“Do you miss it?” I ask.
“Color?”
I nod.
“I miss my sister more.”
I gasp, too shocked by the admission to keep it from slipping out. “Your sister?”
He nods, studying me intently over the rim of his glass. He takes another sip, and there’s a satisfied gleam in his eyes, like he’s happy to see me caught off guard. “Holly died when the hold fell.”
“How?”
“She was defending the wall,” he says flatly.
I could kick myself for not realizing. “She was the heir.”
The Havenwoods hadn’t publicly named an heir before the fort fell, and seeing as their blessing records are missing, I made assumptions the way everyone else in the city does when it comes to succession.
But Henry Havenwood wasn’t born to be heir of Mountain Haven. His sister was. I should have known because magic chooses the wielder, not the other way around. Even if men want to pass their power down to their sons, they only pass a baseline affinity. What happens when they’re blessed in the Blood Well is entirely up to the Divine.
“You don’t have any other siblings?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
I’m surprised at the easy admission. Just because he’s not aware of them doesn’t mean they don’t exist, though his father did seem very protective of Evangeline during the attack.
I can’t tell if Henry is trying to lull me into a false sense of intimacy or if he’s actually oblivious. In Lunameade, no one would ever freely offer so much information about their family or their magic, but perhaps it’s not the case at Mountain Haven. If the rumors are true, and someone in his family has a gift from Asher, this means it has to be one of his parents.
I cross my arms and sit back in my seat. It’s unpleasant being on my heels like this. In one conversation, Henry has managed to dismantle all my plans for the evening and all the assumptions I’ve made about him, and he’s grinning like he knows it.
He pours us both more wine. “Why did you try to poison me a second time?”
“I thought you were lying about that ring protecting you from magical attacks, and I was right.”
“But if you were wrong, you’d have killed me in front of every magical family in Lunameade,” he says.
I shrug. “High risk. High reward.”
“You’d have started a war based on a hunch?” Henry looks like he doesn’t know whether to be angry or impressed.
“My life is a war. This would just be a battle I see coming.”
He cocks his head and looks me over in a slow, assessing way, then his gaze flits to my mark at the bar. “So what comes next for the redhead?” he asks. “You go talk to him?”
“I wait for him to come talk to me.”
Henry arches a skeptical brow. “You can’t guarantee that he will.”
“Can’t I?” I lean back in my chair, take a long sip of wine, and groan as if it’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted.
Several nearby heads turn, and I tilt my glass so a few drops of wine splash onto my chest again. The sparkling wine is cold against my hot skin as it dribbles down the dip between my breasts.
Henry tracks it with his gaze.
I smile wickedly and lift my glass in a toast toward my mark, who has taken notice of me, despite Henry’s presence at my table.
Henry whips his head around just in time to see the man raise his glass to me. He shakes his head, turning back. “Shameless.”
