We laid there as those promises solidified, cocooned from the world as if nothing beyond these walls mattered. I drew lazy patterns across Tolek’s chest, tracing the scars left on his body, and he teased his fingertips up my spine.
Too soon, Tol rose from the bed, striding naked through the room to pour us glasses of water from the pitcher on the side table. The scar on his powerful thigh from the Engrossian ax when he’d tried to give his life for mine was stark in the night, thicker and less neatly healed than the others decorating his skin.
I pushed off the bed, gathering the five Angel emblems from my pack and setting them on the nightstand. Mystlight flicked along the different arrangements of gems and metal. Only the shard of Angelborn remained around my neck.
The worries Tolek had distracted me from started to push in.
“Will you hand me my nightgown, please?” I asked without turning.
Tolek’s strong hands slipped around my hips, his lips against my ear. “No.”
I laughed, turning in his arms. The heat of his skin against mine and the smile on his face—so easy and with an edge of teasing—chased away the worries. “No?”
“I prefer this.”
He always did. Most nights I didn’t mind; it only gave us fewer barriers for the morning.
I looked back at those emblems, resting so perfectly on the nightstand. I considered telling him what was worrying me, then, but…my gaze flicked to the window. The thin door. Too risky.
“Temperatures are dropping in the desert.”
Tol’s lips skimmed mine. “Body heat, Alabath.”
I rolled my eyes, pushing against his chest to grab my nightgown myself, but Tolek beat me to it, carefully swiping it from the dresser and handing it over. Then, he put on a pair of undershorts.
“Open the curtains?” I asked as I crawled into bed. “I want to sleep with the stars.”
He flashed me another of those dazzling, worry-defeating smiles. “Whatever you wish, Revered.”
Sleep pulled us under quickly—thesatiated, insistent kind that only came when Tolek’s arms were around me. But it didn’t keep my mind from perking up at the smallest sound.
At the drift of a breeze through a curtain when the windows should be closed.
At the brush of a seemingly silent hand who’d spent centuries sneaking.
I kept my eyes closed, my breathing even, and stifled the Angellight whirling protectively beneath my skin. Those ears would pick up even the slightest shift in the rhythm of my heart.
But he couldn’t hide his presence, looming over the nightstand.
I waited until his attention was snared with my delicately laid trap. Then, faster than the cats prowling the Starsearcher jungles, I struck.
Tolek jumped from bed, his family dagger immediately soaring toward the intruder. He ducked, but I bore down, driving the stake I’d whittled from the branch of the cypher into the male’s shoulder.
Until his knees cracked to the wood, his grunts of pain loud enough to wake the entire floor. I followed him, pinning his hips. One arm hung uselessly at his side, his magic incapacitated, but he swung up with the other, dragging a nail down my cheek. Blood tickled my skin, but I didn’t flinch.
The door to our room crashed open, our friends pouring in, but I only twisted the stake deeper, where Rina had told me it wouldn’t kill.
I snapped off the tip at a rough angle, ensuring it splintered.
Rounding the bed to glare down at the intruder, Lancaster snarled, “What in the Goddess’s afterlife are you doing here?”
The man beneath me grunted.
“Hello, Brystin,” I purred down at him, flicking away a drop of blood from my cheek. “I was wondering when you’d finally show your face.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
Tolek
