Roar (Stormheart #1)(58)
She didn’t know what that meant, couldn’t tell if she was just reading into his words because of his deep, gravelly voice and his bare chest and the skyfire glow inside the tent that cast them both in shadows.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “About the river. I did not mean to—well, I did, but my intention was not to hurt you.”
“What was your intention?” she whispered.
“To teach you.”
She froze and tried to tug her hand free, but his reflexes were too fast and he closed his grip around her hand before she could.
“To teach me what? That I’m soft? Easy to manipulate? Someone already beat you to that lesson. Though I guess I did not learn it as well as I should. But I have now.”
“Roar. That wasn’t … I—”
She ripped her hand from his grip and stood, her head glancing off the canvas before she remembered to hunch.
“I should let you rest.”
She scrambled out of his tent and fled toward her own. She was almost there when Sly stepped out from the darkness to block her path. Roar jerked to a stop. “Sly, I didn’t see you.”
“Most people don’t.”
The female hunter had an eerie stillness to her … like a predator that could be on you before you even took a breath to scream.
“I think I’m going to sleep. Long day.”
The girl let Roar pass, but before she made it to her tent, Sly called after her, “Just remember. When you don’t see me, it’s because I see you. I see the things that other people miss. The things that they don’t want to see. And I’ll be watching you.”
Roar threw herself into the shaky refuge of her tent, pulled a blanket over her head to block out the world, and tried not to think of all she was missing back home.
*
Nova held herself entirely still, trying to will her body calm. When she moved, heat surged in every joint like her bones were flint and steel, sparking as they shifted against each other. She had lost track of time in her cell, but she knew days had passed since Roar left. And with each hour, the room seemed smaller, her mattress thinner.
A tray of food sat by the door, but it had long since grown cold. She did not trust herself to move toward it. Stillness was the only friend she had right now.
It was the not knowing that plagued her most. They’d thrown her in this cell, and she had seen no one since except the array of arms that reached inside occasionally to drop a tray of food. Her mind, duplicitous as ever, provided an unending stream of dire possibilities for why she was being kept in here and what was happening outside these four walls.
Even now, she wondered if this had nothing to do with Aurora. If perhaps they had somehow learned her secret, and this room, this nothingness, was what she had always feared.
She’d been living on borrowed time since her magic manifested as a child. A Stormling amir, the Taraanese equivalent of an admiral, had visited the house for dinner. Nova had been young, and she accidentally knocked over her drink, sending the liquid into the man’s lap. He’d grabbed her wrist and snarled, and out of nowhere, the fancy tie about his neck had caught fire. The burns to the man’s neck, face, and hands had been extensive. And her family had left in the middle of the night with only what they could carry, using all the money they had saved up to pay for an escort from a hunter, like the ones Rora was with now.
At the memory, the fire climbed so high up her throat that she could swear she tasted soot on her tongue. She tried to push it down, to lock it behind that door deep inside, but it would not budge. She broke her stillness to tear a strip of fabric from the bottom of her skirts. She cupped it in her hands, and then let free just a little of the power churning inside her. The flame caught quickly, easing some of the pressure in her chest. The scent of smoke calmed her somehow, reminding her that she was not helpless.
The fabric burned down to ash too fast, leaving behind an aching hunger to do it again, to burn and burn until all the heat was outside instead of inside.
A loud clank sounded at the door, and her head jerked to the small barred window above her head. It was not yet time for another meal to be delivered. She barely had time to dump the ash from her hands before the heavy wooden door swung open, revealing the Prince of Locke on the other side.
She remembered the way he had looked at her when he wanted information about the markets. His eyes had been hooded, suggestive, alluring. She had not been deceived in the slightest, but she preferred those eyes to the flat black coals she faced now. He made eye contact with someone out of sight and nodded, then he strode into the cell and locked the door once more behind him.
He leaned against the stone wall, crossing his arms over his chest. With a clenched jaw, he breathed in slowly through his nose, and her stomach dropped, fearing he would smell the smoke.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out something that gleamed in the dim room. He rotated it between his fingers, and Nova finally placed what she was seeing.
A skyfire Stormheart. The one Rora had gifted her.
“Anyone with storm magic can use any Stormheart that matches their affinities,” he began. “We pass them down to our children and their children. But when you destroy a storm yourself, its heart is forever tied to you. It is a dangerous feat. There’s no skill to it that can be learned. No magic spell. It is simply your will to live versus the storm’s, and the strongest one wins. That kind of battle leaves a mark.” He tossed the Stormheart into the air, light reflecting off the pearlescent surface, then caught it once more in his fist. “Imagine my surprise when I found one of my Stormhearts, a heart marked by my soul, by my sacrifice and given to my betrothed … in the room of a servant.”