He blows through his nose, but his grumbling is in my mind only. “’Cause the estimate I provided issounreliable.”
“You saidten minutesover twenty minutes ago,” I remind him.
“It only took me seven minutes to get back here, so bite me.”
We both chuckle, our laughter suppressed behind the inner walls of our minds. The blood oath is strongest with him. Since our tattoos are permanent, we can feel each other’s joy as if it’s our own. Other emotions too, if we allow them.
I, for one, try to keep Caz safe from any of my more regrettable thoughts, and I believe he does the same for me.
Once the laughter has faded, I think more about what he said. Although I don’t think he was truly offended, I also think part of him could be. Like me, he’s spent most of his life in shadow, trying to live up to someone else’s unreasonable expectations of him. I never want that to be the way he feels around me.
“Unlike you, the human girl has to take a more cautious approach when it comes to meandering through a city like this,” I offer and the slightest breeze of appreciation flutters through the oath. It’s almost overwhelmed, though, by the rumbling of Harland’s impatience. “I hope she gets here soon. I don’t know how much longer I can keep Harland on a leash.”
“You call him leashed?” Caz snorts, this time audibly. “That man is an active volcano that erupts every few months, and that’s on a good day. With his brothers gone? Us capturing this human girl isn’t going to do much to calm him.”
“Fair enough.”
With a wary glance my direction, he changes the subject. “Is Fox in position?”
“Yeah,” I sigh. “But she’s not too happy about it.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “It’s not your fault, you know. You didn’t capture and torture her into servitude. The king did.”
“You know, your father said almost the exact same thing.”
He beams. “I guess intelligence runs in the family, despite what Renee would have you think.” Rolling his eyes, he glances back over the rooftop ledge, searching the streets for any signs of the human and finding none. “All I’m trying to say is don’t beat yourself up about it. Your…aunt? Is that what she’d be to you—You know what? It doesn’t even matter. Whoever she is, whatever relation she might have to you and your twisted family, she is in far better company by being here with us than she would ever be with your father.”
There’s a truth to that, one that makes my bones chill.
My father has already caused her so much pain and suffering, it’s hard to imagine he could do more. But I know him at his core. I know how ruthless his imagination can be. He will always find a way to make the people around him suffer.
Even family.
Especiallyfamily.
And maybe Caz is right. Maybe since she only married my father’s cousin, she’s onlyfamilyin the loosest sense. But when you have so little family members in your life already, and the ones who are around are miserable tyrants bent on spreading misery, the kind ones, the innocent ones, they’re worth protecting.
“I’ll make it up to her soon,” I think to myself, forgetting that the blood oath is active and open.
The words might not seem treasonous, perhaps nothing more than a harmlessly mindless declaration. But in thought form Caz understands their full intent.
Wide-eyed and choking on air, he whirls on me. “What do you meanyou’ll make it up to her soon? Not that I’m usually against recklessness, but I hope you don’t mean what it sounds like you mean.”
Heaving a sigh, I rub my face, realizing it’s too late to deny my intent now. Not to Caz. Besides, I think in time I would’ve told him anyway. The only reason I hadn’t yet was because the idea had only just come to mind a few days ago.
For almost two full years, my father has held Fox’s sons prisoner. He meant to use them to draw my uncle Alphonse, the former Magistrate of Arcathain, out of hiding, but instead, my aunt came for her children, was captured, and thrown into a dungeon. In all this time, there have been no reports of Alphonse, not since the day the Capital fell eighteen years ago, and my father claimed regency. Not even when we captured Fox did she mention any word of her husband, despite endless hours of torture and threat on her children’s—my nephew’s—lives. And she’s never made an attempt on his life, or mine. Every time she’s broken out of her cell—the cunning spitfire that she is—her only goal has been to find her two boys, but to no avail. My father always recaptures her, and the punishment is always the same.
“A thief will always be a thief,” my father said the first time he enacted her punishment. “Until they lose the means of being one.”
The last time I saw her, she was down to just six fingers, but not even that could tamper her feisty spirit.
It wasn’t until we left Neveridge and I saw my aunt, filthy and bound, glaring from the back of one of our prison carts, that I realized there was no end in sight for her. She would continue to fight for her sons. My father would continue to torture and torment her even though she knows nothing, even though her husband clearly is uninterested or unable to come for her.
She serves no purpose in captivity. Neither do her boys.
And yet, my father refuses to release her or end her suffering. To him, my uncle is unfinished business. A loose end that needs to be tied off. And currently, she is his only connection to him.
I’m not even sure my idea to free her is even fully formed yet, only that I know I can’t let her live as our prisoner forever. She and her boys deserve a life outside of my father’s cruelty.
