“You barely even spent any time in there.”

“Only enough to wait for you.”

He clamped his mouth shut right at the end of the sentence—like he didn’t expect it to sound the way it did.

Once again, I carefully did-not-notice this.

“Besides,” he went on, “I couldn’t exactly wander around socializing wearing this ridiculous outfit.”

I didn’t know what that meant.

“Why?” I took a sip of beer. “Does it offend your fashionable sensibilities?”

“It’s about two hundred years out of style.” Raihn scoffed and shook his head, his smile souring. “The Moon Palace has a cruel sense of humor.”

I didn’t know what that meant, either, but before I could ask, Raihn’s eyes fell back to me. They started at my face and slid down. I sat with my legs folded beneath me, the silk of my dress bunched around my upper thigh on the left side, where the skirt slit. His gaze traveled from my eyes to my mouth, down my throat, shoulder, side, all the way down the bare curl of that leg.

It lingered there, on my thigh, and I didn’t so much as breathe as I watched his lips curl.

“Dangerous,” he said.

Yes, I agreed, silently.

“But resourceful.” His smile broadened, and I realized he was talking about my blade—strapped around my upper thigh.

I exhaled. “I had to be creative.”

“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t walk into that party armed to the teeth.”

“You’re armed, too.”

I lifted my chin to his sword, which had been strapped across his back. I had to notice, now, when Raihn was armed. That sword could kill me with a single strike.

He shrugged.

“What’s this?” he asked, motioning to his throat.

My own fingers mimicked the movement, and I brushed Ilana’s scarf. The reminder of it made a knot of grief—and anger—tighten in my stomach.

“It belonged to a friend.”

Sometimes I resented the fact that Raihn so often heard the things I didn’t say. Right now, though, maybe I was a little relieved by it.

“A human friend,” he said.

“Yes.”

“The one from that night?”

We both knew which night he was talking about.

They’re dead, little human.

I gave him a questioning look—how did he know?—and he responded with a faint, humorless smile.

“It smells like the Moon Palace.”

Fuck. Fuck, I hated that.

Raihn’s smile faded. “What’s that face for, princess?”

“I just—it shouldn’t smell like that place. It was… hers. It doesn’t belong to them.” I touched the end of the scarf, winding it around my fingers. Like if I clutched it tightly enough, I could feel her hands as she had tried to give it to me. Mother, I wished I had taken it from her then.

And now it seemed like one more demeaning injustice. That the place where she had died erased the final remnants of her life.

It felt ridiculous. No doubt sounded ridiculous, too. And yet his face shifted slightly—shifted in a way that said he understood. He leaned a little closer.

“That isn’t all,” he said. “It also smells like…”

His eyelashes lowered, and again, he moved a bit closer—only inches between us now.

“Like rose perfume,” he murmured. “And bread. And… cigar smoke.”

I choked a strange sound, involuntarily. So often, I had been jealous of vampires—jealous of their strength, their speed, their power. But never more than I was in this moment. I would have given anything to smell Ilana again. Smell her and that disgusting messy apartment.

“Really?” I said, my voice rougher than I’d intended. “You smell all of that?”

“It’s a bit difficult, over the scent of…” He cleared his throat. “Well. You. But yes, I do. If I try.” His eyes lifted to mine. “It’s all still there, Oraya. The Palace didn’t take everything.”

My fingers tightened around the fabric.

“What was her name?” he asked. “Your friend?”

“Ilana.”

I hadn’t actually spoken her name aloud since she died. The shape of the syllables on my tongue felt like rebellion.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I’m sorry for what happened to her. And I’m sorry that… this is a hard place to grieve.”

A hard place to grieve. What an understatement. There was no room for grief in a place like this. No room for softness or vulnerability. And certainly no room for the kind of anger, messy and undignified, that Ilana’s death had ignited inside me.

“She was a person,” I said, between my teeth. “Not prey. Not a game. She was—”

Fuck, what wasn’t she? She was silk and cigar smoke and a short temper and a million contradictions; a full life of a thousand other thoughts and dreams and desires for the future—and someone whom I loved, deeply.

I lowered my gaze to the clay of the roof, my hands tight and knuckles white around my mug. I waited for the sting in my eyes to pass.

“Can I ask you a question, Oraya?” Raihn said. “You don’t have to answer, if you don’t want to.”

I nodded.

“When we were bonded in the trial, I felt… I felt a lot of things. Your anger. Fear. The grief.”

My jaw tightened. My instinct was to lash out at him just for acknowledging that he saw those things in me—I so fiercely guarded them. But then, there was no accusation of weakness in his voice. And I’d felt all of that in him, too. Just as potent in his heart as they were in mine, albeit in different ways.

“If you win the Kejari,” he went on, “would you ask Nyaxia to change you?”

I understood exactly what he was asking, and considered not answering. He is Rishan, Vincent whispered in my ear. I couldn’t tell him about binding myself to Vincent, becoming his Coriatae. Those details were far too sensitive.

But Raihn, damn him, saw the crux of my answer on my face, even when I hadn’t said a word.

“Yes,” he said. “You will.”

He sounded oddly disappointed, which I hated.

“Why wouldn’t I ask her to make me something different?” I shot back, a bit too quickly. “Do you have any idea how exhausting it is to live this way? I can’t change anything, be anything, if I’m just stuck being prey.” I clamped my teeth down on my words, then shook my head once. “No. I can’t do that like this. Not how I am now.”

“You can’t?”

I had to force myself to meet Raihn’s eyes. I half thought he was mocking me. But there was nothing feigned in his stare, nothing ingenuine. Only sadness.

In that trial, he had looked at me like I could do anything. Like I was more powerful, more awe-inspiring, than Nyaxia herself. No one had ever looked at me that way before.

And even now, a shade of it lingered.

“Don’t be so quick to throw away your humanity, Oraya,” he said. “You might find you miss it once it’s gone.”

And maybe my human eyes were weak in the darkness compared to his, but the shadow wasn’t enough to hide the twinge across his face that he pretended wasn’t there.

“Those parts of yourself are never really gone,” I said quietly.

“Sometimes, I’m not sure about that.”

“You don’t think I see how hard you’ve worked to hold onto your humanity? You’re more human than I am, Raihn. You’ve kept every part of it that makes you value the things in this shitty world that no one else here does. You’ve kept the compassion. It doesn’t matter if your blood runs black now. That hasn’t changed you.”

Such a raw compliment tasted strange on my lips. It was so uncomfortably earnest. But I said it because I knew he needed to hear it.

And… I said it because it was true.

Raihn went very still and very silent. And slowly, so slowly, his gaze lifted to me.

Before, he had looked at me like I was a goddess, and I had thought I couldn’t feel more powerful than I did in that moment.

I was wrong.

Because now he looked at me like I was more than that—like I was human. Somehow, that meant more.

I had to force the smirk to my mouth. “What’s that face for?”