“I’m alive now,” she managed to say.
Matteo leaned back. “Ah, so that’s what it is. You’re blaming yourself.”
And now she was becoming easy to read. Splendid.
Still, a part of her leaped at the words, the opening, the invitation to bare her soul to him in a way she’d never felt the desire to before. Not with Jin, not with anyone. Was it because he had turned her, forging a deeper bond between them? What was wrong with her?
Images kept resurfacing in her mind: his fingers brushing back her hair with a gentleness she’d seen him demonstrate time and time again, but never on her person, never on her body. The vulnerability in his eyes as he leaned toward her, the same exuding from her own near-death state.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he goaded.
“No, you don’t,” Arthie said, cursing the breathlessness in her tone. Which was an extra level of ridiculous when she didn’t need to breathe.
He propped an arm behind him and leaned back, tilting his head as if he was a king about to be hand-fed grapes. She knew to expect his cocksure drawl before he even opened his mouth.
“Admit it, darling, you feel the sudden urge to kiss me, don’t you?”
She flicked her eyebrows, ready to tell him off before another idea struck. She dropped her gaze to his mouth. “And if I do?”
Matteo straightened, startled by her response. She bit back a laugh. Why had she never responded to his antics this way before? She could have shut him right up many times over.
Because I never wanted to kiss him before.
The thought alone shocked her.
She’d had little interest in love. Then Laith arrived, breaking down her walls bit by bit as he tried to get closer to her pistol, even as she did the same while attempting to decipher his secrets.
There hadn’t been time to build those walls back up again.
What did Matteo want from her? It wasn’t as though she could open her mouth and ask him, not without injuring her pride.
He looked down at their fingers and brushed his thumb along the back of her hand. Perhaps it was because she was hurting, or perhaps it was because she was newly turned, and by him at that, but Arthie could think of nothingbutkissing him.
She remembered when his lips were stained dark with her blood, the cords in his arms strained from the night’s battle—or from holding her down.
Arthie tugged gently on their entwined hands. An invitation. A question. A fire roared to life inside her. He obliged, still surprised by her initiation, leaning in and propping his arm on the covers beside her. Arthie caught a whiff of his scent and wondered why she’d never smelled him before: the rich, nutty warmth of the fresh walnut oil he used in his paints and something sweeter, like a blend of leather and chocolate.
She hadn’t tasted chocolate in years.
It reminded her of home. Of her father bringing back rare treats that she and her mother shared because he never had much of a sweettooth himself. Arthie pursed her lips. She hadn’t thought of home that way in a long time—only the violent fragments. The chaos as the soldiers stormed the Ceylani shore. Her mother’s red sari. The bullet holes. The blood.
“Arthie.”
Matteo spoke her name on a hesitant sigh and pulled back. He must have seen the turmoil in her eyes now that she was so damned readable. She ran her tongue along her lips, trying to bury her memories again. Trying to bury the present and her past and everything that existed outside this room and this bed.
His eyes narrowed to slits, and with it, some part of him closed away. “There’s something we need to talk about.”
She waited.
“It… has to do with how you arrived in Ettenia,” he finished, flinching when somewhere outside the window, glass shattered and people roared.
On a boat. Full of blood. Right. She’d forgotten that he knew. She’d forgotten that no one could fathom being close to a girl capable of such brutality.
Arthie wrenched her hand from his, her anger surging—there it is—battling with whatever raw thing was tearing through her. It was a selfish sort of pain wrapped with embarrassment.
He was rejecting her, while she was lying in this bed, looking up at him.
Everything about this moment had her positioned to be weak. How had she allowed this to happen? She was Arthie Casimir. She rarely trusted anyone, and she’d been right not to: When she’d gone against her better judgment and trusted Penn’s plan and sought out the help of the press, every last one of them had ended up dead.
