The Tiger at Midnight (The Tiger at Midnight Trilogy #1)(63)

Esha looked away. “But until that day, if it comes, we’re still on opposite sides. We’re already endangering more than ourselves here.”

Kunal closed his eyes, letting himself bask in the feel of her soft fingertips on his face, tracing his nose and jaw and cheekbones.

Trying not to let the spark of hope in his heart fade.

If he lost being a soldier, he lost his entire identity. But maybe it was an identity no longer worth keeping.

He was beginning to think if Esha left, he’d lose the one thing he had held on to with tight fists since his mother’s death—his heart.

Kunal hated how right she was. He was being reckless, endangering lives other than his own, betraying his comrades. To what end? And as for his duty—what end was that for?

He loved Jansa, his homeland, but he was seeing that the soldiers were only the puppets of the king, fed half-truths and convenient stories. Might over loyalty, brutality over compassion, greed over temperance. He wasn’t even sure anymore that becoming commander would make any sort of difference, despite how desperately he now wanted it to be true.

But this life was all he knew. He was accepted as a soldier. He didn’t know who he would be without the armor. Who he would’ve been without his uncle, despite the horrors he had perpetrated, despite Sundara.

Esha’s fingers had wrapped around the back of his neck, playing with the edges of his hair. He dipped his head forward, stopping inches from her face.

“If I stop chasing you, you’ll disappear anyway. Not much incentive for me to stop,” he said in a low voice.

“I guess.” She smiled at him, and it lit up her face, as if she had swallowed the sun itself. Her fingers stilled but she didn’t deny it.

“I won’t go back. I will never go back to that gods-forsaken place. You can try if you’re willing to drag me back by force. Or just go home to the Fort and say the Viper disappeared. No one else will find me or go against your story. You’ll go back to being a soldier and you’ll have the prestige of having risked your life for the Fort. No one will have expected you to succeed anyway. The Viper is a myth, after all,” she said, her eyes twinkling.

Kunal opened his mouth and then closed it.

“You hadn’t thought of that, had you?” she asked.

Her words hit home, ringing with a truth he didn’t want to meet. But the Fort had never been his home. It had just been where he lived.

He wanted to tell her, to explain, but he saw in her eyes that Esha was already drifting away and the Viper was returning.

“It’s the perfect plan, really. None of you become commander through an unfair game that pits young soldiers against one another to find a spy that no one believes truly exists. It’s as if you were set up to fail.”

Kunal cocked his head at that. He was desperate to hold her attention, if only for a moment longer, and tugged her closer so that there wasn’t even a hairsbreadth of space between them.

Something dangerous flashed in Esha’s eyes in response and she gripped his chin.

“What? Have you become mute, soldier?”

Kunal continued to ignore her, his breath hitching as she drew closer. If they kissed, crossed this line, nothing would be the same. There would be no wall of ignorance to hide behind, no stories to tell himself that it had all been a game.

This would determine everything to come.

Kunal had played it safe for so long that he was craving danger with a thirst that surprised him.

Everything around him faded, the sounds of a town alive, the musty scent of the dusty alley and the laundered clothes above. It all vanished as she became the only color he saw.

She tilted her head and Kunal leaned in, hesitating, letting her bridge the gap between them.

Esha raised her other hand to his face and tugged down the clothesline above them with one swift movement. A ball of damp silk tumbled onto his head and he cursed with a thoroughness that would’ve made Laksh proud, stumbling back.

Through the vibrant colors, he caught a glimpse of Esha leaving.

He let her walk away, listening to his heart for once.

She paused to look back at him, her eyes holding a farewell in their depths, before disappearing down the street.

A faint drizzle of rain splattered the dusty ground like bursts of paint. Kunal crouched on the rooftop, shaking his damp hair out of his eyes as he focused on a pinprick zooming over the horizon.

He had considered it. For a moment, he had truly considered stopping all of this.

Kunal couldn’t decide if it was weakness or a new form of strength to directly defy the orders he had been sent out with.

At least, self-preservation or ambition should have driven his hand to simply knock her out and drag her back, as she had suggested. But Kunal had always had a heart, the one thing a good soldier was never supposed to have.

He unclenched his fist, small half-moon indentations left behind in his palms as he shook out his hands. With a grimace toward the fading image of Esha, he pulled his pack into his lap, rustling around to find his whistle and the note he had tucked away.

A sharp two blows of the whistle in his hand and wing beats followed in the distance. The hawk swooped down low, circling around Kunal. It tilted its beak up, as if sniffing the air around Kunal to determine whether it would deign to rest on his outstretched forearm.

He was deemed worthy and the Fort hawk landed with a graceful swoop, its talons clenching into Kunal’s bare skin.