“You lied to me, betrayed my trust,” she persisted, not at all sure what she was trying to prove.
“Can’t deny any of that.” His voice was light, teasing even, but his wizard-black gaze was somber. Holding hers.
“You’re not even sorry,” she marveled.
He released another sigh, looking down at his hands. “I am sorry,” he said in a quiet voice. “More than you can ever know, about so many things.”
“Well, I don’t feel sorry for you,” she informed him, hating that she felt even a twinge of sympathy for him. Those horrible laboratories. Those glass-walled cages. The hints dropped in conversation about his being an experiment of his mother’s. Probably those were just more lies spun to manipulate her into seeing him as some kind of fellow captive.
“What is your plan for after you’ve killed me?” Jadren asked, sounding curious and more his usual capricious self. “Do you even have a plan?”
“What do you care?”
He shrugged, gaze drifting over her body again. “As stimulating as the view is, I grow rather bored with waiting for the arrow to strike, as it were. I figured we might as well chat if you’re just going to stand there keeping me from sleeping. Unless you’ve changed your mind?”
“I have not. Once you’re dead I’ll wait for your body to be discovered and then I’ll kill your mother.
He raised a dubious brow. “You envision her rushing to my bedside, distraught and careless in her grief, wailing over my corpse?”
That was uncannily close to the scene Selly had indeed pictured.
He read that in her face, shaking his head sadly, then propped his hands behind his head, elbows wide, displaying his excellent chest. “It will never work.”
“How many times do I have to tell you not to move?”
He glanced at his chest. “I’m presenting you with a clear target. You’ll need all the help you can get, the way your arm is tiring.”
The fatigue was getting to her, curse him for seeing so much. “I should have killed you while you were still asleep.”
“You should have,” he said agreeably, with a twitch of a smile, “though I wasn’t asleep. I woke up the moment you did. Old habit.”
“And you just laid there, pretending to sleep?” she asked incredulously.
He shrugged a little, smile curving wider. “I wanted to see what you would do.”
“How can you be so unconcerned that you’re about to die?” she demanded, utterly bewildered by his mercurial shifts in mood.
His smile faded, lips twisting ruefully. “Seliah… you were never going to kill me. It’s not in you.”
“I could have killed your mother—I nearly did.”
“You made a brilliant show of it,” he agreed, “but you didn’t even come close.”
“Because you stopped me.”
“I stopped you because she was going to kill you otherwise. Wizards are not so easy to kill as that, particularly not ones powerful enough to head a high house. You never had a chance. Believe me: others have tried and the results of their failure provided many a great cautionary tale.”
“So I’m supposed to believe you acted to protect me.”
He settled himself more snugly into the pillows. “I don’t really care what you believe. Either fire that arrow off or don’t, but I desperately need to sleep.” His eyes closing, he made a cozy murmuring sound, as if finding the bed delightfully comfortable.
That was the final straw. She loosed the arrow.
And it flew wild, embedding itself in his shoulder. “Fuck me!” Jadren roared, eyes flying open and magic charging through the air around her like lightning striking ground. He jerked his chin down at the arrow pinning him to the headboard, blood dribbling bright down the pale skin of his arm and chest. “You shot me!”
“I told you I would.” She sounded—and felt—wobbly.
“I didn’t think you’d actually do it,” he snarled, tentatively tugging at the arrow and turning even whiter. “Fuck that hurts. Did you have to hit my dominant arm? Get over here and pull it out.”
