Page 66 of Master of Storms
Marduk turned for the doorway, nearly knocking Solveig over. He burst into the light.
His chest felt tight.
His lungs wouldn’t open.
He’d been wrong. There was nothing here for him. Nothing at all.
* * *
Solveig foundhim sitting on the top of the hill, staring down at the castle. The chime of bones echoed through the oak tree behind them, but up here, by an old stone wall, they could have been miles away from both the Chaos-wielders’ village and the castle.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said, staring at nothing as she approached.
For once, she wasn’t entirely certain what to say.
Marduk radiated calmness again, but she’d seen the flash of panic in his eyes when the old woman started screaming at him. Another shocking realization: for all his laughing manner, he had his own share of ghosts.
She took a seat on the stone wall beside him. Here was his weakness. Here was his destruction, right in front of her. The pressure point to push. The means to destroy him.
And to know it was to reveal her own weakness.
For this Marduk—the one who’d fled from an old woman’s scathing anger—was the one that intrigued her. Not the laughing scoundrel who teased her with sex and sin. She might have withstood that Marduk. But this one, the one with scars she couldn’t see, scars he hid behind a smile and a laugh, was the one who tempted her.
Her anger toward him sat like a hot coal in her chest. Years’ worth of resentment and fury. She’d carried that anger throughout the storm of her entire adult life, using it to fuel her determination whenever she was backed into a corner.
And Solveig let it go, breathing through the flood of release as she closed her eyes and merely sat beside him.
The wind whipped through her hair. In this moment, he was so far away from her that she might not have even existed.
A murdered father.
A villainous mother.
A sister he’d never known.
All the pieces were coming together.
And there was a breathless feeling within her, as she thought of everything he’d tried to say to her. “It was a bad time in your life, you said,” she repeated softly, hearkening back to their argument that night in the inn. “Why?”
Marduk’s tortured gaze caught hers. Anger drowned his irises indrekigold. But it wasn’t anger at her. “Now you want to talk?”
“Tell me a secret,” she said.
The words caught him, as she knew they would.
“You first.”
Solveig sighed and slung her legs over the stone wall. The village hovered far below, and nobody could hear them here. “I hate being here.”
“What?” That shocked him. “Why?”
She took a deep breath and stared over the mountains. “What do you see when you look into Draco’s eyes?”
“Really?” His voice roughened. “I’m fairly certain I made my feelings about him clear last night, when I made a fool of myself in our rooms.”
She turned her head to look at him. “I see the eyes of my mother’s killer.”
Her words cut through his anger. He flinched.
