Total pages in book: 247
Estimated words: 235897 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1179(@200wpm)___ 944(@250wpm)___ 786(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 235897 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1179(@200wpm)___ 944(@250wpm)___ 786(@300wpm)
My lips part. He’s right. Our first priorities are our dragons. They’re irreplaceable.
“Besides, with all this time we have coming up together on this mission, I thought maybe you’d at least be willing to have a quiet dinner with me?” His smirk slips. “Tell me you don’t let your non-boyfriend control you. Allow me to apologize properly, the way I should have three years ago.”
He lifts a hand toward the loosened strands of my braid, but never makes it.
Shadows blast straight through the wards and hit Halden in the chest like a battering ram, sending the crown prince of Navarre flying backward—straight into the rock wall.
Shit.
I cannot imagine sustainable life beyond the Emerald Sea. No ship has ever survived the tempests that form its ice-tipped waves, and the only sailors who return from her exploration do so defeated.
—The Last Admiral, a Memoir by Admiral Levian Croslight
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Halden!” I rush to kneel by his side, and the shadow evaporates like it was never there. “Are you all right?”
“My prince!” Anna jumps to the cobblestone, panic filling her eyes, as his second guard joins her. “Oh, Halden, are you…”
Not just his guard? My eyebrows rise as I glance at her hair. Yep, redheads are definitely his type.
Halden waves her off as he visibly fights for breath, and both guards retreat.
Thank you, Malek, Xaden didn’t kill him. There isn’t even a crack in the rock above his head. “Give it a second, and you’ll be able to breathe,” I promise Halden, praying his ribs aren’t broken.
Bootsteps approach from behind me, and a wave of glittering onyx wraps around my mind like a caress.
“Sorry about that,” Xaden says, his tone implying otherwise. “I was blocking a potentially lethal blow to the first-year and seem to have knocked the wind right out of you.”
I arch an eyebrow and slowly look over my shoulder at him. “Seriously?”
“He was going to touch you.” The glacial rage in his eyes has mine widening.
“Right, because that’s the mature response.”
Halden sucks in a breath, then another. “Quite. All. Right.”
“It wasn’t a response, it was… It simply was.” Xaden crouches behind me as Halden pushes himself to sit upright. “Let’s get three things straight, Your Highness. First, I have remarkable hearing thanks to the shadows at your very feet. Second, I don’t control Violet. Never have. Never will. But third, and most importantly—” He lowers his voice. “She really, honestly hasn’t thought about you. At least not since the second she set eyes on me.”
I’m going to fucking kill him.
• • •
A-I-M-S-I-R. An hour later, I’m still seething as I sit with Rhi on my bed, turning the fingernail-size bronze dials until each letter is visible in the book’s locking mechanism. My finger hovers over the tiny lever that will either open the book…or destroy it.
“I can’t do it.”
“We could talk about how your non-boyfriend threw your clearly ex-boyfriend into the wall instead,” Rhi says. “Or even chat about how you’ve never mentioned you were in a relationship with the prince.”
“Never seemed important.” I shrug. “He was just Halden to me like Aaric is…Aaric, and I promised myself I wouldn’t give him an ounce of my headspace when he turned out to be the asshole everyone warned me he was.”
“A prince? A duke? Clearly you have a type,” she teases. “Did Xaden know?”
I shake my head. Halden didn’t have Xaden arrested, but there was a definite gleam of promised revenge in his eyes when he strode up the stairs with his guards.
Class ended shortly after that.
“That explains the wall,” she muses.
Xaden’s complete and utter lack of control over his temper because he’s venin is what explains the wall, but I’m not exactly going to say that to her, so I change the subject. “Aimsir. It’s the right answer,” I say, mostly to myself. “My father’s world rotated on the axis of my mother, and they didn’t meet until their third year. Her first real love would have been Aimsir, and she was irreplaceable. Our entire family’s happiness rested on her health and survival.”
“You don’t have to convince me.” Rhi sits with one leg bent under her and her hands outstretched toward the book.
I rest the tip of my finger against the lever. “You think you can save my ass if I’m wrong?”
“I’ve never tried to retrieve six vials’ worth of liquid…or any liquid, but I think I can grab enough that at least all of your father’s work won’t be ruined.” She flexes her fingers, then sighs. “And if that rune activates…well, there can’t be too much power stored there. Probably just enough to destroy the book.”
“Probably.” I nod. “I can tell you I’d rather climb the Gauntlet again than be wrong about this.”
“Then don’t be wrong.”
I’m not. Lilith is the obvious answer, and therefore it’s the wrong one. Anyone else would have entered it without a second thought and ruined the book. No, he left this for me.