Page 21 of The Panther's Price

“No?” she snapped. “Because it kinda sounded like I’m your problem to solve.”

“You are.”

“Oh, good. Glad we cleared that up.”

Lucien’s hand raked through his hair. “I mean—dammit, Evryn—I’m not supposed to be doing this.”

She stepped closer now, fire rising in her. “Then whyareyou doing it? Why are you saving me from your own mother?”

He didn’t answer. Because the truth, that he’d been sent to kill her andcouldn’t—was the kind of thing that unraveled both of them.

Instead, he just said, “Because I couldn’t let them have you.”

She fell quiet.

Lucien turned away, tension bleeding from his shoulders like slow poison.

Evryn’s voice was soft this time. Careful.

“I want to find Eamon. That’s not going to change.”

Lucien nodded once, but didn’t face her.

“So,” she said, “we help each other. I stay off the grid. You keep your little rebellion secret. But welook for him.Deal?”

“Deal.”

Later, when she was asleep curled under a fractured stained-glass window, Lucien sat a few feet away—back against a column, shadows coiling lazily around his boots like old friends.

He watched her chest rise and fall.

Her lips were parted slightly. One hand tucked beneath her cheek.

Even here, smudged with dirt, wild hair tangled, dried blood on her collar—she looked untouchable. Sacred. Not in the way the Court defined royalty, with crowns and rituals and bone-deep arrogance. She was sacred like survival. Like fire refusing to go out.

Lucien leaned his head back, shutting his eyes.

He’d killed for less than she’d already seen. But he’d never protected anything before.

Not really.

He didn’t know what she was to him yet. A threat? A symbol? Or maybe a mirror. A girl molded by ghosts.

Like him.

TEN

EVRYN

The smell of something warm and barely edible tugged her from sleep.

Evryn blinked against the filtered light bleeding through the stained-glass remnants above her. The colors danced weakly across the cracked stone floor, fractured reds and golds shimmering like blood-streaked sunbeams.

She sat up slowly, muscles aching from the last so many sleeps on stone and root. Her throat felt dry, her mind fogged with remnants of the dream—of the panther, of the crown, of fire licking up through shadow.

Lucien sat near the broken altar, back leaned against a half-toppled column, tossing something small and round in his hand. He caught it mid-air and held it out to her.

“Eat.”

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