Page 44 of The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King

“Come on,” he said.

“Absolutely not.”

“We both know you’re going to agree. So let’s skip the part where we go back and forth about it. We don’t have a lot of time.”

“Are you asking me or are you commanding me?”

His mouth tightened. “Can I really command you to do anything? If you really want to go back to your room and sit there by yourself, you can do that too. Your choice.”

He pulled his hood up a bit more, the shadow over the top half of his face highlighting the smirk on his mouth, the strength of his jaw, the light pooling in the lines of the scar on his left cheek.

Mother damn him, I wished he wasn’t right, but he was.

I approached warily. He reached for me, then hesitated.

“May I?” he asked, his voice a little rough.

I nodded, trying very hard to look nonchalant.

It wasn’t the first time Raihn had flown with me. But it was the first time since… the end of the Kejari. The thought of being that close to him, the thought of allowing him to hold me… it…

Fear is a collection of physical responses,I told myself, trying desperately to slow my rapid heartbeat before he could sense it.

Even though this was a whole different kind of fear than the adrenaline rush of bodily danger. Harder to numb.

I stepped onto the sill, and he pulled me into his arms, one tight across my back, the other under my thighs. I wrapped my arms around his neck in a way that felt far more natural than it should have.

He smelled the same. Like the desert and the rush of the sky. The warmth of his body felt the same, too—firm and stable.

For a brief, terrible moment, we paused just like that. His muscles tightened, as if struggling with the instinct to pull me closer, to make this a real embrace. Such a subtle movement, but I still felt it, because my awareness of him was so agonizingly acute.

My attempts to slow my heart had failed, and Raihn undoubtedly heard it. My eyes fell to his throat—right at the angle of his jaw, where muscles flexed as he swallowed and turned his head slightly to look at me.

I didn’t want to meet his eyes, because that would have put our faces far too close together.

His thumb rubbed that single circle on my upper back.

“You’re safe,” he murmured. “Alright?”

He sounded a little sad.

And then he hurled us into the night sky.

* * *

He brought us,to my surprise, to the human districts. He kept us out of sight during the flight and landed in the yard of an abandoned building. As soon as he set me down, I took two steps away from him, eager to put space between us.

Our hoods had fallen back in the wind. Raihn casually replaced his and started walking to the main streets. “This way.”

“Where are we?”

I didn’t recognize this part of town. I’d been all over the districts, but this was near the outskirts of Sivrinaj’s borders—far even for us, during our nighttime training sessions.

“I want to show you something.” He glanced over his shoulder, the hood obscuring all but his profile. “Oh. And I brought these for you. In case you want to have some fun while you’re here.”

He held out two sheathed weapons—blades.

Shock stole my steps for a moment, then I had to half-run to catch up to him. I snatched the weapons from his hands in case he thought better of it.

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