Page 18

Of course not.His wings flared dangerously as he sat straighter, resting his left elbow on his thigh.Everyone knows demons don’t feel love or empathy.There was an unpleasant twitch around the corners of his lips.

‘Is that even true?’ I said.

For fullblood demons, yes. Halfbloods …He shrugged.It varies. Naxi feels very little empathy. I’m on the more troublesome side of the scale.

The more I learned about Naxi, the more frightening she became. The more I wondered what in hell had happened between her and Thysandra, too. ‘In any case, I told them I wasn’t looking for a way into your bed, which I suppose is technically true.’

There was no humour to his laugh.You didn’t tell them the full story?

‘What? Gods, no.’ I blinked at him. ‘You don’t think they’d ever let me leave with you if they had any idea, do you? Agenor would rather lock me in a tower.’

I wish him good luck, Creon signed dryly. I think he’d lose a tower.

I wasn’t in the mood to laugh or to enjoy his faith in my abilities to ruin whatever understanding I’d managed to foster between myself and my father. ‘It would still be terribly inconvenient. This is really not the moment to get delayed.’

He granted me that point with a nod and a sigh.

‘So,’ I said, sinking sideways into the padded softness of the chair to keep my eyes on him. ‘Lyn is going to present it to the rest of the world as a plan she came up with and for which she just happens to need our magic. Which Tared didn’t want to agree with, but …’

The words dried on my tongue.But your voice. Your binding.

Those almond eyes of his narrowed, a question brimming in their depths as he studied the way my lips struggled for the right thing to say. He was close enough for me to distinguish every long eyelash, every stray hair escaping the silken smoothness of his locks. A breathtakingly familiar vision, and yet …

How many more secrets still hid behind that façade – how many horrors, how many sacrifices that I would never know about?

‘Agenor …’ I swallowed. ‘Agenor told us why the Mother bound you.’

He stiffened for barely an eyeblink.

Then he sank back into his chair, those full, sensual lips a hard line, and signed,With names?

I nodded.

I see.His shoulders didn’t loosen.That explains something.

What did it explain – had he felt Tared fade into the family home distraught and furious? I shoved that question onto the fast-growing pile of matters for later and instead said, ‘Why didn’t you tell any of them?’

Why would I have told them?The gestures came too fast now.

‘They were convinced you ran off during the battle and never spent another thought on them! If they’d known youdidsave their lives …’

Too little, too late.He shrugged – a stiff shrug, nothing like the usual feline grace.There would have been no need to save them if I’d scraped myself together a few hours sooner, and they’re not going to forget about that because I got sentimental and abandoned my plan to end the Mother over a handful of lives.

‘Their lives,’ I pointed out.

Does it matter? I burned some of their allies alive, Em. They won’t like me anyway, and I fail to see how making myself vulnerable to their opinions will improve anything.

‘They could be friends,’ I said feebly. ‘I’ve found that quite an improvement, having friends.’

He hesitated, then rose, shaking his wings with a swift roll of his shoulders as he stalked to the desk on the other side of the room. Away from me. Away from my emotions as they churned against the new boundary of his mental shields, tearing at his self-control. I tucked my legs below my body to keep myself from following him; my eyes clung to his every movement as he sank down on the desk chair, drew in a deep breath, and signed,You need to understand that I lived for three and a half centuries trusting no one but myself, Em.

A prickle of nervousness danced up my spine. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten his age. It was just that everyone else in the Underground was even older, and next to a father who’d lived for twelve centuries, next to the five-hundred-and-something years of Lyn and Tared, at times it almost seemed Creon and I were of a similar age.

An age that was not so much expressed in numbers, but rather in how little we knew what we were doing here. No-clue-years-old.

‘That’s all fine and good,’ I said, ‘but you did figure out how to trust me.’

A grin swept over his face.You quite forced me to.