She didn’t let go… until she did, by increments. Then, on a breath out, the tension went out of her body.
I lifted my head. Her eyes were dark, her lips swollen, her hair a wreck from my hands. She looked like a queen who’d been thoroughly ruined, and I wanted to finish the job.
"If we start this now," I managed, "I won’t stop."
Her gaze dropped to my mouth. "I know."
The silence stretched. My whole body ached with the effort of holding still.
She was the one who moved first—palm flat against my chest, pushing gently. Not away. Just… enough. "We need to leave," she whispered.
"You’re right.” But I couldn’t make myself move.
Her laugh was shaky, breathless. A brightness against the tugging darkness of our lives. "So let’s go." She rolled her hips against me, and her eyes flashed.
My grip tightened on her thighs, instinct warring against duty, before I let her down slowly. I kept her pinned against the wall because if I didn’t, I’d throw her on that bed. Her hands stayed fisted in my shirt.
"When this is over," I said, low.
Her eyes met mine. "When this is over."
A promise. The first one between us that felt absolutelytrue.
We left the inn after the sun had set. A raucous tune followed us out the door—glasses clinking, men laughing like tonight was the last, best night of their lives. I didn’t have to ask Eury if the pubs carried the same intensity in the Dip; I had roamed them enough during my trips back, just to see for myself what the rest of the kingdom was like.
The outer districts were always edged withmore.More want, more need, more desperation.
I felt that want in Eury. It flowed off her like her magic, visible in any light, nearly tangible. Back in the inn she’d been so hungry for me, just as she was hungry for everything. Power, touch, knowledge.
Her hunger was a drug.
She walked close beside me in the early night. “You aren’t going to tell me where we’re going?”
“Better I don’t say.”
“What if I lose you?”
“You won’t.”Not ever.
The middle wall loomed high over the pub. We followed it, walking the slanted street beside the sewers, until the pub noises had faded away. The perpendicular streets became narrower, the buildings’ façades less kempt, and the lights dimmer, less frequent.
We’d reached the poorest part of the inner district. The Sluice. The last place I wanted to be, the exact place we needed to be. And my fear had nothing to do with what lay above ground. I hoped she couldn’t hear my thudding heart.
I brought us to a sewer grate and stopped atop it.
“This again,” Eury said. “Here I was certain we’d be infiltrating the castle.”
I knelt over the grate. “Certain, or hoping?”
“Same difference in the Dip.”
I smiled as I slid my fingers through the grating. With gritted teeth and a groan of metal, I pulled it up and free. “Down we go.”
She didn’t move except to hold her nose shut with her thumb and forefinger. “There’s no way Carys’s dagger is hidden amongst acid-drenched shit.”
“And if it is?” I raised my eyebrows up at her. “Would you dig through it?”
“Of course.” She came around the hole, sighed, and lowered herself down the rungs attached to the stone wall beneath. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”