Page 84 of Quicksilver

I—

I woke with a start, dragging in an audible, ragged breath as I sat bolt upright.

Where...

WherewasI?

My mouth tasted of bile and ash. Everything fucking hurt. My limbs felt as though they’d been tied to four horses, and the shitty bastards had bolted in four different directions. It hurt to breathe. To swallow. To fucking blink. For a good minute, I braced my hands against the mattress beneath me, trying to wrangle my senses, waiting for the pain to pass.

It took a long time, but eventually, I could think around it enough to take in my surroundings. Light poured in through twelve-foot-tall windows to my left. Heavy velvet curtains hung at them, half drawn on one side. Paintings hung on the walls in gilded frames, though the artwork within those frames was slashed to ribbons. Above, the ceiling was painted black, pinpricks of white strewn across it in no apparent design or order. A chest of drawers made from a rich, dark wood sat against the wall by the door. An armoire made of the same woodwas positioned in the corner, its doors flung open, displaying an array of dark garments within.

I was in a bed. A four-poster bed with birds, wolves, and dragons carved into the posts. The sheets were black. The cushions at the foot of the bed were also black. Along with the mostly black clothes hanging in the armoire...

Dread tapped me on the shoulder. The moment I inhaled through my nose and detected the smell of mint in the air, I knew I was in deep shit.

“Oh, look. She lives,” came a hushed voice.

I hadn’t noticed the wing-backed chair in the pool of shadows created by the drawn curtain. Nor had I noticed the Fae male sprawled out in it, feet crossed at the ankle, hands stacked over his stomach. Now that I knew he was there, he was impossible to miss. Fisher’s hair was a little mad, waves and curls springing every which way. His face was bone white against his dark clothes; as always, he was a creature of stark contrasts. Even from fifteen feet away, I could see the flecks of ichor staining his cheeks. He looked relaxed. His posture was one of boredom, but the energy he gave off hit me like a slap. With eyes of green fire, he stared at me so intensely that I almost gave in and recoiled under the weight of his gaze.

I clenched my teeth, bracing for the storm I could feel mounting on the horizon. “It wasn’t my fault,” I said.

Kingfisher blinked. “I never said it was.”

“You’relookingat me like it was,” I countered, gathering the sheets up to my chest, clutching them as though I might be able to use them as a shield against him.

“Sounds to me like you’re wrestling with a guilty conscience,” he rumbled.

“I do not have a guilty conscience. I have a hole in my sideandmy leg because you chose to relocate us to a place where rabid freaks hurl themselves through windows and attack us.”

“You aren’t injured,” he said evenly.

“What?”

“We have excellent healers here. Better even than at the Winter Palace. A perk of living on the outskirts of a war zone. You don’t need to replace your warriors if you can snatch them from the jaws of death in time.”

I gave him a dark look. “Stick really close, you said. Well, I was about as close as I could get without sitting in your lap and look what happened. We were attacked inside your fuckinghouse.”

“Psshhh.”He made a dismissive sound, fiddling with a button on the front of his shirt. “It was nothing. Four rogue scouts taking a shot they were never going to win. It won’t happen again.”

“You can’t guarantee that.”

“I can. The house has been unguarded since we arrived. Ren wanted to post a unit here to patrol the grounds and ensure we didn’t have any uninvited guests, but I shut him down. I didn’t realize the feeders had gotten so…”

“Brazen?”

“Hungry.”He pressed the tip of his tongue against the point of a sharp canine, studying me. “You landed a hit on one of them,” he said.

“Two hits.” If he was going to commend me, he might as well get it right.

“Impressive.” This was supposed to be a compliment, but his tone made it backhanded.

“For a girl?” I asked bitterly.

He arched a dark brow. “For ahuman.”

“Oh, fuck you, princeling. What have you got against humans anyway?” I snapped. “You’re so determined to hate us, but we’re more alike than different.”

He snorted at that. Rose from the chair and approached the bed. Standing next to me, he reached out a hand and curled a piece of my hair around his index finger, staring at it thoughtfully. “We are nothing alike,” he said quietly. “You nearly died from a scratch that would have been a mild irritation to me. You are soft. You are fragile. You are vulnerable. You are a newborn fawn, stumbling around in the dark, surrounded by predators with very sharp teeth. I am the thing that exists on the other side of the dark. I’m the thing that puts the fear of the gods into the monsters who would eat you bones and all.”