Selena
“Slow down, heiress.”
“Keep up.”
I hauled myself out of the water and onto the rocks, panting. It had been a long time since I’d pushed myself so hard. We’d completed our four-day swim in three, upriver and all, and my arms and legs ached with the burn of unspent lactic acid. The sea dripped from my hair and the hem of my Venusian dress, the ripples of silk snug and transparent against my skin.
“I have no problem keeping up.” Pheolix climbed onto my rock. I pulled away, forcing myself to my tired feet, and he laid a hand across my thigh, tamping me back down. “Sit.”
“Piss off.” I tried again to stand, but his hand may as well have been a bolt, nailing me to the rock. I glared at him. “I could kill you, you know.”
He smirked back. “You’re welcome to try. We haven’t practiced for a while.”
I was in no mood to provoke his heart into giving out. Especially since the vision of him, pale and motionless on the Parian cave floor, hadn’t stopped flashing in my mind. I tucked my chin, eyes shifting to where he sat just out of view. The tight skin over his abdomen was all I could see, wrapped with those lined tattoos, the muscles in his arm ribbed and curved. A vein snaked from his wrist and over the back of his hand. It ticked, just barely.
“Take your hand off me,” I said.
Pheolix loosed a patient exhale. The sound of his breath punctuated the rolling waves. “I’m sorry about what’s going on between you and your sister.”
“You don’t even know what’s going on.”
“You’re right.” He scanned my face carefully. “I don’t. You could tell me about it if you wanted. You don’t have to, but you could.”
“Yes, and what good would that do, other than offer you ammunition for more jokes to use at my expense? You’re a loner, Pheolix. You make fun ofcordaeingand death as though you’ve cheated both. You probably don’t even know what love is, what it means to watch someone throw their life away little bits at a time until they’re just a shell of what they used to be. Don’t pretend you have anything to offer me. You don’t.”
Each word dripped with acid, caustic as they left my mouth. Pheolix absorbed them in silence, and when I ended, he remained silent as though he’d expected more. “Feel better?”
Moon and stars, I did. The tension released from my shoulders, and my body wanted to go limp from it, slumping forward to stare at that vein in his hand, tracking his heartbeat by its tiny twitch. Even so, the backs of my eyes burned. My hands curled, nails digging into my palms, and the ache in my chest moved to my throat, the foul swallow of fear and pain and helplessness suffocating me with every breath.
“Yes,” I sighed. Social etiquette demanded I apologize, but I couldn’t bring myself to. It would be like gulping all that acid down again, inviting it back. So I sat there instead, fighting away each sniffle and cough, banishing the burn in the back of my nose.
He hadn’t moved. His hand still lay across my leg. It was heavy, too heavy to simply rest there. He was actively applying pressure, forcing me to feel the rock through my skin. Grounding me. I watched his side from the corner of my eye, the lines of his tattoos stretching softly as he breathed.
“You can let me up now.”
“I will. After we’ve sat a few more minutes.”
In the corner of my eye, the lines of his tattoos expanded and shrank as he breathed.
“Do all drones have tattoos like those?”
“All of Thaan’s do.”
I remembered them, vaguely. The simple lines that spanned the width of the drones’ backs, hugging their sides but ending before they met in the middle.
“Why does he make you get them?” I asked.
He arched his back, looking at them from over his shoulder. “Thaan doesn’t make us. We get them ourselves. Bragging rights, I suppose, though it’s nothing to celebrate. One for every year we last.”
I frowned. “What do you mean? Every year doing what?”
He shrugged. “It’s not important, heiress.”
Inked in a slant that pointed at Pheolix’s hips, the lines converged down his spine. I stared at them, counting.
“Thirteen,” he supplied.
“Who has the most?”
