Page 15 of A Flame of the Phoenix (An Heir Comes to Rise #6)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Izaiah

I zaiah seized his opportunity to slip into the guarded library. He’d been here before, but never in his true fae form. It was necessary to shift back for the locked door he intended to gain access through.

“Are you trying to get yourself caught?” Tynan hissed.

Izaiah stiffened at the intruding voice. His teeth slammed together, his plan now compromised. “How did you follow me?” he grumbled, not even turning to look since the dark fae was the only presence he detected.

“The birthmark on your hip—it appears as a lighter patch on your fur. Even as a little mouse.”

Izaiah’s tools paused in the lock. He was caught between amusement and surprise that Tynan kept such a keen eye on his body to have noticed and translated the faint distinguishing feature. His stomach annoyingly fluttered like some faeling discovering their first crush. Fuck. Izaiah brewed a storm over the unwelcome feelings.

“Are you always stalking me? I’m flattered.”

Tynan only glowered, but Izaiah smiled wickedly. He suppressed his ire over the dark fae following him, which was a contrast to the thrill that always broke across his skin.

Now he had to come up with another reason for being here.

“Where did you learn to do that so easily?” Tynan asked as the door clicked open.

“You don’t ask about me, I don’t ask about you. Don’t go back on that now,” he said coldly.

He would not risk spilling his past. Nothing personal could come out between them.

Izaiah stood looking into the small room. At his pause, Tynan tried to go in first, but Izaiah’s arm extended to stop him.

Locking eyes with his disgruntled stare, Izaiah reached into his pocket, producing a bloodied piece of black clothing. He didn’t know if it would work, so his body tensed as he reached it toward the open entrance.

A ripple distorted in front of them. Tingles crawled down his arm with the faintest resistance, but then…the ward dissipated.

“Faythe’s blood?” Tynan deduced.

Izaiah relaxed. “Mm-hmm.”

In the small room with bookshelves built into each wall, Izaiah tried to pretend Tynan wasn’t here. When the dark fae shut the door, however, he couldn’t deny the excitement that stirred in him.

“What are you looking for?”

“I should kill you,” Izaiah said, hooking a book off the shelf. “You already know more than you should. What would you prefer—teeth or claws?”

“Teeth,” he said, the warm impression of his body creeping up behind him. “Definitely teeth.”

Izaiah turned before Tynan could lay his hands on his waist. He thrust the book against his chest. “Not this time,” he said.

The rejection flexing around Tynan’s eyes disturbed him. It was all the more reason to keep his distance.

“Malin’s parents… I have never found a marriage certificate,” Izaiah explained. It was the first thing to come to mind, and a truth nonetheless that he’d gathered from the king’s study. “Odd, don’t you think, for such an important royal document to be missing?”

Tynan shrugged. “Can’t say I know much about royal anything. It wasn’t exactly in our teachings to overthrow the continent.”

Izaiah hadn’t thought about that—how differently they’d been brought up to view the world. Yet despite being raised as nothing more than a soldier, Tynan didn’t seem all that cold and immoral.

He found himself peering at the dark fae, who began flipping aimlessly through a book. It was then Izaiah realized by how fast he was turning, only lingering on the occasional picture…

“Can you read?”

Tynan stiffened at that, continuing to examine the pages as if he were debating whether to deny it. “Kind of,” he settled on. Then irritation locked his jaw, and he thumped the book shut. “Why would you care?”

“I don’t,” Izaiah said, plucking another book from the shelf.

Liar. His mind tormented he did care, though not for the reasons Tynan seemed to be guarded against. As if it could be used in ridicule.

“It wasn’t exactly in our regime. They told us what we needed to know,” he defended.

It wasn’t necessary for him to explain, but Izaiah didn’t console the insecurity Tynan let slip.

“They told you what they wanted you to know,” Izaiah said.

There was no telling how much of it would have been warped truths about their world and its past conflicts, painting the dark fae as the only victims to feed the thirst of vengeance in their soldiers. It was a frightening thought.

“What if I said I could teach you?”

Izaiah wanted to retract the offer as soon as it left him. He turned away from Tynan, swallowing against the burn in his throat that formed hateful words instead to fill the cracks in the wall between them.

“Why would you want to do that?”

He didn’t. He shouldn’t.

Yet he said, “So you can make your own judgment in this war, I guess.”

The stillness that lingered for a few seconds began to tremble his hands, and they clamped tighter around the leather-bound book. He hoped Tynan would reject?—

“When can we start?”

Izaiah’s tension released at his response. He shouldn’t want this. He should be keeping his distance.

“I’ll let you know,” was all he could offer for now since the storm of his mind had begun to rebel against the time together this arrangement would force. He had to divert the conversation. “Why has Malin taken a liking to you?”

It had become an irritation not to have figured it out.

Tynan slipped his sight from the book he’d splayed in his palms, leaning against the desk. “You sound jealous.”

“Not even remotely.”

Tynan smirked. “He’s desperate for someone to listen to him. I just happened to be there. He’s highly insecure. It’s a pattern for people like him to attach themselves to one person to confide in.”

“Yet you’re betraying him.”

His shoulder lifted, flicking through more pages. “I wouldn’t say that. I’m as intrigued about him as you are.”

“I’m not intrigued ,” Izaiah bit out. “He killed my king and turned this kingdom against my queen. I want him dead.”

“Is that why you betrayed her and your brother? You hope to kill Malin alone, and she’ll forgive you for it?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.”

Izaiah’s jaw shifted. He couldn’t make sense of this frustration inside him when Tynan was around. A desire to kill him, if only to end the torment. Yet without the plague in his thoughts, the vacancy didn’t sound desirable either.

Izaiah shifted the topic. “Why do you follow Zaiana? Is it nothing more than forced duty?”

“Of course not,” he said instantly. Tynan thumped his book shut, not watching Izaiah as he seemed to tunnel in thought. “Zaiana was the first to ever see potential in me. I wasn’t notable in my training grade, but only because I didn’t want to be. Show yourself as the strongest, and you’re a target. Excel at the tasks, and those around you want to see you fail. You have no idea what it was like to grow up as a dark fae.”

For the first time, Izaiah didn’t shy from the guard who slipped toward him. A guard who wanted to hear more. He leaned against the desk with him, folding his arms.

“Yeah, well, out here wasn’t all that great either.”

Izaiah tensed, unable to meet Tynan’s eye.

“I don’t believe that,” he said lightly. “You seem to have everything. Well-respected, free to be yourself…”

“I didn’t always.”

Gods, he shouldn’t say anything more.

He was glad when Tynan didn’t push.

“Under the mountains, it was all a competition. A game of survival every day. We don’t have parents, just ourselves. Some would form groups for the illusion that they had someone to have their back, but usually, they’d be the first to strike a dagger the moment you turned around. It was no secret Zaiana was not someone to contend with. No one even tried to best her. When she became Delegate, I didn’t realize how much she’d been watching me. How she saw me on some deeper level I didn’t think our kind was capable of. When she asked if I would be her Second, I could have gone to my knees. Not for the respect or the protection it would grant, but because it was the first time I truly wanted to live with a purpose.”

Izaiah clenched the desk tightly at the story. For the feelings he didn’t want stirring within him. And for his own past, which threatened to claw its way from the grave he’d buried it in.

Tynan’s hand went over his, but Izaiah’s impulse won, tearing the comfort away. And maybe it was selfish, but he couldn’t go down the path that had started to emerge with Tynan.

“I’m glad to hear she’s not entirely coldhearted,” Izaiah said, pacing away to swallow past the tightness in his throat.

“What happened to you?” Tynan asked. It was careful, yet a battering ram to the gates of his emotion.

Izaiah shook his head. “Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Care,” he snapped. “Don’t care, Tynan. It only adds resistance to the blade you keep aimed at my chest.”

The dark fae’s lips firmed. Disappointment weighted his stare, and Izaiah’s hands fisted. His magick hummed in him to shift. Though he couldn’t be certain if it was to kill the threat in front of him or to flee from it.

“You don’t need to worry about that,” Tynan said. “You’re attractive, I’m bored—that’s all this is.”

Tynan set his book on the table as he made to leave.

Impulsively, Izaiah lashed out for Tynan’s wrist as he passed. Their eyes met, and Izaiah warred with himself over letting go…or giving in to the tension straining between them. They could forget the past few minutes—all it would take was closing that distance to forget the world in the heat that blocked it all out. But every time the air cooled again, reality became a more punishing force.

“Having a still heart…does it make it easier to pretend you feel nothing?” Izaiah asked.

His heart beat faster in their silence. As if it were compensating for the absence of Tynan’s.

“No,” he said.