Jason had the utmost respect for Jessamy, knew her words were no lie. Born with a malformed wing that meant solo flight was out of her grasp, she’d suffered anguish such as Jason couldn’t imagine. He would never discount it, never consider it less important than the forces that had shaped him, but he knew the way they had grown and developed was fundamentally different.
As he couldn’t imagine what it was not to be able to touch the sky at will, Jessamy couldn’t imagine what it was to be alone. Utterly, absolutely alone. Not for an hour, not for a day, not for a year. For decades.
Until he had forgotten how to speak, how to be a person.
That endless aloneness had withered something within him when he’d still been a boy with wings too heavy for his body, and unlike Jessamy, he believed it to be a permanent loss. As irrevocable as the fact that the atoll where he’d been born, where his mother had been buried, was gone, crushed by a massive quake caused by an underwater volcanic eruption. It was as if his parents had never existed, as if he’d always carried this aloneness inside him.
“Obviously,” Mahiya said into the silence, “I’m outclassed,” having utilized the pause to paint on the mask of a woman who had grown up in a court—where venom was most often delivered with a honey-sweet smile.
“Enough games.” Though the survivor in him admired her fierce will, he couldn’t allow that to give her the upper hand. “Make your decision and make it quickly.”
A fine tremor silvered over her skin, and he knew that beneath her stubborn refusal to give in, she was afraid. Jason didn’t like inciting fear in a woman. It brought back too many memories that would not fade no matter how many years passed, his hands tingling as if he’d been pounding on a locked bedroom door in a futile attempt to get out, to stop what was happening beyond.
“No, you are mist—”
“Don’t lie! I saw the way you looked at him!”
The roar echoed through time, but haunted as he was, Jason had long learned to dance with his demons. He held his silence even when the quiet grew jagged with the sharp bite of Mahiya’s fear, even when his every instinct snarled at him to destroy the thing that made her afraid.
“You need to give me something in return.” Lines forming around soft lips, shoulders squared. “I can’t surrender the most valuable piece of information I have without gaining something equally valuable in return.”
It was then that Jason understood this princess with her quiet grace had learned to use fear to strengthen herself rather than allowing it to crush her. Some unknown, hidden part of him felt a searing joy, the emotion raw and unexpected and so extreme, he had to use conscious effort to wrench it under control. Even then, it burned, the midnight flames licking at his veins.
“If your information is good,” he said, thinking through his violent response to judge that she was willing to risk death to hold on to this final piece of information, “I’ll speak to Raphael.”
Hope shot golden light across her face. “Will he—”
Jason would not bargain with lies and half-truths. “No archangel will start a war over you,” he said bluntly. “It doesn’t matter what secrets you possess.”
Mahiya could feel herself beginning to fracture from the inside out. With a few words, Jason had just destroyed the single precious drop of hope she’d cultivated through humiliation and hurt and a lifetime of knowing she lived on borrowed time. The worst thing was, he betrayed no emotion about any of it—as if her life meant nothing. And this was the man she’d wanted to touch, wanted to learn?
“Then,” she said, clawing her way out of the abyss on a tower built of rage and pride and an agonizing sense of loss for something she had never possessed, “what use is your promise?”
“A direct defection isn’t the only way to get what you want.” Jason’s tone was harsher than she’d ever heard it, his eyes so dark they were ebony. “You grew up in a court. Think about it.”
Mahiya blinked at his anger, her own emotions skewing sideways.
“The information,” Jason demanded before she could unravel the tangled skein of her thoughts.
In the end, it wasn’t a difficult choice. Because the cold, hard fact was that Jason was right—it didn’t matter that she’d done nothing to warrant incarceration in this gilded prison. Neha was the ruler of this territory, had absolute authority over her citizens. If she wanted to torture Mahiya for an eon, that was her right.
As Jason had pointed out, no other archangel would step in and risk inciting a war for the knowledge Mahiya currently held. Therefore, it must be Jason. At least, he hadn’t lied to her. Rather, he had a way of being too honest, stripping away illusion and hope. So she would throw the dice and hope he kept his end of the bargain.
“Lijuan,” she said, her chest aching at the remembered sensation of the bone-chilling cold in the corridor that night. “No one saw her arrive, and no one saw her leave, but as she’s no longer fully corporeal, that means nothing. I heard her speaking with Neha inside the room guarded by the vine snake—and yes, I am certain. Her voice is distinctive.” Screams, that was what lived in Lijuan’s voice.
Jason was silent for a long, long time, the swirling curves and fine dots of the tattoo on his face stark in the sunlight. When he did speak, it was to say, “I need you to find out if any of the women in the court—high or low—have gone missing. Focus on the ones who aren’t at the center but at the edges.”
Startled by the abrupt change of subject, she answered instinctively, “That should be easy enough to discover. The population inside the fort is tightly controlled.”
Jason spread his wings, the darkness spilling off them, and she knew it for a sign of dismissal.
“That’s it?” she asked, wanting to grab hold of him, shake him, shatter the obsidian walls that kept him remote from the world. “That’s all you have to say?” So easily, he’d destroyed then forgotten her.
“For now.” He rose into the air.
Teeth gritted, she pushed herself into a vertical takeoff, knowing the conversation was over. She could never catch him in the sky. Not only that, he was a spymaster. If he wanted to vanish, Mahiya was ill-equipped to keep track of him . . . and Neha had to know that. “A game,” she said through a throat raw with such rage that it threatened to blind. “It was a game from the start.” Neha had set Mahiya up to fail, set her up to die.