Broken by the Horde King (Horde Kings of Dakkar #4) - Zoey Draven Page 0,95
soft earth, assured and determined, reaching inside me, reaching places I thought long gone.
That was the fear that came to me right then.
Clearing my throat, I looked down at the necklace. If I wore it among the horde, everyone would know it was a gift from him. It was much too exquisite, much too expensive for anyone else but a horde king to give.
And maybe I wasn’t immune to material things. Especially if they were this beautiful. Because even with the risk that his horde would know about us, I didn’t want to take it off. It was a piece of home.
“It’s beautiful, Kiran,” I finally told him, meeting his eyes again. “Kakkira vor.”
He nodded and his hand slid away from my neck. I watched him stand, watched him move to the fire basin and light it up for me. The fire flared to life and already I felt the warmth from it creeping across the voliki.
“I’ll send your piki in to attend to you,” he said, his small, knowing smile catching me off guard.
“Kiran—” I sighed.
But he was gone, ducking beneath the entrance so I couldn’t argue.
I sighed again, the quietness of the voliki reaching me. It seemed so much larger now that Kiran was gone. He’d filled it so completely that I acutely felt his absence…
Or maybe he’d just captured so much of my attention, held onto it like the sly, wicked, arrogant creature he was, that I hardly noticed anything else.
“I might be in trouble,” I whispered, stroking the pendant, desperately wishing Laru was here.
I had been so certain I could do this, that I wasn’t at risk of loving him again.
It had taken Kiran a single morning to make me doubt everything.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“Oh, it’s beautiful, Missiki,” Hinna breathed. Then she blinked at me guiltily and corrected, “Mokkira.”
I sighed, suddenly feeling like I was fighting a losing battle, especially since Hinna was brushing through my wet hair. She’d tried to help me wash my hair in the bath—which was a traditional duty of a piki—but I’d firmly put a stop to her advances and she’d sat, worrying her lip as if she was failing, as she watched me finish rinsing off.
I’d felt a little guilty, so when she picked up my brush with a hopeful expression—the brush which I’d found among the rest of my possessions that Kiran had taken from my voliki—I didn’t protest.
When she’d first set foot into the voliki this morning, she’d looked so excited she could explode. She’d confessed she’d never been inside the Vorakkar’s voliki and had peered around discreetly with wide eyes while I’d bathed.
And thankfully, she didn’t ask why I was suddenly sleeping in the Vorakkar’s bed because I wasn’t even certain I could give her an answer.
Now she was admiring the necklace that Kiran had given me in the mirror. I was seated on a low stool and Hinna was standing behind me. It felt nice to have someone brush my hair. My lomma had often brushed it at night before I went to bed.
A pang went through me and I breathed through it. It always hurt to remember, to ache with the memory of her and to know that we would never make any more together.
Blinking back the tears that were rising, which were always close to the surface these past two days, I cleared my throat.
“Hinna, can I ask you something?”
“Of course, mokkira,” she said, frowning.
Swallowing, I asked something that had been on my mind since…well, since I’d arrived, truthfully.
“Has the Vorakkar been with a lot of females in the horde?”
Her hand paused in my hair for a brief moment before she resumed.
“It is hard to say for certain,” Hinna finally answered, hesitation in her voice, which made my chest clench, a sharp sting of jealousy I thought I’d been over. “In fact, the Vorakkar has always been private about these things.”
“Private about what things?” I asked, frowning, staring into the mirror at the pendant that hung from my neck. Little seffi flowers twinkled in the fire’s light in the basin next to us.
“It is strange,” Hinna went on, “because the Vorakkar has never shown interest in taking a Morakkari. Until now.”
I swallowed.
“I mean,” she stated quickly, “that…he has…he never—”
“It’s all right, Hinna,” I said softly.
She took a breath.
“So he never announced he would begin his search for a queen?” I asked.
“Nik,” Hinna said. “And whenever there were feasts, he never drank from the goblets that the females brought to him.”