Page 90 of Rogue Elves of Ardani

“What?”

“The other night elves do. I was looking at them downstairs.”

He seemed at a loss for how to answer. He shook his head. “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it,”he said flatly.

Running her fingers through the strands, she gathered it in one hand and tied it back away from his face and neck.

“Did you do it when you lived in Kuda Varai?”

“Sometimes.”

She dipped the rag in the water, then wrung it out. Vaara twitched when the cold cloth touched his shoulder. She gently scrubbed at sticky blood.

She slowed when she got to the silvery lines on his front. Some of them were not quite healed and still a raw gray-pink.

“Does this hurt?” she asked as the cloth passed over one of the lines.

“No.”

There was comfortable quiet for several minutes. Her cloth ran over his chest, over shoulders and arms, over hands that he’d dipped in the water but still hadn’t been able to clean completely, and scraped at his fingernails, which still had flecks of red stubbornly sticking around the edges and underneath. She was very aware of his eye on her, following her every movement with attention so rapt and thoughtful that, uncharacteristically, she felt her cheeks darkening under his gaze.

“He’s going to kill me next time,” he said.

She looked up at him, frowning.

“I can feel it,” he said. “Something was different this time. He is losing patience. Next time, he’ll kill me.”

“There won’t be a next time.”

“There will. One way or another.”

Her free hand was resting against his shoulder to balance herself. She felt the darkness creeping into his mind again, poisoning his thoughts.

The shame was still there. As if he was the only one who’d ever been hurt by someone evil and powerful. As if that was even something to be ashamed of.

He didn’t understand true shame the way she did.

She lowered the cloth to her lap.Can I show you something?she thought to him.

He raised his head a little. She felt him respond in the affirmative.

She hesitated, almost changing her mind. Then she closed her eyes, gripped his shoulder, and recalled an old memory that she usually did her best to forget.

She and Patros were in the parlor at the house. They stood over a weeping man who knelt on the immaculate wood floor.

In the present, in the back of her mind, Crow felt Vaara recognize the place. It was the same room she’d shown him before, where Patros had made her practice her empathy on a stray dog.

Patros tossed a small, sharp knife to the floor beside the man, then stepped back. He looked expectantly at Crow. Another test of her growing abilities—just like with the dog, before.

She swallowed tightly. Her hand slowly came to rest on the terrified man’s forehead.

The man cringed under her touch. With her hand on his forehead, she felt the fear in his mind as if it were her own. His panic shredded through her, eating her alive, and she was desperate to pull her hand away, to do anything to get away from it. But her hand remained there, absorbing his fear.

She weaved her own mind through his, violently cramming commands into it in her desperation to have it done with so she could let go of him. Shaking, the man picked up the knife and raised it toward his own throat. Crow could feel him resisting it. His dread and outrage soaked into her, breaking her with wave after wave of emotional pain.

Do it, she commanded him, furious at him for dragging it out so much. Tears spilled over and ran down her face.

The man lifted the knife and sank it into his neck. Blood spurted from the wound, hitting Crow’s boots.

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