laughed around her ’rillo, dragging the smoke from her lips.
“Don’t blame me. You’re the one who pleaded for more.”
“Couldn’t help myself.” Ash nuzzled closer. “And you like it when I plead.”
Goddess help her, but she did. Exhausted as Mia was, just the thought of it was enough to send fresh shivers along her spine. The sweet surrender of Ash in her arms, the honeyed triumph Mia felt as she melted under her touch. She was drunk with it. Eyelashes fluttering as she smiled and breathed clove-scented smoke, the girl in her embrace hers, and only hers.
Truth was, it’d be easy to think Mia and Ashlinn were cut from the same cloth. A pair made of spit and fire, driven by vengeance, sharp and hard, aye, perhaps even cruel. But Ash was different when they were alone. She was softer here. Silk to Mia’s steel. All the walls she put up for the world crumbling away to dust. There were parts of herself Ash kept just for Mia—like secrets in the dark, whispered without speaking. A language of sweet sighs and knowing eyes, of soft lips and gentle fingertips.
Lightning flashed through the porthole glass (replaced when they’d berthed at Whitekeep). Thunder rolled across the skies above, black clouds stretched over the sky. Mia could still feel the three suns waiting beyond, though, like a leaden weight on her shoulders, an ache at the base of her skull. Hate upon hate.
Mia ran her fingers up the smooth curve of Ashlinn’s hips, over her back, feeling the girl shiver and sigh in her arms. She was a feast for the senses, sure and true. Beautiful, svelte, golden. But Mia found her eyes drawn to the tattoo scribed on her lover’s skin. The map she’d stolen at Cardinal Duomo’s behest. It showed a twisting path through a crescent mountain range, instructions in the tongue of Old Ashkah. Glancing at the inkwerk, Mia saw the map’s destination between the luscious divots at the small of Ashlinn’s back. It was marked with a grim and grinning skull, which didn’t bode well for whatever happened on arrival at this mysterious Crown of the Moon.
This, of course, put Mia in mind of Tric, and all he’d told her as they stood beside that blackened pool beneath Godsgrave’s skin. Aa and Niah. The war between Light and Night. The splinter of a dead god’s soul somehow lodged in Mia’s own. She thought of the deadboy sitting alone in his cabin, listening to the tempest while she locked herself in here and fucked his murderer. A cool sliver of guilt piercing her heart.
Ashlinn had risked her life for Mia countless times during her trials in the venatus. Aside from Mercurio and her passengers, Ash had been the only one Mia could count on during those dark turns. And what Ashlinn had done in the Quiet Mountain after initiation—as terrible and bloody as her betrayal had been—Mia would simply be lying to herself if she said a part of her didn’t understand it.
Ashlinn’s father had raised his daughter to see the Red Church’s corruption. And though his motives were selfish—though it was his maiming in the Church’s service that led Torvar Järnheim to raise his children as weapons to bring about the Ministry’s fall—Mia could understand that, too. And more, understand why Ashlinn had followed him.
He was familia.
When all is blood, blood is all.
Truth was, Mia was no different. She was no better. She wasn’t a hero, driven by the cruelty and injustice of the Republic. She was a killer, driven by the pure and burning desire for revenge. Scaeva and Duomo and Remus had hurt her, and so she’d set out to hurt them back. And if others got in her way on the journey, one way or another, she moved them out of her way. Ashlinn had simply done the same.
Except one of the people she removed was Mia’s friend.
Confidant.
Lover.
And a year later, Mia had fallen into Ashlinn’s bed.
There was something heartless about that, Mia knew it. And it had been easy to rationalize at the time—any turn in the venatus could’ve been her last, and she’d clung to whatever comfort she could find back then. She was indebted to Ashlinn. She saw a dark kinship in Ashlinn. Goddess knew, she was attracted to Ashlinn.
And Tric was dead. Gone. Never coming back.
But now …
And while the press of Ash’s lips left Mia feeling almost dizzy, the thought of her touch even now, laying senseless and sated, sending warm and