Page 18 of The Lure of Wolves and Whispers
Turning the fear into anger is as easy as breathing. “Say that again.” I drop my voice and glare at Keeva. “I dare you.”
Keeva shakes her head, then runs her hand over her neat braids. “These are the Whisperers. Any price they want for their help will be a price too high to risk paying. Don’t agree to anything they ask. She wouldn’t…” Her voice cracks. “She doesn’t want this for you.”
My heart wrenches inside my chest. “I saw that wound on her side. It wasn’t fresh. She didn’t get it from the gardai in the market today. And you didn’t seem the least bit surprised.” I narrow my eyes at her. “You’re part of this. I don’t know how yet, but I’m not a fool. So don’t try to tell me what I should or shouldn’t risk to save her.”
“Whatever you think of me,” Keeva says cautiously, lifting her hand in front of her. “Think.This isn’t a situation you can walk away from. She wouldn’t want you in danger. Not from these people.”
The candles flicker and shadows shift in the far corner of the room.
I sense movement from the edge of my vision, see long limbs slinking from the cover of velvet darkness pooling in the farthest corner of the shadows.
Fuck.
We never checked the rest of the room.
A rough, lethal voice carves through the dark. “You really should have listened to her.”
SIX
He wears his shadows like a second skin.
Even from across the room, his green eyes feel like flames too close to my skin, sparking in the dark. He moves with a lethal grace, the candlelight caressing the edges of his sharp jaw, then the flash of the dozen or so daggers in sheathes down his ribs. Not one of them is longer than my hand, but the threat rippling off him leaves no doubt any one of them could slit my throat.
My mind howls in warning, just before recognition flares.
I smell the blood pooling in the market dirt all over again. Hear the scream of the guard’s sword flying for my head, and the words the cloaked man gritted out to me after killing him.
Go for the throat.
Danger crackles in the air between us as the man stalks out of the shadows. The floorboards don’t make a sound beneath his feet, though the soft brown leather boots look almost exactly like the ones the gardai wear; it’s as if he snatched a pair for himself and somehow managed to escape them.
“Your friend’s right,” he says in a voice somehow both soft and rough. “If you were smart, you wouldn’t have walked through that door.”
His voice tugs at something deep inside me, drawing out aflicker of defiance. I raise my chin and dare to meet his burning gaze. I refuse to let anyone intimidate me from getting what could save my sister. “And ifyouwere smart, you’d stop wasting our time and give me what I came here for.”
A smirk toys with those curved, full lips. He raises one brow. “Why should I?”
Keeva’s shoulders tighten, and she squares them to face the man who can’t be more than a few years older than me. “She’s as quick as you with a knife, so giving her what she wants is probably your best move here.”
She conveniently leaves out the fact that he’s got about eight inches on me and could no doubt put me on my back in a hand-to-hand fight in five seconds flat. Finn was right about that, at least—I’m better with daggers than fists.
Not that I would ever let a Whisperer get close enough to put hands on me.
But Old Ones, the way Keeva and this man talk to each other… it’s as if they’ve known each other for so much more than mere seconds.
The man tilts his head, eyes climbing up the length of my body. One finger strokes the edge of the hilt lowest on his ribs, tucked in against the faded leather jacket worn over his black tunic. There’s a sheath hanging by his side, as if it’s meant to hold a sword, but it’s empty. “Is that so?”
He moves in a blur of shadows and steel. I feel him slashing for my ribs before the whistle of the blade hits my ears and I jump back, twisting out of his reach.
The knifejustmisses my skin but catches the fraying hem of my cloak, exposing the green tunic underneath.
His jaw ticks, eyes flitting to the color before lifting back to me, and something unreadable glints in his cunning stare. “Quite the choice of color.”
My cheeks flush, and I’m grateful for the dark. “I’m not here to fuck around.”
Those green eyes narrow dangerously on mine, but I grit my jaw against the fear. There’s only one thing worth being afraid of right now, and it’s sure as shit not him. It’s losing Finn. That fear blocks out everything else and quickly curdles into the desperation I have to fight to keep off my face. “So, if you don’t mind,” I continue, “I’d like to get down to business.”
“And what business would that be?” The man steps closer, the candlelight catching on the outline of a thin, branching scar curling beneath dark stubble on his jaw—it looks like lightning in darkness.
