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“Here?” I raise my brow. “To see me?”

Eamon runs the back of his hand over a scuff of scraped mud on his chin. He shakes his head, but he doesn’t get the chance to speak.

Daxeel strides through the doorway, his unfeeling expression as firm as his tone, “They are looking for Taroh.”

I hardly look his way, but rather I focus on his muscular frame passing through my peripherals. It’s enough to followhis movements through the dining hall and note the slithering shadows around his boots.

It’s enough to note that the look he throws my way is harder than stone. But that look is fleeting before he strides for the end of the table and drops into the high-backed chair with a thud of exhaustion—the same exhaustion that dims the ferocity of his eyes and keeps his lashes heavy.

Aleana frowns at the meat on her spoon. “Where’s he gone?”

Eamon’s smile is small, teasing. “Well if they knew that, they wouldn’t be looking for him, now, would they?”

She rolls her eyes back, then drops her spoon to the bowl.

“Taroh didn’t return home last phase,” Eamon adds with a glance at me, and I’m sure he’s not all that interested beyond merely informing me. “Some folk are out searching for him.”

I sit on it a moment. My mouth is puckered in thought, my tongue trapped between the bite of my teeth. Then, I scoop a hunk of ham from the broth, and lift it closer to my face as if to better inspect it.

The sear of Daxeel’s gaze on my cheek itches my skin.

I ignore it and wonder, maybe hope, if Taroh has vanished for good. But that’s a silly, indulgent thought that I shouldn’t waste my time entertaining.

I bite the chunk of ham as savagely as a wild fae would. I grin something fierce and wicked around the tear of meat. “Hope he was stolen by a water fae and drowned.”

Aleana snorts into her mug of honeyed thistle tea—one hell of an energy boost, so I figure she’s seeking health in anything but the tonics that are faster to waste her away.

“Likely passed out in a brothel down the coast,” Eamon mumbles, running the back of his hand over his brow. Looks like he’s had quite the phase himself.

I don’t need to wonder who he’s been with.

Since I nudged them together at the Gloaming, he and Ridge have been spending more and more time with each other, and maybe I regret it a little—because I wander the corridors of Hemlock alone for the most part.

“Would be nice if someone robbed him,” Aleana sighs.

“Gutted him.” Eamon’s grumbled correction tugs a smile onto my lips.

Our shared look is a fleeting embrace.

Taroh, gutted.

A dream, of course. The chances of anything of the sort ever happening to Taroh, what with his social standing in Licht, being a lordson, and here as a spectator and not as a competitor in the Sacrament, are slim. He isn’t exactly on the battle blocks, making enemies.

And being the son of a noble, some part a noble himself, well he’s likely to be protected by others, because he belongs to a certain network of connections, of advantages. A stranger would come to his aid before coming to mine. Always best to be in a noble’s favour, isn’t it?

So I don’t pin my dreams and futures on a fatal rowdy romp through the Midlands. Still, it would be a nice thing. And better yet, if that happened to him in Kithe, gutted, there’s not much anyone could do about it, since vigilante justice rules the Midlands. Here, they answer to no lordship of the courts. His father—hisfamily—would have to take justice into their own hands.

That’s just a whole lot of bloodshed for one bitter, ugly male.

Aleana cuts through my thoughts as she mumbles, “This tea is putrid,” before she guzzles the last of it, down to the pulpy sludge at the bottom.

I hear every hard gulp down her throat.

I angle to face her. My cheek presses against the tall spine of the seat.

The burn of Daxeel’s flickering gaze finds me, like he aches to follow my every move.

I give him nothing in return, not so much a flittering glance.