Page 6 of Captured in Love
She frowns at me but doesn’t question my judgment. I love my nieces and I don’t want them to be around when Kiran inevitably starts shouting, or when I report on what exactly happened in Egypt. A minute later, she returns, child-free but bearing a plate of fresh salmon fillets.
“Thanks.” I grin and stuff the cool orange flesh in my mouth.
“Where’s the token, brother?” Kiran insists, his blond eyebrows creasing in a frown.
I don’t miss the scornful little dip of his voice when he says ‘brother,’ either. I stifle a sigh. For once, I wish he’d just forget we were only half-brothers and stop giving me shit about it. After more than three decades of his constant jeering, I’ve had more than enough. Which is why I ignore him completely and report to Tinna instead.
“The task was more difficult than we anticipated. The tokens were held in an ancient tomb in the middle of the desert, which nearly killed me. If I hadn’t seen how another team of witches entered the tomb, I never would have even found the entrance.”
Kiran snorts. Tinna throws him an annoyed glare and waves at me to continue.
I brace myself, look her straight in the eyes, and say, “The human guide Kiran hired, Milo, is dead. Turns out Kiran failed to give me all the information on the man. He was a skilled mercenary, yes, but he was also a grave robber and a traitor. Kiran got him into his service by buying up all his debt and holding it over his head. I only found out about this when Milo pulled a gun on me and tried to rob the tomb.”
Tinna’s gray eyes darken. “What?”
Kiran opens his mouth, but she lifts her hand to shut him up, and even he won’t disobey the queen. He glowers at me instead.
“He tried to take another team’s token,” I continue relentlessly to get all the story out, “and he woke up an ancient deity. Or its statue, anyway.” I haven’t decided yet what to think about the black stone monster that nearly slaughtered us all.
I give Tinna all the gruesome details but gloss over the fact that I stayed behind to rescue a witch when I could have left her there to die and therefore eliminated a serious competitor. Forsomereason, the last thing I want is to discuss Nora Moss and the pull I feel toward her in front of my obnoxious brother.
Then I drop the last, crucial piece of information. “The coordinates for the next task here in Iceland have me thinking that the tokens are hidden in Sjávarborg.”
She jerks to attention. “How is that possible?”
I shrug because I have no idea how the witches managed to even learn about the ancient underwater metropolis, let alone dive down there and place the tokens inside. I’d only visited the sea dragon city once when I was barely out of high school, when Tinna insisted we needed to learn as much as we could about our ancestors. All we found down there were ruins, though, so we never returned.
“Show me the coordinates?” she asks, giving me a once-over as though she expects me to produce a phone or a map.
Instead, I open my right palm and present it to her.
Tinna takes one look at the branded strings of letters and numbers and gasps. Even Kiran leans in and frowns at the pink welts. The top row, with the coordinates to the tomb in Egypt, are fading now that I’ve collected the token from that location, but the Icelandic and the Greek numbers are still bright and shiny, even though they should have healed long before now.
If I injure myself by accident while in human form, any cuts, scrapes, and bruises disappear within a day or two. Kiran is a prime example of incredible shifter healing. He broke both his legs in a paragliding accident two days before the inaugural ceremony of the Ballendial Games, and here he is, with one cast already off and moving freely around on his crutches where a human would probably be wheelchair-bound for weeks.
Why he had to go paragliding when he has wings to fly is a different issue altogether.
“This is barbaric,” Tinna whispers. “Those fucking witches.”
Then she glances over her shoulder as though to check whether her girls heard her swear. She presses her lips together and exhales, her nostrils flaring.
“Okay,” she says finally. “We’ll let everyone know that we might have witches on the island, so they don’t go around swimming where they might be spotted in dragon form. And Kiran can take over this next task since this was his dumb idea from the start.” She turns toward our brother. “You’ll have that cast off tomorrow, you said, right?”
He opens his mouth to answer, but I beat him to it.
“He can’t,” I say. “At the ceremony, the witches specifically said that only the people bearing these brands will be able to enter the library should their team win. I am the only one who can complete all the tasks and get inside that place.”
Kiran throws his hands up. “Oh, of course, now you want to steal my idea and my glory. After how you bitched about taking my place? That’s rich.”
And just like that, something snaps inside me. “You fucking idiot,” I growl. “You think Iwantthis? I was nearly killed in Egypt because of you, and I doubt the two tasks I still have left will be any easier. Not to mention the fact that these witches arecrazy! A couple of them conjured up a fucking sandstorm so large, the locals called it the biggest meteorological event of the century. And that wasn’t even aimed at me! What do you think they’d do if they discovered I’m a sea dragon? Sooner or later, I’m going to come up against a spell that I won’t be able to get past becauseI can’t use magic. All of this just becauseyougot it in your head to rescue a piece of metal that doesn’t even mean anything to anyone.”
A ringing silence follows my outburst, the throne hall empty around us. Kiran’s expression is openly hostile, though, and Tinna narrows her eyes at me just a little. And I curse myself for saying that last part about her crown.
“Sorry, I didn’t—” I start to say, then trail off because anything I say now will be a lie.
“You never understood,” Kiran says, his words laced with menace. “How could you? You’re no royal.”
And there it is, the truth that will always separate me from them, at least in his eyes. In Tinna’s, too, even if she tries to hide it better.
