Kalia looked bewildered. She blinked quickly. “You…you would do that?”
“It’s long work,” I warned her. I gave her a hesitant smile. “But there is something immensely satisfying in it.”
Kalia stared at me for a long time. Long enough to make me think I’d said or done something wrong.
But she wasn’t glaring at me. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t even frowning.
She was assessing me. Her gaze went to the starwood flowers.
“I would like that,” Kalia finally said, sighing, her shoulders dropping again. I felt her gaze drift downward, stilling on the column of my neck, and a part of me tensed when her lips pressed together. Because I knew she saw it. Azur’s bite. Not from last night, but the night before. It hadn’t quite healed yet, though it had nearly disappeared, strangely enough. “I’m sorry for yelling. And for last night,” she mumbled.
I adjusted an escaped tendril of my hair, hoping to shield a little of the bite mark, though I knew it was fruitless. Kalia seemed embarrassed too.
“Let’s forget about it,” I said quietly.
There was movement behind her, and my eyes sharpened on the keep. Specifically on a balcony of the west wing.
My breathed hitched.
Azur.
He was watching us.
Judging from the windows, the balcony was only two rooms down from the records room in the west wing. He had his hands braced on the stone ledge, his wings flared wide as if he’d just been about to take flight.
I realized he’d probably heard Kalia yelling and had come out to see what the commotion was.
Or he’d been watching you before then, came the stray thought.
Even from this distance, I could feel his eyes on me.
As if on cue, the mark at my breast burned and heated. The memory of pleasure—hot and tight and aching—returned, but I swung around quickly, firmly pushing it from my mind.
“Let’s get started,” I said, keeping my voice light and airy.
Kalia gave me a tentative smile in return.
If she noticed the way my skin heated, she didn’t comment on it.
It didn’t help that I could still feel Azur’s gaze on my back.
Chapter 20
Azur
“The deed to the estate was finalized yesterday,” Zaale informed me, hovering next to my desk, though I had my back to him, peering out the window down to the grounds below.
Gemma and Kalia were down there.
Again.
The third time in three days.
“It was approved by the New Everton Council. The Nulaxy representative uploaded it to our Halo. He apologized for the delay,” Zaale continued.
The soft raspiness of his voice was growing more pronounced every day. I wanted him to give up his post. I wanted him to relax, but he had refused. I knew that Zaale wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he stepped down at head keeper.
The deed.
“Good,” I grunted. “Mr. Cross has his uses, it seems.”
“Does the Kylaira know?” Zaale asked.
“No,” I said, turning from the window. “She doesn’t.”
He inclined his head in an affirmative nod, his horns, streaked with silver tendrils, glimmering with the high afternoon sun.
“Do you plan to inform her?”
Having the Hara’s estate under my control had always been a part of the plan. Gemma likely hadn’t known that Rye Hara had already lost it. Over a year ago. He’d given the deed to a collector as collateral for a gambling debt.
When he’d first heard of my proposal, the first thing he’d had Mr. Cross amend to the marriage contract was a stipulation for the recovery of the deed. To pay off yet another collector—a toothy Binshay who also dabbled in vessel scrapping—to reclaim it.
But I’d had an amendment of my own, one Rye Hara hadn’t liked.
In the end, it had come down to whether he wished for his deed to be owned by the Binshay…or to be owned by the Kylorr who married his eldest daughter.
As of yesterday, the Hara estate in the Collis of New Everton was mine.
After I’d originally brokered the deal, I’d had malicious thoughts of selling the deed to whatever greedy-palmed, beady-eyed, salivating dealer I could find. The Haras would be kicked out of their own home with nowhere to turn. The estate would be overrun by leeches looking to profit off their belongings. All of New Earth would know their shame because I would ensure that it would be plastered on every inter-Quadrant database and news com network I could find.
And then I would turn the video feed over to War Crimes. Rye Hara would be tried and imprisoned. He’d rot away on a prison planet for the rest of his life, and thinking about that had made venom leak over my tongue, delicious and sweet.
Now there was only one problem.
My wife.
“No,” I finally answered Zaale. “She doesn’t need to know.”
“What should I do with the deed?”
“Put it with the others,” I told him. In our family’s secure network on our Halo. “And have a parchment copy placed in our vault.”
“I will,” Zaale said.
When I returned to my desk, however, I saw him hesitate on the threshold of the room.
“Anything else?” I asked, peering at him closely.
“The alerts you had Setlan set up,” Zaale started.
Setlan was our family’s private ambassador and advisor. If we needed anything done off planet, he would take care of it. It had been him who’d approached Mr. Cross with my proposal, after all.
I straightened as Zaale let out a mighty huff.
“It seems Rye Hara opened up a credits line with a collector on Vrano.”
“Vaan,” I cursed under my breath, dragging a hand over my horn. As if on cue, I heard Gemma’s laugh echo up from the terrace. I had the windows propped open, allowing a warm breeze to blow through my private offices. Every now and again, I’d catch a spare word of my wife and sister’s conversation. A laugh or two, even from my sister, which made a strange tightness in my chest snap and pull. “When?”
“This morning.”
Gemma would be devastated by the news.
When I’d first married her, I would have delighted in that misery. I would have fed on it like blood, lapping it up and feeling it warm me from the inside out. Rye Hara’s desperation—which I now knew was mingled with an addiction—would have felt sublime. Better than sex and more satisfying than a long drink from a blood giver after flying all night.
Now?
Now the announcement was accompanied by an uneasy twist in my gut. Because now I knew what Gemma had given up to try to help her family. Of which, I had a feeling she’d only revealed a fraction to me. Her loyalty to her sisters, especially, made the news all the more discomfiting.
He will never stop, I thought.
I’d told her as much four nights ago. In the quiet of the records room. Though I’d fed from her every night since—just thinking about her shuddering and gasping last night as I’d fed from her neck, feeling her squirm against me, filled me with sudden and alarming need—we hadn’t returned to the subject of her family. Or her father.