Page 35 of Eternal Ruin

That earned him a smile with all the warmth of an icicle.

Arin’s leather ensemble melted into her obsidian skin, and it was difficult to tell them apart except for the multiple knots on her booted heels and the faux-silver jewelry piercing her nose and collarbone. She’d given up her real silver when she joined Uxlay. An act that no doubt boiled her blood.

Susenyos touched the silver nail piercing the roof of his mouth. He didn’t doubt Arin also carried silver, hidden.

“How is our army?” he asked with a degree of nonchalance.

“Wehadan army. One you abandoned.” She spoke in Amharic, her accent clear and sharp as cleaved black stones.

“Help me lead them again,” Susenyos said, thinking of how to jump back out. “It’s always been me and you. Samson is rash, driven by pettiness. He can’t lead them. Help me take the blade artifact from him. You know where he keeps the twin blades.”

She betrayed nothing about the artifact. Yet something told Susenyos she knew. Arin would not be left in the dark.

Instead, Arin smiled, fangs visible. He found it still terrifying, as vicious as the day he saw it as a human boy.

Upon their first meeting outside his father’s castle, she’d told him, “You have the muscles of a mouse.”

In his arrogance, Susenyos had challenged her to a fight, and within a blink, the sky had become his only view. He knew what angels looked like—he’d been saved by one before. But when Arin hovered above him back then, the mouth of a lion parting her luscious lips, charcoal eyes burning with a single ember, he’d glimpsed true and undeniable hell. It had taken him several minutes of lying there defeated, fisting his fingers in shame, before he chased after her and asked her to make him strong.

Make him worthy of protecting his people from the army of dranaics that were going to descend upon his country.

And she had.

“Samson never surrendered.” Arin spoke with an edge. “He fought until the end. The Nefrasi will choose whoever is strong. I will choose whoever is strong. Now, why did you run like a cat with its tail cut off??”

Susenyos tried to take a step back, away from the knifelike words digging into his flesh, but she met him at each step.

“Why did you run like a weak human?”

His fangs lengthened at the tone, punishing like his father’s.

“Most of all, why take Iniko and Taj with you? What purpose did they serve?”

He hardened his face. “They made a decent shield during my escape.”

Arin’s painted lips stretched, though her eyes remained steely. “Samson’s cell was next to yours. As was your cousin’s. You chose those two and I’ll find out why. Right before I kill them.”

There was a slight shift in Susenyos’s breathing, an involuntary inhale masked in the breeze, but her eyes lit up. Damn her hearing.

“Should I start with Taj?” she asked, voice sultry. “You know he has a running mouth. Iniko may be more of a challenge, but I think I can loosen her tongue.”

When the Lusidio vampires ambushed them, it had taken a hundred of them and their blood-licked silvers to land a scratch on Arin’s jaw. Under any other circumstances, Susenyos would have paused to study her lethal movements, how her black-tipped claws pierced an artery with perfect precision and the unforgiving blows that were released from the flats of her palms. His court could have spent a fortnight in that horrendous rain, cutting down one vampire after the other, but the Lusidios, like rabid dogs, were endless.

It pained him to say the next sentence, but there was no other choice. “I will prove myself. Show you my loyalty rests with the Nefrasi.”Then I will make you tell me the location of the blade artifact.

Arin’s form circled him, like a moon orbiting the earth. “You swore an emperor was above such things. That you did not prove yourself to anyone but the angels.”

Susenyos stared at the wall, trying to block out memories of his father’s cruelty. Susenyos had been tested nearly all his life, forced to justify himself again and again only to fall short.

Offering himself up to judgment like this burned his very soul.

But it was Kidan’s words that had struck him, lingering like a persistent scent and sinking into him unbidden.

It’s all over this house, she’d said, those damning eyes large and all-consuming.You miss them, Yos, and it’s killing you.

He could not afford to lose his people again.

“Fine, prove yourself, then,” Arin said, feline-like eyes bright. “But first, punishment.”