Page 25

I look over at the slaves.

Stirring a bowl of cream and chopped chives, Tris has her head bowed. Her cheeks flame, her mouth pinches into a freckled cat’s bottom. Her sharp gaze lifts to sear into Dare’s back, but then she catches my stare. She blinks, the flames on her cheeks alighting into wildfires.

I tap my finger on the table at the base of the empty mug.

Relief ribbons through her. Her shoulders sag with a quiet exhale before she moves for the jug of fresh coffee, then rushes over to me. She fills my mug to the brim before she retreats back to her duties.

So many seconds have passed, maybe a minute whole, and so I don’t expect Dare will answer.

But then, he speaks in a whisper that I almost don’t catch—

“I don’t know.”

For a beat, I watch the light glisten over his inky tendrils. My mouth turns down at the corners as I reach for my mug. I cup it in my palms, relishing in the burn against my flesh.

“Someone you’ve… met?”

Dare smiles, a small gesture stained with bitterness. He lifts his gaze to the window again, finally tugging his focus away from the smudged ink.

I watch as he shakes his head slightly. I almost wonder if he really knows he’s speaking to me, or I just happen to be around in a private moment when he voices his sleepy thoughts.

“No.” His voice is firmer now. Guarded. “But I miss her.”

How can one miss someone they have never met?

My thought is shattered as Dare throws up his arms with a yawning stretch that ripples down those lean muscles on his back, and I think of water trickling over boulders in a stream.

With that one stretch, he cuts down any question I might ask.

His muscles slink beneath his skin, the faintest shadows lining the definition. The stark contrast of his inky hair and his alabaster complexion holds my attention for a lingering moment.

He must be so dangerously beautiful to females who aren’t me. Females like Tris who, I’m certain, hasn’t stopped scowling at him across the kitchens for the past few minutes.

If I had met Dare, not Daxeel, I would have been another of his willing victims. But now that I know Daxeel, my lust, my desire, it calls out for only him. Even when I have lain with another, my mind was consumed by Daxeel.

I let the coffee pour down my throat, my mind away from my body, living in moments of the past.

Dare jumps off the edge of the table. His bare feet smack to the stone floor just as Tris comes up to pour more thick, dark coffee into my mug.

“So, Nari, darling heartbreaker,” Dare starts, but the husky sleep of his voice dims his teasing nature. He turns on me, leans against the wall, and with the nail of his thumb, scratches the line of his lashes, “what will you do with your gift?”

Tris stalks off again, and I’m certain she only tended to my coffee so she could get closer to Dare, maybe throw him a dark look that he hasn’t noticed, since he seems to not remember that she exists at all.

I fiddle with the handle of the mug. “What gift?”

His grin is lazy, unenthused. “A whole month to win over your male.”

I’m not so certain it is exhaustion that’s keeping him in this strange mood of his, this grump, but rather that it’s more to do with the female he misses but has never met.

“And now you know,” he goes on, “that you are his evate. You’re a clever halfling—what will you do?”

The words spill out of me, “I will love him.”

My answer is so unflinching and simple and unashamed that Dare lifts his blank stare to mine.

He blinks on it for a moment before he turns his cheek to me. His gaze finds Tris who smacks down a chopping board on the bench across the stone dungeons, and I think she does it too hard, too huffily.

Unfazed, he just watches her cut a loaf of bread into thick slices.