Page 20 of A City of Flames

“There’s always something new every time I encounter you.”

Oh, shit.

Spinning and almost tripping on my cloak, I face Lorcan’s curious gaze on me.

“Do you always happen to appear everywhere I am?” I raise a brow, aware I’m coming across as defensive.

“I’m on guard, and I just so happened to see you exploring the grounds on your own.” His hands are behind him as he tips his head to the side. “I’d thought to check out if you hadn’t gone mad.”

I frown, but he doesn’t give me time to quip back. “What’s in there?” He points to my hand and the lavender silk net.

“A frog.”

He didn’t expect that answer. He chuckles, reminding me of how Freya had said she’d never seen him smile before. “Do you hate those too?”

“No.” My frown deepens. “I—I was going to let it go.” Feeling the need to set the frog free, I lower myself to the ground, shaking the net as it hops out. The glossy skin, like colors of the forest are visible even in the night as I watch it disappear, and water ripples from the stagnant pond before I stand, facing Lorcan again.

A crease forms between his eyebrows as he looks toward the pond then at me. “Might I ask why you trapped it in—” He nods at the net. “That?”

I glance at it in my hands. “I used to be a trapper.” Or still am...

“And you miss it,” he states, the same curiosity now dripping from his voice.

“I’d done it since I was thirteen. I’m not you, having been used to this since a young age.”

His eyes drift down to his sabaton boots, letting out a soft disbelieving laugh. “You’d be surprised by what I’ve been used to before.”

I angle my head slightly. Before arriving in the city, I’d not asked much but now I want to know things about everything, everyone. “And what is that may I ask?”

“Well, if you must know Miss Ambrose, I was homeless after my father’s death. My mother had died after giving birth to me, and by the time I came to the city, the general found me on the streets, barefooted and malnourished.”

A whoosh of air leaves me as I try to hide the shock on my face. I didn’t expect him to open up like that... All at once. “I’m—I’m so sorry,” my words stumble over each other.

“It was a long time ago.” He dismisses it, but I can sense a kernel of anger for one second before it vanishes. “You should head inside. I’d hate for an attack to occur and for it to have been my fault because I was... distracted,” he muses, and I glower at how he’s thrown back the word I’d said on the first day of training.

Raising my chin, I ignore his request to head inside and instead say, “Freya tells me there’s never been an intruder in the barracks before.”

“Freya... wasn’t here for two years. There hadn’t been attacks for years prior, but as of lately, shifters have become more unpredictable.”

I just about jolt over the word unpredictable. “Even with steel powder?”

His head motions over me. “The walls all contain it, but that doesn’t mean they can’t infiltrate the fields, where there’s less of it.”

“Or maybe they’re becoming immune,” I say in a quiet murmur. If the Golden Thief is unaffected by it, who’s to tell others of his kind aren’t? Who’s to say he hasn’t breached past the castle walls before?

Lorcan regards me silently, intrigued by my response. After a while of not saying a word, he nods. “Maybe, Miss Ambrose.” With that, he looks off past the barracks and to the castle towers, turning as if to walk away.

“Wait,” I call out to him in a rush. He stops, russet hair lightened by the moon brushes below the neck of his armor. Once he turns to me, I say, “I know about the Golden Thief.”

He studies me carefully, almost like he had put up a shield that not even the sun goddess Solaris could shine through.

“I saw a poster in the city,” I add, chewing on my bottom lip. “Is he really that hard to catch?”

“Supposedly,” he says, looking at me through lowered brows. “He’s smart in his own ways, but there is one thing we’ve come to know.”

“What’s that?”

His lip twitches, and satisfaction rolls off him. “He can’t fly.”

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