Page 215 of A Warrior's Fate

Recounting the deaths also seemed to move Ezekiel, whose eyes gleamed. “I won’t pretend to understand the reasoning of a witch.”

But there was something else. Something else he wouldn’t say. Ezekiel was manipulative, conniving, and those words—Deimos, traitor— nagged at her.

“Who’s the killer?” She chanced the words gently. “The one who did it.”

His stare hardened, and his nostrils flared. “I never saw their face. I never heard them speak. I don’t know who they were. She simply called them ‘her sword’.”

Her sword.

If that witch had been in the Wilds, then she’d need one. That was how she’d conquered the bak.

From the new quiet, came another question, “That jewel you had yesterday, where did you get it if not the vaults?”

Kai, who’d since gone to sit in the chair behind his desk, inclined his head. “Why?”

Ezekiel tightened and released his grip on the marker still in his hands, rolled it between his fingers. Fidgeting. Anxious. “She had a crown, the witch. Obsidian stone. It looked just like it.”

“It was a gift for Isla.”

“What did she look like?”

Both Kai and Isla had spoken simultaneously, but Isla’s eager question, rather than Kai’s vague brush-off, was what Ezekiel had been interested in.

With his eyes on her, she clarified, “The witch. What did she look like?”

A tug came at the bond, reining her back. Kai hadn’t wanted her to push him. Hadn’t wanted to reveal their hand?

“Black hair, blue eyes. Fragile and pale,” Ezekiel answered, making a point of the last two words. “Like she was a ghost, maybe a prisoner for years.”

Isla swallowed the bile rising in her throat and took in the facts. It hadn’t been her that the artist had depicted. Ezekiel wouldn’t look away as if he could see her thoughts coiling around her, threatening to suffocate her. Like he wanted to will them to.

“Why keep the desire for Mavec a secret?” Kai asked, drawing the attention away from her. “Mate of Io or not, you know I’d defend the city.”

“I apologize; it was just too much of a risk at the time,” Ezekiel conceded, lowering his head. “But now Fate has had her hand, and everything has fallen as it should.” He cast a look between them. “When are you planning to share the news? I imagine the mark won’t be wholly faded by the time the Imperial Alpha arrives.”

“When we tell her family is for Isla to decide, and the pack will know when the challenge is over.” Kai folded his hands over his desk, jerking his chin towards the door. “You can go. I’ll see you in an hour for the meeting with Gamma Hersch.”

Ezekiel nodded, rising to his feet. Carefully, he placed the marker on Kai’s desk, then bowed. “Alpha.” He turned to Isla and dipped again before drawling, “And Warrior—for now.”

Isla scowled, biting, “You’re dismissed.”

At her side, the corner of Kai’s lips ticked upwards.

Once Ezekiel had gone, Isla turned fully to her mate, whose features had fallen into a grimace. He’d dulled his power and was massaging his temples. “How the fuck was that worse than I thought?”

“I know,” Isla said, barely over a breath.

Kai laughed bitterly. “And he’s still hiding something.”

“How do you figure?”

“After you and I parted in Callisto, when I came back, all anyone—including Ezekiel—tried to do was convince me that Io was to blame for killing my father and Jaden. To turn me against them, against you…and I believed them.”

Isla remembered that time at the overlook, how nauseated she’d felt at the prospect.

“But Ezekiel knew the truth the entire time,” Kai finished. “That it was the witch they’d been helping who turned on them.”

“He just said why he didn’t tell you.”

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