Page 120 of The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King

Then the man’s face changed. The smarmy smile faded. His eyes widened, and just kept going, until they were comically perfect circles.

He stumbled backwards, nearly tripping over two of his companions.

“Highness,” he breathed.

My heart sank.

Fuck.

Raihn’s face fell as the boy dropped clumsily to his knees, his hands raised.

“My king, I apologize. I—I apologize. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Raihn ducked his head, wincing, as if he could make the boy unsee what he had recognized. But it was too late.

And just like that, the room turned.

It took a few seconds for people to realize, but once they did, the silence spread through the crowd like the blanketed fall of night. Soon every set of eyes was trained on Raihn, all wide, all terrified.

And for one moment, Raihn’s gaze fell back to me—utterly devastated. Just a glimpse, before he quickly swept it away under a mask of nonchalant ease.

He rose and raised his palms. “No harm done,” he said. “Didn’t mean to cause a commotion.”

He glanced around at the room, now pin-drop silent, half the patrons on their knees and the other half looking too terrified to even make themselves bow.

“We should go,” he muttered to me, and took my hand.

I didn’t even pull away as he led me out the door, the crowd parting around us like they couldn’t get away fast enough.

33

ORAYA

Raihn didn’t talk for a long time when we returned to the city streets. He was walking fast and I matched his pace, not sure where we were going. He adjusted his hood, looking straight ahead, not so much as glancing at me.

But he didn’t have to.

I felt a pang of sympathy for him. He had few pieces of his human identity left. I knew how much he valued the shards he could salvage. As much as he tried to pretend it was all about shitty beer, I knew otherwise.

I shouldn’t care. I knew I shouldn’t care. Yet I just kept walking beside him.

“Sorry,” he muttered, finally, once we had walked a couple of blocks.

“It’s nothing.”

It wasn’t nothing. Not really.

“I guess I can’t go back there for a while,” he said. “But at least…” He stopped short, and I realized that we’d come to the same boardinghouse he’d brought me to before. He flashed me a wry smirk, barely visible under the shadow of his hood. “At least we have some other safe havens.”

The man at the front desk was, once again, asleep—at which I could’ve sworn Raihn breathed a sigh of relief. He led me up to his apartment. The place looked the same as it had the last time we were here, though a little messier—more papers scattered over the desk, a used wine glass beside the basin, the bedsheets a little rumpled.

I eyed those bedsheets longer than I meant to.

Raihn sat down at the edge of the bed and fell back over it, sprawling out as if collapsing from exhaustion. Then he caught my eye and grinned.

“What?” he said. “You want to join me?”

A teasing prod, of course. And yet I could imagine it so clearly. How his body had felt beneath me. How he’d smelled. How he’d tasted.

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