Page 107 of Thief of Souls
His gaze flickers down, focusing on the spinning knives, but I’m already slipping my skin. I put the dirk through his throat and the image behind me—a grinning young woman with two knives twirling—vanishes in a puff of smoke.
“Never even saw it coming,” I whisper in his ear as the light goes out of his eyes.
Glamor. The next best thing to an entire arsenal of goblin-forged blades. Too many of the fae focus on what they can see.
And if there’s one thing that growing up with my sister taught me, it’s that being able to “vanish” into thin air is a powerful weapon.
I step through the doors, sheathing the knife.
The room is quiet. Still.
There’s a marble slab in the center of it and someone’s laid the Lord of Mistmark there in quiet repose.
The sight of Alaric lying so still is a shock that makes my feet slow. He’s always seemed so energetic to me; a whirlwind of determination that would stop at nothing and no one. I’ve fought with him, kissed him, tried to kill him…. And every time we’ve clashed, he’s been the one in control.
Now he looks like he’s sleeping.
It takes me right back to that first night I crept within his chambers, intent upon murdering him. He was so beautiful that I hesitated for a moment, and that hesitation cost me. Just as I summoned my goblin blade, he suddenly woke, grabbing my wrist.
It even feels like that night again—like fate is going to reach out and kick me in the teeth—though the weight in my chest is different.
I could let him die.
I could let this entire twisted knot that binds us together die.
All I have to do is tell Zemira I was too slow to bring him the antidote.
He’d be gone from my life. I’d never lie awake again, twisted in knots as I fight the urge to go to him. I’ll never wake from dreams where his name is on my lips even as I can still feel his tongue between my thighs. The scars on my body—the ones my father graced me with when I returned from my assassination attempt in failure—will fade.
There’ll be no more shame.
No more fear.
No more desperate yearning that wakes me at nights.
I’ll never see those blazing eyes lock upon me across a room again until everything around us fades.
“Just you and me, little wraith,”comes the whispered memory of his voice. “Forever.”
And any chance I ever had of escaping his hold over me vanishes.
Curse him.
Alaric doesn’t move. He’s barely even breathing.
The poison must be working through his system even faster than I could have imagined.
It spurs me to action.
“Don’t think you’re escaping me so easily,” I whisper as I slide to my knees beside the stone bier he’s lying on. “You still owe me a reckoning.”
Where the fuck are the healers? Surely they didn’t just leave him here to die?
It’s not as though they would have been able to do anything against the poison he ingested when he licked my lying little lips, but if he dies in Malechus’s court, there will be an accounting.
Two minutes left, at best.
I kneel by his side, and for some ridiculous reason my heart hammers in my chest.
