Page 55

Heat swooped through me as his gaze made a similar assessment, dipping from the plunging neck of my nightrobe to where the silk skimmed just above my knees. He lifted his eyes again, slowly, my body prickling in the path of his stare. Then he parted his lips and moved as though to slide his chair back. As though to walk straight toward me and warm the skin that had bristled at his attention.

But he winced at the movement. And the sight of his pain lanced through my reverie.

I stumbled forward, the door clicking shut behind me. “Do you need help?”

Keil paused, seeming to consider. His eyes roamed over my face again, now pained in a different way. Then he took a deep breath and said, “Yes. Thank you.”

I drifted toward the lantern’s glow and stopped before him, between the spread of his knees. Deliberately averting my gaze from the golden stretch of his torso, I took a bandage and assessed the wound—then grimaced. Though it wasn’t as deep as my arrow wound, it still looked too deep.

Or maybe any injury looked too deep on a person you never wanted to see injured.

“Doesn’t it need stitches?” I asked.

Keil shook his head. “It’s just a scrape.”

One he’d earned knocking me out of the path of Mara’s knife.

“A scrape I would’ve taken for any of my allies,” he added with a knowing smile.

But that smile didn’t brighten his face as it usually did. His eyes were shadowed—an echo of his raw expression in the outbuilding tonight, when he’d realized he’d had his sister’s torturer in his sights . . . and she’d gotten away.

“It’s been just you and Valeria for a long time now,” I said quietly, “hasn’t it?”

He nodded slowly, seeming unsurprised at the direction of my thoughts. Seeming as willing as he’d always been to bare himself to me. “She’s my best friend. We used to argue about who was older, but secretly, I always believed it was her. And that those extra five minutes of life experience had made her infinitely smarter than me.” His expression turned fond, and a little sad. “Stronger, too.”

I remembered his hands shaking as he’d opened Garret’s prison wagon all those months ago. What had he experienced in the following moments, seeing what had been done to the person he loved most?

“You’re allowed to feel like this,” I said, not knowing how to iron out the crease of sorrow between his brows. But knowing that he was bearing this heartache alone . . . and that I wanted to help him carry it.

Keil’s gaze shuttered, then dropped. “What happened to Valeria didn’t happen to me. I have no right to her pain.”

“But you have a right to yours.” My gaze drifted involuntarily to his wound. “Nobody should have to see the blood of the people they care about.”

“No,” he said softly. “They shouldn’t.”

Finding Keil’s attention fixed on my upper arm, I averted my eyes to the writing desk. A long gold chain sat on its surface, much like the one Valeria wore—except this one bore an empty claw-pronged setting, as though the gemstone had been knocked out.

Keil ran his fingers over a small engraving in the desk—an engraving I hadn’t noticed. “It’s the crest of an old Wielder family who once owned this land,” he said, misconstruing the direction of my gaze.

Then I wondered if he’d noticed after all, because he covertly shifted the chain behind the lantern, as though hiding it from my view.

Clearly, the chain was too sentimental for him to share.

I leaned forward. And with the hem of my robe skimming his thighs, I began wrapping his shoulder. I felt his eyes on me as I worked, his skin warm under my wind-chilled fingers.

“Too tight?” I asked as I secured the bandage, my voice slightly wispy. Positioned over his bare chest, standing in the open crook of his legs, I must have appeared as though I were about to seat myself in his lap.

“It’s perfect. Have you done this before?”

I gave him a dry look. “Tied a knot?”

“Bandaged a wound,” he clarified, his breath of laughter grazing the back of my hand.

I cracked a small smile as the air lost the heaviness of grief. “My best friend, Tari, once scraped her knee in town. She didn’t want to walk to her mother’s clinic, so she made me rip the hem off my skirt as a bandage.” I cringed, still half smiling. “Her scrape got infected.”

“Poor Tari,” he said, and hearing him say her name produced a pleasant swoop inside me. As though Keil was assimilating into my life.

“And of course,” I added, smothering that feeling before it could take hold, “I recently bandaged my own wound. Though that got infected, too.” I frowned. “Perhaps you shouldn’t have given me this job after all.”