Poison's Kiss (Poison's Kiss #1)(71)

Breath rushes out of me in a long exhale. The guards recede to their posts.

“I go back to the Naga,” I say. “I pretend loyalty and I pass you the information that you need.”

“You become my spy?”

“Yes,” I say. “For a price.”

The Raja bristles. “You haven’t earned the right to ask me for favors.”

“Fine,” I say, holding out my wrists. “Then throw me back in your dungeon. And best of luck finding another visha kanya willing to do your bidding.”

He narrows his eyes and holds my gaze. I refuse to look away. “What are your terms?”

“You protect Mani,” I say. “You allow him to live here at the palace and make sure no harm comes to him. You give me the training and the information I need to take down the Naga. And when they have been eliminated, you give me my freedom.”

“That is all?”

“Yes,” I say. “That is all.”

His brows lift. “You ask for so little.”

“My freedom is no small thing,” I tell him.

The Raja nods. “Indeed,” he says. He doesn’t speak for a long time, and I watch the emotions play across his face, watch him measure his hatred of me against the desire for an ally on the inside. In the end it’s not a difficult choice. Not for a man who loves his kingdom. “We have a deal,” he says. “But you would do well to remember that you are at my mercy.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” I say. “And you would do well to remember that you are at mine.”

I hear a sharp intake of breath from one of the guards. The Raja’s eyes flash, but he stays silent, and I feel as if I’ve won something, as if we finally understand each other. “What do you need?” he asks.

“For starters, I need to know where you are holding the Naga prisoners. And a key so I can free them.”



Two weeks later Gita and I arrive back at the girls’ home under cover of a purple darkness. The rest of the Naga have gone their separate ways—back to their posts to plot the destruction of the Pakshi, to find new targets for me to kill.

My feet ache from the hours of walking, and my throat is raw from talking, scratchy with all the lies I’ve coughed up.

“The Raja threw me in the dungeon,” I said.

“He has Mani,” I told them.

And this is how I will do it, wrap up the lies in slippery truths so that they will slide down easier. Just like Gopal used to lie to me.

Gita twists a key in the lock and pushes the door open. She wraps her arm around my shoulders and kisses my cheek. “Welcome home, Marinda,” she says.

My stomach is swimming with dread. But I smile at her anyway, because this is the only way to get what I want.

That’s the thing about poison. The deadliest ones always come from the inside.





Story ideas come from all kinds of unlikely places, and Poison’s Kiss is no different. Several years ago, I was listening to a lecture series on espionage and covert operations. In one of the early episodes, the professor discussed different civilizations and their views on and myths about spies and assassins. He mentioned a legendary figure in Indian folklore—the poison damsel, a woman fed poisons from childhood so that she gradually becomes immune but is toxic to any man she lures as her lover.

It was one sentence in an eighteen-hour course, but my mind caught on the idea. Forty minutes later, I realized I hadn’t heard a single word since “poison damsel.” Most assassins and spies are recruited as adults, so I was fascinated by the thought of making such a monumental choice for a child. I wondered what would happen to a girl who was poisoned but wasn’t cut out to be a killer. How would the fact that she was deadly shape her? How would it break her?

The idea wouldn’t leave me alone. I started researching the legends of the visha kanya (Sanskrit for “poison maiden”), as well as mithridatism, which is the process of slowly becoming immune to a poison by ingesting it in ever-increasing doses.

Gradually, the idea for Poison’s Kiss took shape. I knew I wanted the story to take place in a world other than our own, but I also wanted to be true to the origins of the visha kanya and create a setting that looked and felt like the place where the myth was born. So although Sundari is not India, it is influenced by that culture and its mythology.

I read dozens of Indian folktales, and bits of those legends made it into Poison’s Kiss. I knew I needed a mechanism for obtaining the poison that would make Marinda deadly, and I couldn’t think of anything more terrifying than snakes. I had already made the decision that Marinda would be poisoned by snake venom when I stumbled across a mention of the Nagaraja in my research. Anciently, this “king of the serpents” was worshipped as a deity in northern India, while in southern India the serpent cult included worship of live snakes. I thought it would be fascinating to explore how a blend of these two elements—the visha kanya and the Nagaraja—could be shaped into something new that would provide a context for Marinda, a reason she had been turned into an assassin.

I read everything I could find on snake worship and came across numerous references to the Naga. In some stories, the Naga are serpentine beings who live under the sea and are considered deities. Other tales cast the Naga as a human tribe of snake worshipers. My imagination took off as additional pieces of the puzzle fell into place.