No blood.

Heat flooded my cheeks, a combination of humiliation and powerless despair. It’s a fucking alien butter knife.

I lurched forward, my elbows hitting the table. My head sank down into my hands, my palms pressing against my burning eyes until all I could see was darkness. I wanted to stay there. The darkness. I’d lost so much – my dad, my home, the friends I’d had on this planet. Now, here I was, a prisoner not even trusted enough to hold a goddamn butter knife.

“Why are you even here?” I asked dully. He hadn’t killed me yet, and he didn’t seem to have come to hurt me. He couldn’t interrogate me, either. So what, then?

I didn’t expect an answer. And I didn’t get a verbal one. But there was something. Something that startled me enough to pull my hands away from my face.

It was the sound of stone and crystal hitting my plate.

I blinked at the knife as it rattled back into place, as if it had been carelessly tossed down from above. I looked up questioningly, seeking Asha Wylfrael’s face but only finding his back as he walked away from me to the other side of the table. When he sat down in the chair facing me, he did not look at me, but wordlessly began to eat from the other plate.

He came to eat fucking breakfast with me?

I watched him incredulously, wondering if I was dreaming. This scene was just way too bizarre. The two of us seated across from each other, with matching plates, like we were sharing a meal at some bistro together.

“Why are you even here?” I asked again, the question a whisper this time. His eyes flashed to mine, and I found myself looking back down at my plate. My gaze lingered on the knife, now still.

Tentatively, I picked it up, my fingers curving around the dark emerald handle. Across the table, Asha Wylfrael stopped eating, as if waiting to see if I’d hurl it at his head even knowing now that it couldn’t cut. When I didn’t, he took a swig of something from a mug.

Why did you give this to me?

Had he tossed it back down on my plate simply because he’d been satisfied the knife couldn’t actually do any damage?

Or had he noticed my reaction – my defeat when he’d taken it from me – and changed his mind about keeping it from me?

Or maybe it was all a trap. Something meant to look like carelessness, or kindness, that was supposed to lure me into a false sense of security.

“Did you kill them?”

I hadn’t even realized I’d asked the question until the words were out of my mouth. Asha Wylfrael lowered his mug, staring at me intently, as if by reading my lips from across the table he’d be able to make more sense of my foreign words.

“Did you” – I pointed at him – “kill” – I took the knife and mimed aiming it at my own throat – “them?” At the last word, I swung the knife wildly to the side, pointing towards a wall, beyond the wall. To the place my friends had once been. “Did you kill them? Did you kill the other women? Humans?”

Asha Wylfrael’s fox-like ears twitched. He leaned forward, bracing his starlit forearms on the table.

“Humans,” he growled. I shuddered at the disarming sound – the ripple of his deep alien voice wrapped around a word I actually understood. His eyes flicked to the knife I held. “Kill humans.”

He didn’t nod or anything like that, but there was a sense of acknowledgement in his repetition of the words. I knew in the deepest parts of myself that he’d understood my question. And had now answered it.

So, he did kill them.

Obviously not everyone, as the ship had left with some sort of crew. My heart twisted when I thought of Min-Ji and Suvi. They were so late getting back to the ship. Is there even a chance they made it?

I remembered how easily Asha Wylfrael had erected and then toppled that massive wall of snow, and I doubted it. He was too powerful. He could have stopped them in their tracks before they ever reached the safety of the ship.

“And will you kill me, too?”

Asha Wylfrael cocked his head, trying to make sense of the word “kill” among all the others.

“Asha Wylfrael... Kill me?” I once again aimed the knife at my own throat, this time to emphasize who it was I meant.

His silvery brows rose in an apparent mixture of understanding and surprise. He leaned back in his chair and studied me, one hand’s fingers drumming a slow beat against his leather-clad thigh, the other hand rubbing thoughtfully at his chin.

Fuck. I shouldn’t have asked him that. He looks like he’s actually considering it now!

Cursing myself for being such an idiot, I tightened my hold on the knife. It was so dull it was basically worthless.

But right now, it was just about all I had.

OceanofPDF.com

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Wylfrael

The blunt, if clumsy, courage of her question gave me pause. Made me stop and study her, rubbing my hand across my jaw. I wasn’t considering the answer to the question itself – I already knew I wouldn’t kill her now. I was considering her. This fragile creature with her skinny little neck, useless little knife, and enough spirit to go chasing down the question of her own death, even if it meant throwing that question at the feet of a god.

“What would you do if I tried?” I mused, more to myself than to her, wondering just how far that spirit would take her. I knew she wouldn’t understand the question, and she didn’t. But she held the knife a little higher anyway, as if in answer.

I smirked at the futile fierceness of the gesture.

“I’m not going to kill you,” I finally said. I waved my hand in a dismissive motion. I didn’t know how to construct a sentence in the negative in her language, having only just learned the words “kill” “you” and “me,” so the hand movement would have to be enough. I did not feel like putting more effort into the communication than that. Let her understand me, or let her not. If she is afraid that I will kill her, it is only because she has earned that fear. Let her deal with the consequences of invading my world. I do not owe her anything.

But if I did not owe her anything...

Why had I given her back that knife in the first place?

Because it’s dull, I told myself as she watched me and clutched it. Because she could never hope to harm me, or herself, with it even if she tried.

It was certainly not because of the way she’d slumped forward, as if in grief when I’d taken it, such a small thing, away from her.

No, that was not the reason. Because if that was why – if I were for some absurd reason beginning to care about what this criminal human felt...

I need some space from her. I needed to keep myself away until I’d seen Rúnwebbe and could properly interrogate her. Once I could put words to all her vicious motivations, learn from her own mouth just how much wrong she’d done by me, I would be able to find my equilibrium again.

“Worry less about me killing you and more about starving to death,” I grumbled, rising from my seat and walking to her side. I nudged the plate closer.

She stared down at the plate without moving for so long I thought I’d have to force her to eat again. But finally, keeping the knife in one hand, she picked up the bread with the other. She ate slowly and without looking at me.

When she’d finished the bread and started reaching for her mug of sweetened sotasha milk, I noticed a dark reddish-purple mark marring her wrist. Some sort of human colouring? It looks swollen, though...

Before her fingers closed around the mug’s handle, my hand shot out and gripped her wrist. She cried out with more than just surprise and anger when my thumb pressed into the spot. Hers was a sound unmistakable across species – a short and strangled melody of pain.