Page 78 of Savage Crown

The second attacker tries to flee.

Tries.

Rylan moves like a shadow, too fast, too precise.

One strike.

A muffled choke.

The second man collapses.

Dead.

The room is silent.

Breathless.

I push myself up on shaking arms.

The pain lances through me, sharp and unbearable. I hiss, gripping my injured arm.

Rylan wipes his blade clean, his movements slow, deliberate.

“Who were they?” he asks, voice eerily calm.

I force myself to lie. To breathe.

“I don’t know.”

Rylan crouches in front of me. His gloved fingers tilt my chin up and our gazes meet. His touch is deceptively light.

His eyes are not.

“That’s a shame,” he murmurs. “Because they knew exactly who you were.”

29

RYLAN

She thinks she can outlast me.

She thinks she can endure.

But I have broken men far stronger than her.

Seraphina stands before me, shoulders squared, chin lifted in that way that makes my blood simmer—defiant even in the face of her own undoing.

The stench of blood still clings to the air from the corpses in her room. The assassins Lartina sent did not get what they came for.

But I did.

Proof.

They came for her. They wanted her alive. That means something.

It means she is valuable in a way she has not admitted.

A human slave should not be worth this much trouble. A human slave should not have assassins sent to retrieve her.

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