Page 18

He gave her a long look but couldn’t immediately suss out how she might attack him with fat and herbs unless it was going to be an extremely slow murder, so he retrieved some goat butter from the icebox and the canisters of dried herbs from the back of his pantry.

When he returned, she was on the other side of the kitchen, up on her toes and reaching for the heavy black pan hung on the wall.

It was just beyond her fingers’ grasp, so Severath used his own superior reach to grab it.

“Oh,” her small voice came up between his body and the wall, and he realized only then that he had boxed her in.

He’d noted in his observation that too quick movements made her flinch, so he fell still, but that left the problem of remaining close.

Their conversation had been delicate, and one wrong move could put an end to it for good, yet that was perhaps not the only reason he couldn’t seem to move away.

She looked over her shoulder with dark eyes rimmed by even darker lashes, mouth slightly parted.

The back of her body was only inches from the front of his, the closest they’d been without unconsciousness or fury between them.

The space felt acres wide and yet perilously close, and while Severath knew peril, this was not the kind that existed because his life was under threat .

Ember was finally the one to move, gently taking the pan from his still hand. “Thank you.” It was only two words, but they made something in her face change, and just before she dipped her head away, redness spread across her nose and cheeks.

Severath stepped back, but he didn’t blink, afraid his imagination was playing tricks—never mind that his imagination had never really been all that good.

She busied herself with the pan and the stove, but continued to glow as red as kindling as she tried to hide herself away.

Severath kept his gaze trained on her cheeks and then let it spill down to her neck, another patch of warm color there.

She turns crimson , he thought, rubbing his jaw. Just like me .

But then a second thought struck him, and he whipped about madly in search of a reflective surface.

“Tell me about your brother.”

Severath froze. “How do you know—oh, Balran said, didn’t she?”

She grinned down at the pan, and her smile was so nice nestled into their newly shared color that he couldn’t harbor annoyance with his cousin.

“Lazerath is my brother,” he said unhelpfully, still searching for a makeshift mirror.

Ember’s narrowed gaze pinned him—not murderous but cautionary nonetheless—as she dropped a pad of butter into the hot pan with a shrieking sizzle.

“My twin.”

She clicked her tongue, still unsatisfied, and reached past him for the cutting board covered in cut up grouse. Her arm grazed his chest, and neither of them pulled away, but she did sneak another look at him, face devoid of disgust but not of their shared color. Interesting .

“He and I look nearly identical—well, we did—but that is where the similarities end,” Severath went on, peering down into the copper basin, which did nothing to help show him his own face as the basin was already tinted with a brownish hue.

“He is kind and funny and charming. And also a pain in the ass.”

“You don’t think that’s a similarity?”

His jaw tightened, but there was a lightness to her words unlike when she had called his scaly tail disgusting.

“It depends, I suppose, on who you ask.” He pulled open a cupboard and there, finally, was a silver mug.

He squinted his one eye, but he was still as red as the day he was born, no sign of her color rubbing off on him.

He thought he should be relieved, but it was only vague disappointment that clouded his thoughts.

“Anything else?”

Severath snorted. “The bread you like so much, he makes that.”

“Oh, perhaps he should be showing you how to do this.” After sniffing each jar, she had chosen her spices and was dusting the meat heavily.

Severath only made a sound to confirm he had heard her, not wanting to say that while he enjoyed his brother’s company in appropriate doses, he was far too intrigued with the way she was moving to trade her away.

She rubbed the mixture she’d concocted over and under the skin of each piece, and her head tipped, hair falling out from behind her ear and across her face like a curtain, hiding her away.

Before he could stop himself, he was reaching out and slipping a finger around the edge of that curtain, lifting it once again so he could study the way her coloring shifted.

Ember inhaled slowly as his fingertip glided over the sharp ridge of her cheek until it met her rounded ear, and the redness chased after.

When the near-black strands were tucked away, his finger lingered despite that his logical mind had caught up with his carnal instincts and was screaming at him to stop.

The curve of her ear was soft, though, and when he continued to trace its shape down to the lobe, that color they shared flared all the way down her throat.

Where else might that color rise on her skin with only the delicate stroke of his fingers? And what might happen if he pressed his whole hand to her flesh and dragged it down her body?

There was a blast of steam and a harsh sizzle as Ember dropped meat into the pan. The kitchen filled with a nutty scent, and Severath felt his fangs emerge, far too easy with hunger already pacing around in his gut like a wild animal kept caged.

“It’s tempting, but you can’t touch it.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Severath said quickly with the last of his breath.

She blinked, gaze never leaving the pan. “ The chicken—I mean grouse,” she said, swallowing. “To get a good crust on the skin, you have to leave it alone until it’s ready.”

“Right.” He clasped his hands behind him. “And which spices did you use?”

Ember showed him each jar, and he pushed down whatever foreign urge had so recklessly been taking over, a bit easier when she called each of the herbs strange names.

“Well, that’s what this smells like,” she grumbled when he corrected her. “How am I supposed to know what demons call thyme that doesn’t need sun to grow? How do you even grow anything here? It’s ridiculous.”

“I’m a soldier, not a farmer. Things just grow ,” he said with his own irritation, and the kitchen felt normal then—at least, the version of normal that had been pervading the house for days.

Under her direction, he took over the pan of grouse and then watched her season the vegetables and cook those too—not in a pot of hot water either, which she insisted he never do again.

Their conversation turned to her favorite dishes, and when asked, he told her a little more about what it was like to have a brother.

He carefully breached what it was like to have their father as well—impossible to live up to and often daunting—but then she yelped.

The sound from her mouth was as sharp as the metallic clang of the knife on the counter. She had tried to remove a bruised bit from a vegetable and caught her thumb while chatting distractedly about rendered goose fat.

Severath had the tap running in an instant, then a clean linen in one hand, and Ember’s wrist in the other as he tugged her toward the basin.

Instinct once again took over reason as he cleaned the wound, washing away the red blood that beaded on her taupe flesh—the colors all wrong, but none of it mattered more than the injury.

Her hand shook, but he held it firm, snapping off a thick leaf from the mender plant that sat on the counter for just this situation.

The sticky, viscous gel from inside the leaf should clean the wound and stop the bleeding—at least it did for demons—but he had to move quickly, tucking her arm under his as he had to hold the wound close to his face to see.

Her blood no longer attempted to escape, but it had stained the linen left abandoned on the counter. He smoothed the gel over the slice, cradling her hand in both of his. He waited a breath and then another until finally the third satisfied him that the common trick worked on humans too.

Severath exhaled and with it went the tension he only felt when scouting the Dreadmoor and discovering an injured comrade.

But the opposite appeared to be happening to Ember.

Her breaths were coming shorter, her throat bobbing with nervous swallows, and her eyes grew darker and darker as they widened.

“Please, let me go,” she whispered, and Severath immediately released her.

Ember was like a small animal in the wood, frozen for fear, life balancing on a fang’s edge. She didn’t move save for her chest, hiccuping with every harried breath.

Fucking hells, he was an idiot. He’d been terrifying her all evening, hadn’t he? Yet he’d convinced himself she was the threat.

“I’m sorry, but I…I can’t. I have to…” Ember’s panicked eyes darted up at him for only a second before she fled, away from the meal they had almost finished preparing and away from him.