking die.

But that look on her face when the kùsu got between us? The moment she knew that I was going to walk away and leave her there?

I’d expected anger, but that wasn’t what I saw.

Instead, Samara was hurt by the betrayal.

Despite everything between us and her knowing that I would seize an opportunity like that, part of her still trusted me.

It was that look that had me racing along the ridge, trying to find a way to get to her. I’d left her to die, only to save her minutes later.

That small amount of trust she still had in me was gone now, and I knew I’d never get it back. I told myself that it didn’t matter. That next time I got an opportunity like that, I’d take it and leave her to fucking rot.

The more I repeated it in my head, the closer I came to believing it.

I hated the way Nyx looked at me now. They were still loyal, I knew that, but they liked Samara, and I knew they’d looked up to me since joining the rangers. They were a couple years younger than Samara and the youngest of the rangers that made up my usual crew.

Nyx was like a younger sibling to all of us, and like a younger sibling, they put all of us up on high pedestals. And now they had to reconcile the fact that I’d pulled some shady shit, and I felt bad for putting them in that position.

I’d really fucked this up. As soon as we figured out what was going on with these wraiths, I’d head north for a bit. Maybe get permission from the Velesians to run around in their territory. Tensions were high between them and the majority of the Moroi, but I’d always gotten along with most of them fine. Probably because I spent my time in their territory hunting down monsters and never looked down my nose at them the way many of the other Moroi did.

“What’s the plan, Marshal?” Nyx asked tightly.

My jaw hardened until my teeth hurt from clenching them together. I couldn’t even remember the last time Nyx had referred to me by my title. Only the rangers who didn’t normally work with me did that.

This was Samara’s fault. She fucked up everything in my life.

“Cali reached out to me while we were staying at the outpost,” Samara said from behind us. “She’s going to meet us up ahead. She can guide us the rest of the way to the temple.”

I heard her mount pick up its pace until it was on the other side of Nyx. This one was calmer than the frantic one she’d been riding the night we were attacked, but it was solid white and painfully stood out, even here where the forest had given way to scrub lands. I was surprised the damn thing hadn’t been eaten the first time someone had taken it for a ride outside of the outpost.

“That information would have been nice to know before now, Heir,” I growled.

Samara gave me a cool look. “It wouldn’t have mattered before. If we started to veer off course, I would have said something,Marshal.”

“Did she have any updates about the wraiths?” Nyx asked stiffly before I could say anything else.

---