I’ve never felt so…normal.
“So, then,” I ask, leaning into this moment. “What’s my first step?”
He draws in a long breath, scratching his stubbled chin to make it sound like he’s rubbing sandpaper. “Well, don’t get caught again, for starters,” he half-jokes, his tone dipping down into something more serious. “The Shade shit proves you’re being targeted. So I’d revert back to barely trusting your own shadow. Right now we are waiting for an opening to try and leave this city. So, in the meantime, I’d start practicing how to fight. Immediately.”
“You think I can just start fightingnow?”
“I’ll arrange for either Anya or Bones to do it. No one else, maybe except your father. I don’t know his men yet, so I don’t trustthem. Anya’s your stature, so she’ll have good insight. Bones is a professional and won’t hold back, which is something you need.”
The absurd image of sparring with Bones floods me. “You’re going to let me beat him up?”
His grin is almost feral. “You talk a big game, love. I’m sure you’re capable.”
I pivot, bits of hay crunching under me. “What aboutyou? Why won’t you teach me anything?”
He leans in slightly—the first movementtowardme—his voice dropping to a dangerously tempting vibrato. “You want me to pin you down again?”
I look away, refraining from lightly hitting him, biting my lip with a half-smile. “I hardly think this is the time.”
“There’s never a better time for pleasure than while death is at the door.”
That poetic thought is like a gust of wind that catches just right in one’s mouth, making it hard to breathe. So much so that I have to immediately think of other things. “I think you’re afraid to fight me,” I reply, wanting to live in this easy conversation.
His unburdened laugh warms the space between us. “Do you just miss hitting people, Jane? Is that it?”
“I mean alittle,” I laugh out. “It sure makes me feel better.”
There’s enough of a pause that it’s almost hard for me to ignore a table of men who seem to be talking about me, gesturing over here frequently. I nearly rise to strut over and ask what they’re gossiping about when I blurt out, “Can you read them at all? Or are they silent, like my father?”
When I feel the bed of hay shift, I rotate my head to look at him once more; he’s up on an elbow, looking directly at me. “About that… Icanread him, actually. He took off a ring whenhe and I met just after I left.” He slowly licks his bottom lip, that gaze lingering behind me more and more before he adds, “It’s connected to Cypress. And I’d bet my entire coffer that Blackwell is using something similar, possibly from Misery.”
The room constricts; his words are a noose around my thoughts. My pulse thunders in my throat when presented with the possibility ofknowingmy father, not realizing how much I actually appreciatednotknowing him. “What did you feel? Is it really him?”
His demeanor is nowhere near as rushed or panicked as mine. “He’s your father, Jane. And his heart is heavy.”
Mydad.
His heart is heavy? My gaze lowers as if I’ve been looking at my father through a mirror’s reflection, only for the glass to disappear, and he’s standing in the frame.
Soren’s comforting presence morphs, too. Some part of me is confusingly annoyed now, as if my heart is too bare and open, and I’m not ready for him to explore that. Nor do I like the idea of him sitting and waiting for me to figure myself out. It’s as if he can finally see the seam that holds me together, and I don’t like that he knows how deranged its design is.
“I’m sorry you’re stuck in this, by the way,” I murmur, my voice strained. “Sitting in a bed of hay isn’t exactly worth your time.”
When I face him, his eyes deepen with that same hidden depth that seems reserved only for him—for now. “You’restuck in it, too.”
Inhaling deeply, I stare back down at my hands, a bruise already forming around my wrist where Shade grabbed me. A small glance through my lashes shows Soren watching me, pure displeasure overtaking his face as he stares at my wrists, although I think that’s just the emotions that escape, where I imagine something more savage plays out in his mind.
“I suppose that’s true. I often just feel like everyone is stuckbecauseof me.” I give a half-chuckle, not wanting to think about Shade right now. Or any of it. I want conversations that have no purpose. “Anyway… did you know someone like you is called a Sensor?”
His head rises, but his gaze remains on my wrist, a callousness slowly erasing as a warmer expression overtakes it, but I can tell he’sfarfrom forgetting these bruises.
“My old mentor never mentioned it. Didn’t know I had a proper name,” he replies, and I love that he knows I need a conversation like this.
“Mentor?” I ask, my curiosity piquing.
“Another, like me,” he answers, although his voice tells me his mind is still elsewhere.
My attention, on the other hand, is stuck on my spiraling imagination, considering Soren as a mentee, fascinated by this side of him. What was a young Soren like? I bet he had a mouth on him. And who in the hells was inchargeof such a bastard? “Well, who is it? What was their name?”
