“Raia. Thank you for joining me.” His gaze doesn’t wander lower than my face as he bows and offers me an upturned palm. “You’re as beautiful as the soul beneath.”
The moment I slide my hand into his, Azrael’s eyes lock onto the engagement ring now decorating my finger. His jaw clenches. Gold eyes leap to mine before sliding to Lucen in a way that might send a shiver down my spine if I didn’t suddenly feel likesuch a fucking pawn.
The thought he had proposed to assuage my worries seems an obvious one, but his proposing to me as a form of retaliation...
The world around me seems to narrow—squeezing and choking me so intensely that my soul is forced from my body until I am free to observe this all objectively.
Each of my distant footsteps seems to echo with the wordspawn, pawn, pawnas Azrael guides me up the steps of his carriage.
Only once I’m seated inside does he turn to acknowledge Lucen.
“Congratulations on your engagement. I’d invite you to celebrate with us, but you look as though you’ve fallen ill.”
My hollowed gaze lifts to the strangely spade-shaped, gold-trimmed window of the carriage. Lucen is rooted in place, staring daggers into Azrael’s back as he climbs back inside and takes a seat across from me.
The driver shuts the door behind him, and a few moments later, the carriage snaps into motion. A golden orb of light, held in the hands of two gilded syrens swimming in opposite directions, decorates the ceiling of the opulent carriage. It casts a soft amber light. Theclop, clop, cloppingof hooves is loud in my ears as Azrael stares at me. Powerful legs spread wide as he leans against the dark green velvet cushions of his seat. His presence—both physical and magical—seems to leave only a singular wisp of air for me to breathe.
He looks entirely displeased, and he’s not even trying to mask it.
His eyes dip to my engagement ring.
“Tell me about Lucen.”
My heart is in my throat, climbing higher and higher as if to leap out of this blasted, pompous carriage. “I beg your pardon?”
Azrael’s brows knit together, briefly scraping his teeth over a supple bottom lip. “Among a number of other things, you have a rare gift... One that allows you to discernsoulbonds,yes?”
His discerning gaze is impossibly suffocating—makes me want to leap out of this fucking carriage. “What of it?”
“You don’t have towillit into action. It just does it. Like the parasympathetic nervous system quietly working behind the scenes, regulating your body’s autonomic functions…”
“You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t quite see your point.”
He purses his lips in a feigned smile. “All god-magic works in that same fashion. Innate. A constant unspooling and restoration of energy that stretches out into the incorporeal and corporeal worlds to serve its purpose.”
He pauses for a moment, elbow perched on the edge of the window, and drags the back of a single digit across the sharp line of his jaw. “My own power lies not merely in the taking of life, but also in assessing it. Weighing the life and karmic debts of every soul. As any lucid person might imagine, walking through this corporeal realm is often like wading through shit—a cesspool, if you will. Eventually, you learn to compartmentalize these things, but when you come across a soul that does not belong in said cesspool, you notice.”
He studies me for several moments. “Imagine my surprise when I find you, a brilliant little beacon of light sharing dinner with a male that I cannot, for the life of me, find more appropriate words to describe him other than a steaming pile of excrement with pretty blue eyes.”
At this particular juncture, I can’t find the voice, nor the desire to disagree. At my silence, he continues.
“Do youknowwho it is you’ve agreed to marry?”
A knot of discomfort fists my chest.
Have I been so foolish this entire time?
How could I ever have questioned that Lucen was my soulbound when he is willing to use me as a pawn to pay his debts?
I don’t even truly know what Lucen does for a living. I can scarcely pry the words out of him.
And yet, I’ve agreed to marry him.
Am I that desperate to be loved?
That I fell for the first person who showed me any scrap of tenderness?
Dread and shame sink into me like heavy, dull talons tugging me down into a downward spiral of despair lined with comforting pillows of familiarity that are far too easy to confuse with safety.