Page 46 of The Panther's Price

She smiled against him. “Good.”

He kissed her temple. Held her closer. Lucien didn’t feel like a weapon anymore, the first time since he could remember. He felt like a person, His own.

He felt likehers.

TWENTY

EVRYN

Evryn woke warm.

It was a strange thing to notice first—not the ache in her muscles from training or the ever-present weight of danger humming in the world around her. Just warmth. The kind that wasn’t from a fire or a cloak, but from being held. From knowing, if only for a moment, that someone saw her. Chose her.

Lucien’s scent still lingered on the air, cypress and smoke and something darker, like steel right before it sings in the forge.

But when she stretched a hand out beside her on the mossy ground beneath the arching moonleaf tree, there was nothing but cold.

Her eyes opened fully.

He was gone.

The remnants of last night still ghosted her skin—his hands, his mouth, his voice in the dark—but the emptiness beside her sharpened fast into suspicion.

This wasn’t like when he kept watch. This feltdifferent.

She sat up, breath steadying, eyes narrowing as she reached for the power humming low in her chest. Her Sight. It had grown stronger in the past days, more precise. Eamon had once toldher it would bloom under pressure, under pain. He hadn’t been wrong.

She inhaled slow, let herself fall inward, and when her eyes reopened, the world shimmered.

Footprints, energy trails, not physical—shimmered faintly across the garden floor. A pulse of motion, heading east, cloaked in familiar shadows.

Lucien.

And not alone.

She followed the thread.

The veil around the perimeter was thin here, Lucien had probably believed she wouldn’t sense him leaving through it. But she had trained under his hand now. She knew how he walked when he was lying.

The wind shifted. Voices, hushed, filtered through the trees. Evryn crouched behind a curtain of silverfern, pushing her Sight just far enough to catch every word.

Thalia’s voice, smooth as ever, like silk hiding thorns.

“You’re wasting time, Lucien. She’s clouding your judgment.”

“I know what I’m doing,” Lucien muttered.

Thalia asked, her tone feather-light and cutting. “Do you? Because as far as I can see, you’re playing the Queen’s orders fast and loose. Selyne won’t be patient forever. In fact, I think the only reason she has given you this time is because of your obedience and loyalty to her tasks in the past. But this–”

Lucien’s reply came like a crack of cold thunder. “I still serve the Queen if that’s what you’re asking. My loyalty has never shifted so don’t think you can use your words against me.”

The word echoed like a punch to the ribs.

Thalia’s next words dripped like honey laced with poison. “And what happens when the girl finds out? When she realizes you’ve been keeping her alive only until you decide it’s time to finish out your mother’s orders, being her perfect executionerand all? Because if that’s not the case, you may as well hand her over to me. You know I don’t plan to have her head on a silver platter as your mother does. The girl is no threat to me.”

Lucien didn’t answer. Didn’tdenyit.

Evryn’s fingers curled into fists against the dirt. Her heart was pounding so hard it felt like it might tear through her ribs.

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