by K. N. Banet
I finished lacing my boots and nodded.
“See you on the other side,” I said, leading him out of my room.
Grabbing my keys, I waved for Sorcha to follow me without missing a step. I didn’t like public displays of affection, so I didn’t get close to Raphael.
“Stay here. Have a beer. Cook for Cassius.” I waved at him and was glad to see him wave back instead of trying to come closer for a kiss or something like Sorcha and Cassius were already doing.
I went to the garage, opening the garage door before jumping into my car. Sorcha strolled out next and got into my passenger’s seat.
“We’re going to have fun,” she declared as I put the BMW into reverse.
That’s what Cassius is afraid of.
6
Chapter Six
“So, how long have you known Paden?” Sorcha asked as I drove. We’d sat in silence for all of two minutes.
“A long time,” I answered, keeping my eyes on the road.
“Since I’m fae, I know how hard it is for other species to have lasting friendships with us. How did you make it work?” She seemed professionally curious, her entire way of speaking changing from sassy noblewoman to something with a bit more of an edge.
“We don’t count favors anymore, stopped a long time ago. I’m sure if we did, things would have gotten messy ages ago.” I smiled a little. “He knows I don’t have time for fae games, and I keep his business…safe-ish. A Tribunal Executioner who makes money on the side as a bounty hunter is a good thing for him because it keeps the most dangerous criminals out of his hair.”
“Most of the time,” she pointed out. I glanced her way and saw her looking at her nails. “Cassius told me about what happened to him when Sinclair was after Raphael.”
“Sinclair was always an exception. He and I had a…” Sighing, I tried to find the right words. Rivalry was too small. I had hated him, and he had enjoyed taunting me. “I probably owe Paden after that one. He deserves something for taking the hit when Sinclair rolled through Phoenix trying to capture Raphael.”
“That’s why Cassius doesn’t want you to do this,” the silver-haired beauty whispered. “He’s afraid of what Paden will ask.”
“Is that why he broke and let you come with me?” That stung. I didn’t care what reputation Sorcha had among the fae, I was more than capable of taking my thumps from Paden and putting up with it.
“No, that’s why I offered,” she countered. “He would have let you go and get yourself shot in the foot with this because he thinks you need to learn your own lessons sometimes. I decided that was unacceptable.”
I let silence weigh on us, trying to understand. Sorcha wasn’t the best of friends I ever had, and I had no reason to think she particularly cared for me. I was a novelty she probably found interesting. Pulling up to a red light, I frowned in her direction.
“Why?” I couldn’t stop the simple question from rolling off my tongue.
The look she gave me in return showed me just how dangerous everyone in the fae believed she was. There was cunning in her eyes I had seen before, even though her expression was sweet. Everything in the mask worked except the eyes.
“Because my husband cares deeply for you, and that means I care deeply for you. I don’t have many friends. Among the fae, every variety of us, they whisper about me. They smile to my face and whisper behind my back. They look at Cassius like a disobedient boy rebelling against his missing father by marrying me. None of them are his friends, either. They want his power, his prestige. They want him to be his father, but no one can be King Brion. No one ever will be. When Cassius rejected the throne and the seat on the Tribunal, most of them ostracized him.”
“And he dove into his work and never looked back,” I said, knowing this part of the story.
“And he slept with you, creating a firestorm in our world. Most of them, especially his direct family, thought you were a terrible influence on him.”
“I was—”
“No, you were a better one than they could have ever been,” she snapped.
The light turned green, and I hit the gas, her words further confusing me as I tried to untangle them.
“I need you to expla—”
“You taught him how to have it all,” she said softly. “You, a ruler of the nagas, also a Tribunal Executioner, living the life you want to live. You don’t bend to the wills and wants of others because you’re confident and secure in yourself. You throw convention out the window. You don’t allow the prestige of birth and position to tell you to be someone you aren’t. You taught him that, and if it wasn’t for you teaching him that, I would have never had a chance to win his heart. If it weren’t for you, he would still be living by their rigid standards, never finding that someone who could love him for just being him. It didn’t have to be me, but I’m thankful it is. You also taught him how to love someone for who they are.”
“I…” I had no response. Never in my long life had someone said I was a good influence.
“He’s harsh with you because he cares, and he would have let you walk out without backup because you scare him, and he wants you to learn how to care for yourself, so others don’t have to worry. And he worries, Kaliya. Even as he courted me, he talked about you, always desperate for even the smallest rumor about how you were doing, if you were even alive sometimes.” She chuckled. “The moment I met you, I realized you weren’t in love with each other anymore, but there’s a deep bond. My husband doesn’t have many people, and it doesn’t take long to realize you don’t, either. So, I care about you because of that. All of that. I’m going to back you up because I know what it means to be a woman living a dangerous life and the perils that come with that. There’s nothing you can do about it. My mind is made up.”
The perfect mask came back, and she reached out, laughing.
“I’m glad we had this talk. It feels good to have a friend to talk with about these things. Men, right? They can be just as complex and confusing as women, and no one ever gives them the credit they deserve.”
“Yeah…good talk,” I said, trying to understand what had just happened. I wasn’t used to deep conversation, especially about Cassius, and even more so, his feelings. And this was Sorcha, his wife. She was a friend, but I didn’t realize she saw me in such high esteem. It was almost a newfound pressure of responsibility I didn’t want or need.
“So, what about you and Raphael? That’s complicated. I’m glad Cassius and I don’t have the sort of problems you and he do.”
I accidentally hit the brakes and forced myself to pull over, knowing this wasn’t something I could deal with while driving.
“Excuse me?” I asked, my fangs dropping as if I was about to go to war.
“He…” Sorcha frowned. “I thought he told you. Cassius and I don’t keep secrets. Keeping a secret can be used against us to sow discord in our marriage, even if the secret itself is not our own or even known by our enemies. I know all about you and Raphael being mates.”
“For fuck’s sake,” I snapped. “No, he didn’t tell me. I certainly wouldn’t have told him if I knew he would tell anyone else.”
“It was just me, and I have no one to tell,” she said quickly. She unbuckled her seat belt and leaned over. “I’m sorry. I thought he would have explained. I didn’t know he hadn’t. Forgive me. Obviously, this isn’t my place to ask about. Please forget I know anything.” She lifted her hands in submission and gave me a pleading look. “I wouldn’t purposefully step over the bounds of this friendship. I’m sorry.”
“Why are you being so nice?” I asked, once again confused.
“Because so many people are awful to me,” she answered simply. “For mistakes I made when I was younger.”
“Is that what you consider your past? Mistakes of a misplaced youth?”
“No, I think my past was me lashing out because of my own secrets.” She lowered her hands and sighed. “I won’t bring it up anymore.”
“Raphael doesn’t know,�
�� I said stiffly. “You understand that, right? He doesn’t know, and if I want to keep protecting him, he can’t know.”
“Do you think it protects him?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I know it does. The only person who can confirm he’s my mate is me. If you and Cassius never let it get out as a rumor, no one will ever know, and he’ll be safe from the troubles of my people. He’ll be able to move on and focus his time and efforts on a woman who isn’t riddled with her own problems. Maybe one day, he’ll have his own people. And…he won’t have to watch me do stupid, dangerous things every day, wondering if I’m going to come home. He won’t be put in danger, trying to follow me like what happened with the prison break.”
“Oh…” Sorcha didn’t have pity on her face, but honestly, I wanted her to. Pity was something I could get angry about. The look she gave me was sympathy, and I couldn’t summon a fiery temper to snap. “I…understand.” Nodding, she looked forward. “That’s a hard decision to make.”
“I never wanted a mate, anyway,” I muttered, putting the BMW back in drive. Hitting the gas, I tried to let the conversation die off.
But this was Sorcha.
“A secret for a secret,” she whispered. “Cassius told me a secret of yours without telling you, so I’ll offer you a secret of mine.”
“That’s kind of you but really unnecessary—”
“By the laws of Oberon and Titania, my husband and I have unintentionally slighted you, and we must make reparations,” she said, her voice turning unearthly. “A secret for a secret, of equal worth and equal danger.”
When I glanced her way again, her human glamor was gone. Her ears were long and pointed, like Cassius, which wouldn’t have caught my eye except they were wrong. Clan fae had softer points, a remnant of their slightly human origins. She was supposed to be a clan fae, but her ears were too much like Cassius’, long and pointed at a severe angle, reaching out possibly six or seven inches.
“Do you glamor your ears in your natural form?” I asked softly, carefully.
“I do,” she said with a small smile. “I’ve done it for so long, it takes a significant effort to drop the glamor on them.”
“How are you related to Cassius?” She had to be. With those ears, she was part of the pure born fae of Titania and Oberon.
“I’m not,” she answered with a grin and power in her eyes, the moon-grey gone. Now, her eyes were like pools of mercury, a swirling grey that made it very clear she was something of magic.
That sent shivers down my spine.
“What are you?”
“I’m a child of the fae lands, taken there as a human babe and made into something new,” she said with a smile, but I saw a silver tear roll down her cheek. “The parents Paden told you about only adopted an orphan as their own. It wasn’t until I was nearing adulthood when I learned the truth of my origins. That discovery led me to realize iron is not the same weakness for me. Then I rebelled against the ones who made me, for taking me away from the life I was supposed to live and forcing me down an unknown road they couldn’t help me with.”
“Oberon and Titania…that’s why you were only a fae arms dealer. You had a bone to pick with them,” I filled in, trying to keep my hands on the steering wheel. My knuckles were white, and my grip was bone-breaking, but I had to keep them there, or I would lose control of my own damn car.
“That’s right,” she said with a sigh. “Whatever their purpose, I’ll never know. They show up and disappear like bad parents always do, but that’s what I am. I was born a human and made into a pure fae…or something completely new. A secret for a secret.”
“Of equal worth. This doesn’t feel equal,” I pointed out, swallowing. No, her secret felt much more dangerous.
“Worth is in the eye of the one holding the secret. You are trying to protect a life—Raphael’s—with the secret of you and Raphael. It would rattle your people to the core because he’s not human. He is like no mate who has ever existed. Cassius and I are trying to protect a life—mine—by keeping the secret of my past. Imagine the storm that would descend on the fae if they knew who and what I was. Everything would change,” she said, and I caught her shrug in the corner of my eye, the shrug playing off the very real emotion in her voice.
I finally broke and said something I had wanted to since the silver tear fell.
“Please don’t cry. I don’t know what to do with tears.”
That made her laugh, and she wiped her face.
“Sometimes, I feel sad for the little human baby girl who never got to grow up into what she was meant to be,” she admitted. “Forgive me the weakness, please.”
“Grief is hard,” I whispered. “Especially when it’s for the futures we lost.”
“You know the pain?” she asked quietly.
“I lost the future I thought I would have the day my family was butchered, and sometimes, getting up and facing the road I’m on isn’t easy.”
“I think you and I know more about each other than we understood at first glance. I’m glad to know you, Kaliya Sahni.”
“And I’m glad to know you,” I responded, nodding decidedly.
We fell silent as I drove farther into the city. As I approached the Jackalope, Sorcha sighed.
“How close are you to Paden?” Her glamor was back up, looking human but not perfectly. She still had big moon-grey eyes and silver hair. She was still tall and had a lithe, perfect body. I knew this Sorcha better. Unlike Cassius, I wasn’t used to her going between glamor and no glamor. On him, I rarely noticed the difference.
“Some days, it feels like I know him better than anyone. Others, it can be like we’re strangers.”
“I wonder if that’s his fault or yours,” she said, crossing her arms.
“Probably mine,” I admitted, shrugging as I found a parking spot. “When it comes to people like Paden, I have to be careful about what I say. I trained myself to be careful all the time, with everyone as a result, so nothing could leak…ever. I’ll tell people the naga are in hiding, but never a single thing more. I tell people I ran away when I was young and went to train with Hisao, but nothing about what happened in between.”
“You give half-truths. You don’t lie, but you keep the details that matter to yourself.”
“Yup.”
“With everyone but Cassius,” she said, raising an eyebrow.
“Shit,” I muttered.
She chuckled. “I won’t let on that I know anything more or less than what you present to the conversation. I just wanted to know what our starting baseline was because I don’t know what sort of things you tell Paden.”
“He knows more than most of my colleagues, the other Executioners and Investigators. He knows less than Cassius…and Raphael. But we shouldn’t get into any personal topics tonight.”
“One would hope,” she agreed, unbuckling her seat belt.
I got out of the BMW as well and locked it up as she walked around to me.
“Just in case things get hairy down there…are you armed?” I asked, going to my trunk, opening it as she opened her clutch and shoved half her arm in. I watched as she pulled out a sword by its hilt and revealed half of it.
“I’m always armed.”
“You’re quickly becoming my new best friend.” I picked up a holster from the trunk and put it on, then opened a gun case and grabbed the two I wanted. Finally, I revealed a secret space underneath the trunk with several sharp objects. I picked a dagger and put it into a thigh sheath, then closed everything up.
“I’m perfectly okay with that. I need more friends, and you’ve proven to be an interesting one. I thought my days of excitement were over when I married Cassius.” Her grin was all trouble.
I laughed. Together, we headed into the Jackalope as if we owned the place, and heads turned. There were too many fae in the place for Sorcha to go unnoticed, and everyone in Arizona knew me.
And there were no well-meaning men there to keep us in line.
7
Paden met us at the top of the stairs. Usually, he waited for me to get downstairs, but there was apprehension on his face that told me he didn’t know if he was comfortable with Sorcha and me there without backup from Cassius and Raphael.
“Hey, Paden,” I greeted, smiling as I walked toward the stairs, considering just walking by him. Sorcha had my back, staying close enough to stop an attack but far enough away, no one would feel like she was crowding me.
“Executioner Sahni and Lady Sorcha. Welcome to the Jackalope,” he greeted, nodding his head. “Is there anything I can help you with tonight?”
“No need to be formal,” I said, not liking it. I was used to Paden being at least a little happy to see me. This wasn’t normal. “I wanted to hire you for something off the record.”
“Oh.” He blinked and nodded, looking between me and Sorcha, his expression changing to deep confusion as a frown formed and his forehead wrinkled. “My office?”
“Please?” Sorcha spoke over my shoulder, her voice innocent and sweet.
He grunted, then nodded, waving us to follow him. When we made it downstairs, I noticed it was a little emptier than usual.
“Business slow?” I asked, frowning at the only three people having quiet, lonely drinks.
“Since the prison outbreak. A lot of my clientele had connections to people in that place. Bosses, colleagues, family, enemies, and friends, you name it. I think another six months and I’ll start seeing people down here again. Upstairs makes enough to keep the bar in the black, and I’m still doing my real job.”
“And that’s why we’re here,” I said as we entered the back office. The last time I’d been in this room was too long ago. I had come home from a pointless trip for the Tribunal, and Paden wanted me to look into a strange story about a man named Raphael Dominic Alvarez.
It had all started right here.
“What do you need?” he asked as he sat down. I sat down in my favorite seat across from him while Sorcha examined the couch, then slowly sat on it.