Page 113 of Tarnished Queen

I roll my eyes. “Maybe one day the people I trust will trust each other and I can have a tiny sliver of peace in my life.”

“I wouldn’t count on any peace whatsoever until Xena is dead.”

“Is that who did this to you?”

“Not herself,” he clarifies. “Fuck, I wish she would have tried to fight me herself. There’s nothing I’d love more than to strangle that backstabbing bitch with my own two hands. But no—as always, someone else did her dirty work. Her soldiers made sure I knew she sent her regards before I went unconscious.”

“Was it a surprise attack, then?”

He shakes his head and his eyes go unfocused. The movement is too much for him and he presses two fingers to his temple for a second to steady his skull before he looks back at me. “I was trying to meet with a contact. You wanted information from inside Xena’s ranks, and I thought there was one person I might be able to trust. It was a risk, but I guess I didn’t realize how much of one.”

“You’re saying you did this for me?”

He grimaces. “I didn’t have a lot of options. The family I grew up in has turned their back on me. I have no one to trust and nowhere to go. Earning your trust is my only chance to turn this mess around and not lose everything I’ve worked for.”

“Let me tell you, it’s wildly flattering to be your last choice.”

“It’s not—” Christo shakes his head. “It’s not like that, Nikolai. I just—”

I hold up a hand to stop him. “Breathe. I get it. And I don’t care. Loyalty is loyalty, and I’ll take it either way.”

He looks relieved. “Thanks.”

“You risked your life to get me information. We’ll call it even.”

“I just wish I’d gotten something out of the meeting aside from a bruised kidney. My contact didn’t give me shit.”

“I’m honestly surprised Xena didn’t try to feed you false information. Seems like a good way to set a trap for me.”

A small part of me wonders if this whole thing could be a trap. But I don’t see how. Christo has gotten inside of my house before and he didn’t need to be unconscious to do it. Plus, I made sure Belle and I kept our chit-chat while Christo was knocked out to a minimum. You can never be too careful.

“She probably knew I’d be on the lookout for something like that,” he says with a shrug. “I was going to triple-vet any information I got in case she was feeding me bullshit. I’ve learned the hard way not to trust Xena. Part of the reason I left in the first place is because I knew Xena would kill me next to make sure her claim to leadership couldn’t be contested.”

I arch an eyebrow. “I thought you left out of loyalty to your dead father.”

He shrugs. “It was both.”

Christo’s honesty is refreshing. Not for the first time, he reminds me of Arslan. If half of everything he says becomes a sexual innuendo, I might start to wonder if Arslan wasn’t reincarnated.

“Instead of setting a trap, she sent a message,” he says. “‘This war will end soon.’”

“That’s the message? I usually can’t shut Xena up, and now, she decides to be brief and cryptic?”

Christo gestures to himself. “Blood is worth a thousand words, I guess.”

“I guess. But it still seems strange. No offense, but why would she think I’d care that she beat you up?”

“Offense taken, actually,” he mumbles.

I snort. “Don’t be so sensitive. Why not attack someone closer to me?”

“She still might. You should take stock of the people in your inner circle. Make sure they’re okay.”

“You just saw Belle,” I remind him.

“Is she it? There’s no one else.”

My mom is dead, my father is as good as, no siblings, Arslan is gone…

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