Page 32 of The Panther's Price

He slowed, glancing back.

“To a place where people won’t want you dead quite as badly.”

“Comforting.”

He almost smirked. Almost.

Lucien adjusted the strap of his pack. “They’re Veilborn. Unaligned to either side that wants you. Don’t deal with the Crown, don’t deal with Thalia. But they honor power and their own kind. And right now, you’ve got more of that than you know what to do with.”

She raised a brow. “So you think if I flash the Mark around they won’t slit my throat?”

He met her eyes. “No. I think ifIdo it, they’ll listen long enough to keep it in their pants.”

That earned him the faintest twitch at the corner of her mouth.

Not a smile. But it wasn’t hate. Progress. Still, her expression turned cold again.

“And what then?” she asked. “When they realize who I am?”

Lucien paused.

When the Queen sends someone else.

“When that happens,” he said, “you’ll be ready.”

Evryn studied him like she wanted to read his blood through his skin.

“You keep saying I’ll be something.”

“I don’t know what you’ll be.”

“Then why do you keep protecting me?”

Lucien looked at her. The truth curled on his tongue.

Because you remind me what I used to be.

He didn’t say it.

Instead, he said, “Because I don’t want anyone else deciding it for you.”

They stared at each other.

For a moment, it felt like maybe there was still something unbroken between them.

She turned and didn't look back.

FOURTEEN

EVRYN

Evryn kept her hand near her knife the entire walk through the pass.

The world had narrowed to tension and terrain—her bootfalls, the occasional grunt from Lucien ahead, and the creeping certainty that she was being led into somethingmuchbigger than him.

She didn’t trust him. Not fully. Not anymore.

Not after the messenger crow.

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