Page 62 of Lich's Mate

Or did he somehow betray me?

My jaw tightens at the thought, and I feel myself unconsciously starting to scowl.

No. He wouldn’t do that.

If this is going to continue to work out, you’re going to have to trust him more than that.

“So, it’s about Gorran,” Vex starts, already trailing off.

“Yes,” I clarify. “I figured it was.”

Vex sighs.

“There’s no easy way to tell you this, but you know that mission that went surprisingly well, that you and your?—”

He stops himself before he addresses Meera as ‘the human’ again.

“That you and Meera foiled?”

“Given that it only happened three or four days ago, yeah,” I reply. “I’m pretty familiar with it.”

I try to ease the severity of my voice. I never saw myself as that kind of leader, strict to the point of being hard to work with.

But Vex sent for me out of the blue, with little warning or ceremony.

Last night, we were in the middle of an intimate moment, and a thud filled the room, as a karasu hit the closed window of our manor.

He didn’t even clarify what it was about. The parchment I pulled from the limping karasu simply read ‘We need to talk. Privately.’

The hardest part was keeping it a secret from Meera. I really didn’t want to ruin the moment any more than I already had.

But I partly feel like this isn’t necessarily her fight either. She’s already done her part.

Why she hasn’t left yet is beyond me. However, thinking about that inevitability does cause me a handful of unpleasant feelings.

“Well,” Vex says, breaking my thoughts. “It didn’t go quite as well as we had hoped.”

I feel my fists clench at my side but relax them slightly, realizing that it isn’t Vex’s fault.

“How?”

“Pardon?”

I take a deep breath, my nostrils flaring. I can see Vex cowering slightly. He likes to claim we’re both equals, but I still sometimes see the fear in his eyes when he angers me.

“How didn’t it go as well as we hoped?” I press. “Our plan seemed pretty foolproof to me.”

He nods solemnly, his eyes more drawn to the ground than toward my gaze.

“Well, I thought it was weird when you told me what happened, so I went back and double-checked…”

“You thought it was weird?”

Vex purses his lips.

“Look. The way you described it, there was almost no fight at all,” he says. “We were expecting a lot more guards and a lot more resistance…”

“Not if we caught them by surprise,” I counter.

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