Page 140 of Winds of Ruin
We’d beenfriendlyon and off for a century. Though my visits had become less frequent and then altogether stopped after I’d found a mirror in a musty old ruin.
A coincidence. I swallowed hard.
We wrote each other every so often. They’d restaffed after the “incident.” I never knew what had happened. There was a reason—she’d been paid off by the crown to remodel and keep quiet.
Despite our recent distance, Leonna might know me as well as Krait. Maybe better. Certain truths were easier spoken in the darkness of a pleasure hall chamber to a woman who had little to gain from listening to me.
“You know I can always use a distraction,” I mused quietly.
I slipped the key into the bosom of my dress. When I glanced back out toward the dance floor, Emmerick was watching us. His expression turned steely, and his muscles tensed. She followed my gaze, and a knowing smile etched across her pretty lips.
“Interesting. It’s been a long time—don’t be a stranger,” she said. “Though if youarea stranger, he looks like a worthy reason.”
Leonna wandered back toward the women at the punch bowl.
Two worlds were colliding.
On one side, my old life, brimming with debauchery, wine, and physical acts to numb whatever troubled me.
The other, calm nights with Emmerick and the steadying warmth of being in his arms.
I wanted nothing more than to drag him away from those doting women and tell him he meant the world to me. Icouldpursue him.
Would it really be so terrible of me?
“Whatexactlydid I just witness?” Sybilla crept up beside me. She wore a blue velvet dress and a twisted silver crown of acorns and thorns. “Because itlookedlike my dearest friend was undressing my former lover with her eyes until she got distracted by a pretty courtesan who definitely was not on the guest list.”
“I wasn’t undressing him…” The denial died on my tongue. “Actually. What if I were?”
Sybilla had moved on, started a family. Everyone else had their person. Should I not be looking for the same companionship, for someone to come home to each night?
The way Em’s words melted me, the way I could think of nothing but him when he left a room—it all had to be real. I could be what he needed.Couldn’t I?
Sybilla burst out with an incredulous laugh.
I frowned, and she realized her error.
“Oh. You are serious. It’s just...”
It wasn’t every day that I watched Sybilla stumble to scrape words together. My bruised pride and feelings prevented me from finding the humor in it.
She continued, “I’m sorry. I know you and Em both well. He likes a certain amount ofpredictability. I don’t see you together in that way. You would eat his heart out.”
My frown deepened, and she straightened.
How should one react to their greatest fears being spoken aloud by someone they loved?
“You know what? This really isn’t my business,” Sybilla concluded.
“When has that ever stopped you?” I snapped back. “You are, of course, free to meddle in my business when it pertains to traversing the realms with your daughter, or assigning me a new advisory role, or assuming I am too flighty towantto settle in one place or with one person.”
It all spewed from me too harshly. My anger with my own flippant actions had manifested against her. She hadn’t forced any of those things on me. Not really.
Sybilla stiffened and discarded her glass of wine on a nearby pedestal that housed a potted plant. She placed her hands on my sleeved shoulders.
“El... I didn’t mean to hurt you, truly. I never knew that you felt this way,” she said and held me there so I couldn’t flee.
“What way?” I lashed out, unable to shake the desire to strike at her even knowing she wasn’t the reason for my high walls—I was.
