Page 83 of Silvercloak

“I will be,” Saff said, though the answer didn’t feel particularly robust.

She’d never felt able to share her darker emotions with Tiernan or Auria; she didn’t want to taint them, overwhelm them. And yet she had so easily confided in Levan about the brick of grief in her chest—and the terrible, traitorous relief that followed her parents’ death. Perhaps there was a darkness in him that called to a darkness in her.

Clearing her throat, she asked, “Is Auria still …?”

Angry? Ashamed of me?

Mourning her grandfather?

“She needs a bit more time, I think. I’m sorry.”

Saff wanted so badly to ask about Papa Marriosan, but she couldn’t let Tiernan know thatsheknew. It was far too damning.

Tiernan gnawed at his bottom lip, still visibly in self-loathing turmoil. “You’re a good person, Saff. I hope you know that.”

The image of Kasan’s empty eye socket came to her, but she said nothing to refute the idea.

“Can I buy you a drink?” Tiernan asked, a hopeful note in his voice.

Saff shook her head. “I have to go. But thank you for coming. It means more than I can say.”

“Of course. Take care of yourself, Saff.”

Levan was waiting for her across the street, leaning back against a shopfront with one foot pressed flat against the wall. Beside him, Rasso was enjoying a staring match with an underripe lemon that had fallen from a nearby tree and rolled into the moonlit gutter. The fallowwolf’s ears were folded over, as if to block out the noise of the taverns.

At the sight of Saffron, Levan stepped forward.

“Well?” The word was urgent, laced with equal parts hope and desperation. By his side, his hand clenched into a fist, but the gesture wasn’t threatening, just … determined.

Determined to find this necromancer.

Who was he trying to bring back to life? Necromancers could only work with fresh corpses, and he’d been trying to find Zares for weeks. Maybe longer.

Harrow Claver’s curtailed words played over and over again on a loop.

Darling Levan will never take another life partner. Not after what happened to …

The kingpin’s son had loved and lost someone. That much was clear.

And then the revelation from earlier this evening, when she’d asked why he hated Vogolan.

He killed someone very important to me.

The pieces slotted together.

She thought about the night she had first met Levan, how utterly dead behind the eyes he’d seemed. Like all the light had gone from his life. And she supposed that it had. He’d lost his mother as a child, and the person he loved as an adult. His despair had been so deep and dark that he’d run straight into lox’s gnarled, suffocating arms.

There had been glimmers of internal life since, she thought. Brief flares of emotion before he smothered them.

Was Levan’s loss recent enough that finding a necromancer was worthwhile, potentially fruitful? Saff recalled a book her mother owned on the maligned art. One moon cycle was around the longest a body could lie dead for before a necromancer revived it, and even then it would require extremely complex and power-draining magic to preserve the corpse as well as it needed to be preserved.

When had his life partner died?

“Silver?”

He took several more steps toward her, close enough that she could feel his breath on her face. Hunger burned in his eyes, so potent her heart stumbled and faltered. She knew now, after being around him for seven days, that his gaze was not something he gave easily, casually. She had something he wanted, and thatwantcoursed between them like a current.

In that moment—that brief and fleeting moment—she had the power.