Page 16 of The Frost Witch (The Covenants of Velora #1)

The Dark God must have been laughing from his obsidian throne. Hell, we were in the first temple of the Seven Gates. After all the chanting and praying, all seven gods were probably looking down on us right then. And laughing hysterically.

At least the lust burning beneath my skin had banked, stifled by pure humiliation.

I put one hand on my hip, closer to my little dagger. Though I doubted I’d get the chance to draw it if Garrick the Red decided to attack me. But a bounty hunter who’d made a fortune on a desolate, dying continent would not be stupid enough to attack me in a temple where it was expressly forbidden.

I was not defenseless. I was never defenseless.

Even without my coven to bolster my power, I had killed the man who’d attacked me outside of the tavern.

I could hold my own, even against Garrick the Red.

He had twenty years of killing for hire?

I’d been resurrected nearly four hundred years ago. Let him try me.

Never mind that he’d made a career out of killing, and I’d flinched away from it at every turn. It was not the moment to dwell on my failures as a witch. There was always plenty of time for that in the night, when I ought to be sleeping.

This man was used to intimidating people wherever he went. I’d watched it happen in the tavern the night before. But now we both saw each other for what we were. His reputation may precede him, but that did not mean he scared me.

I cocked my head to the side. “Who would have guessed—Garrick the Red is blond.”

His own head tilted to match the angle of mine. “The red refers to the blood.”

I snorted. “Congratulations. That is the bare minimum to keep you alive.”

He uncrossed his arms, the action shrinking the space between us. He could have touched me as easily as I could have stabbed him. And damn it all to the Dark God’s coldest, cruelest hell, but there was that flare of desire in my stomach again.

“Not the blood in my veins. The blood on my hands.”

My eyes snapped down to those very hands.

Huge—they were ridiculous. They should have been out of proportion to the rest of him.

But he was huge, especially in comparison to my short stature.

He wouldn’t need one of the weapons strapped to his body to hurt me.

He could rip me apart with his hands alone.

Blood on his hands, indeed.

I bit my tongue before I could say something worse. I still needed him to keep my secret. I was supposed to be bribing him.

I forced my arms down from my waist to hang at my side. Garrick tracked the movement with his eyes, his lids lowering a fraction as my thick cloak fell back into place around me, hiding my body.

“My offer stands,” I said.

He at least did me the courtesy of looking at my face as he denied me. “Keep your spells for yourself, witch.”

The word bristled against me like wool on bare skin. I’d forced the mother in the tavern the night before to call me what I was. But from Garrick’s lips, it rubbed wrong. Maybe because he did not say it with even the slightest hint of fear—but plenty of derision.

“I have a name.”

“I’ve already told you mine.”

And looked so fucking smug while doing it.

I wanted to withhold my own name just out of spite. But unlike his, there was no prowess or gravity associated with mine. Once, I could have said Koryn, daughter of Gallatin of Crenmea. Or Koryn, frost witch of the Midnight Coven. In their own times, both would have meant something. But not now.

Now, I was just — “Koryn.”

“Koryn,” he repeated, rolling the syllables over his tongue. “Koryn, the wicked witch of Canmar.”

I hissed through my teeth. “Two spells?—”

“Keep your spells and I’ll keep your secret,” he interrupted.

The hairs on the back of my neck rose. “Why would you do that?”

He shrugged, a truly ridiculous gesture from someone his size. “My reasons are my own.”

I did not have much height, but I had plenty of indignation. “And once they no longer apply, you’ll tell everyone I’m a witch so they can band together and kill me.”

He shrugged again.

My hands curled underneath my cloak, frost cooling my palms. “ You think you can kill me.” That was why he didn’t care about my spells or my secret. Because he did not see me as a threat.

The rest of the world thought him a predator. Yet the feeling swirling in my chest was not fear but impudence. How dare he reduce me to a triviality. The power of a thousand generations of witches hummed through my blood. Fuck him.

But by the time I opened my mouth to hurl those words at him, his swirling turquoise eyes were fixed firmly back on my face with that intensity that froze me as effectively as any ice.

“What sort of witch makes friends with human competitors?”

He could only mean Nimra. He’d noticed us speaking before the ceremony. That was hardly noteworthy. I doubted that Garrick the Red had made his fortune on Velora by being blind to his surroundings.

She is not my friend , I almost said. I don’t have friends , close behind. “I do not have to explain myself to you,” I went with instead. He might know things about me the others did not, but that did not entitle him to any more secrets.

He continued as if I had not spoken at all. “You warned her to get away, instead of sacrificing her.”

For a moment, I did not understand what he was saying.

He’d done more than watch. He’d heard my whispered warning to Nimra before I’d approached him, while he was yards away, at the edge of the altars, speaking with the fae female.

My head whipped over my shoulder. They were gone, both Nimra and the dark red-haired man I’d mistaken for Garrick the Red.

I had warned her not to let the man get her alone. Even now, knowing that he was not Garrick the Red, my instincts told me he was dangerous.

But Garrick should not have been able to hear any of it.

My gaze slid upward, toward the sloped ceiling with its pitched vaults and ornate carvings.

The acoustics of temples were always strange, sound traveling in unexpected ways.

That must be how he’d heard my whispered words.

There was no other way, with his human ears, no other reason for him to have paid such close attention to me.

I turned back to him, startled at the sudden closeness. The space between us had closed so gradually I had not realized it until I could feel the warmth of his body.

“I don’t need to kill you,” he breathed, returning to our earlier conversation.

He took another step forward. One more, and we’d be touching.

I’d be close enough to shove a dagger between his ribs.

Though I wasn’t arrogant enough to think I’d manage that before he gutted me.

I’d be much better off loosening the frigid power building beneath my skin.

I refused to give an inch of the space he took. “And why is that?”

“Because the gods will do it for me,” he said with a soft chuckle. That close, I felt it against my skin, smelled the faint traces of cinnamon and wine on his breath.

I did not step back, even as the feel of that warm air sliding in between the folds of my cloak did things to me. Inconvenient things.

A few heartbeats—his, not mine, because I could hear those, too—and his lips flattened into a smirk.

He broke the tension, stepping away. He did not bother with a farewell, but I could not let him have the last word.

I should have kept my mouth shut. But maybe I was as stupid as the humans in the tavern the night before.

“I’ll see you on the other side,” I said to his retreating back. Because I assumed he would make it through, damn him.

He paused, but did not look back over his shoulder.

“We’ll see.” Because he assumed I would not.

The dormitory could have housed ten times our number.

I remembered those days, when men and women of all ages had entered the temples and attempted the gates with glory on their minds and foolishness in their hearts.

A century later, the temples were still busy, but the air of excitement had worn away.

Supplicants entered out of need and hope, rather than glory.

As I lay silently and made my supplications to the Dark God, glory was the furthest thing from my mind. For so many months, since I’d been ousted from my coven, I’d had only two goals. Preserve my power and stay alive. But in a blink, it had all changed.

Get through the gates, lift the curse on Velora, and be restored to my coven. To sisterhood and safety and true power.

Get through the gates, or Kyrelle would make one reckless, self-sacrificing decision after another until both she and her father were dead.

I’d known, even when I gave her the gold and entered the temple in her stead, that she would never leave her father.

I’d seen the love between them, year after year, even as their already meager circumstances deteriorated.

I had never loved another nor been loved like that.

And after the pain I’d seen in Kyrelle’s eyes? I never wanted to.

I rolled over in the lumpy bed and fell asleep. By some blessing of the gods, my night was dreamless.