Page 17 of Until the Heart Stops
Callum extended a hand toward the direction I’d been heading.
“After you.”
Chapter 7
We walked in silence for a time, but Callum did not appear impatient with my wandering, not even when I paused at a stall that sold beautiful stone altar bowls. The vendor selling the wares possessed a powerful magic no longer found in my generation—I could sense it humming in the air around him. His gaze was sorrowful as I traced a finger across one.
“Who for?” the old man asked in a gnarled voice.
I rocked my jaw back and forth to stem the tide of grief. “My mother.”
He looked at the bowl for a long moment and a shimmer of magic slipped through the air. “She would like this one.”
The bridge of my nose burned and I nodded. “I think she would too.”
I sighed, knowing it was far beyond my means in any case to buy this particular bowl, regardless of how beautiful it was and how much she would have liked it. The man gave me a sad smile and offered another kindness. “Another day, lass.”
I wondered what my mother’s spirit had told him.
We set off down the cobblestones once more, Callum a little closer than he had been when we first began. “How long has it been?”
I tugged the shawl tighter around my shoulders. “Eleven months and seven days.”
The altar within the apartment I shared with Adrienne and Noah was set beneath our one large window that looked out toward the river. It was filled with offerings for all those we had lost. Though it had been long enough since my mother passed that I should have set her a bowl upon the altar, I still could not bear the thought of such a final gesture of loss.
Callum gave a small noise of acknowledgment. “And she was the one who you inherited Risqeu lan Serang from?”
Tension prickled across my shoulders. “Yes, she was.”
The tip of his walking stick clicked against the stones and I watched its progress rather than his face as we slipped through the crowd. The tension slid to the back of my neck, curling up over my temples.
“And she from your grandmère?” he clarified.
“Yes,” I answered carefully.
A brush of his cloak made me shiver and I resisted the urge to touch the warm gem against my heart.
“Why?”
I frowned, ducking beneath a low awning strung with dried citrus. “I don’t understand the question, my lord.”
He stopped and it took me a moment to realize. The furrow returned between his brows, stretching the silvery scar. Around us people bustled from one stall to the other, a few calling out to friends or companions, but it was as if we were in the eye of a storm for all the notice he gave it. “Why keep it open when there is now so much competition?Last I entered the Souzterain I counted two separate blood dens bursting with clients, and yours…”
Heat flared across my cheeks. He did not need to finish his thought. I stared at him, the tension now spreading across my face until a pain throbbed behind my right eye. But when I did not speak, he took a step closer, gray eyes searching mine. “You work yourself to the bone, and to what end? I know much of duty, Mademoiselle Searah, and I cannot understand?—”
“It is not duty,” I cut across him.
His jaw shut with asnap,next words squeezed out as if from stone. “I am trying to understand.”
My brows ticked up. “And where does this need for understanding come from, my lord?”
“Do not call me that,” he rasped.
My heartbeat tapped behind my eye, pain spreading across my brow. “Is it a strange fascination as to how those who your maker spurns live? Or is it for your maker himself that you ask such things?”
His hand snapped out, fingers wrapping around my throat. In half a breath he was closer than he had ever been, towering over me while his cool palm tensed. But the grip was not punishing, merely the pressure of his presence. The warmth in my cheeks slid lower, curling down my spine and settling in my belly.
“You do not understand the first thing about my relationship with my maker,” he growled. “And you misunderstand even more than you could possibly dream.”
