Captive of Wolves (Bound to the Fae #1) - Eva Chase Page 0,93

after he felled Kellan when she crept to his side and offered her regrets, even after the way the bastard meant to savage her… The way she apologized to me after August stormed off on her…

A soft twinge passes through my chest, but I dismiss it as quickly as it rose up. She puts on a good show of honor and compassion, as if any being could really be that benevolent—and Sylas buys into it just like that. This despite the fact that her presence has caused more turmoil in and around this keep than we’ve faced since we were exiled here. Despite the fact that she has far less reason to consider our welfare than Kellan ever did.

It’s hard to believe those gestures weren’t actually strategic. How could she possibly truly care that much about any of us? Even Isleen—

I cut off that line of thinking with a jerk of my head and stalk onward. I don’t have to convince our lord that the mite is playing to his sympathies. I only need him to see the bigger picture. Nothing and no one could make him shirk from his duty.

Sylas isn’t in his study or his bed chamber—he isn’t one to ignore an insistent knock. Frowning, I prowl through the main floor and then down to the basement.

A murmur of voices and the jangle of modern human music carries from the entertainment room. He must be watching one of those absurd movies.

The door stands a few inches ajar, so I can see into the room before I reach it. I jerk to a halt within arm’s reach, my body stiffening.

I’ve approached quietly out of habit with the stealth it’s my nature to fall into when I’m alert enough. None of the figures in the room have noted my arrival. They are watching a movie, the shifting lights of the screen playing across their faces in the semi-darkness: Sylas, August, and the human girl tucked between them.

Her eyes have closed, her features even more delicate in sleep. Her head is tipped against Sylas’s shoulder, and his hand rests on her leg. By her other thigh, her fingers lie interlaced with August’s. As I watch, he glances at her with unmistakeable tenderness.

When he shifts his attention to Sylas, his expression tightens. Our lord glowers in return, his thumb tracing a gentle line across the girl’s knee.

What’s left of my stomach balls into a knot. Before I’m aware of the motion, my jaw has clenched. I have to tense my legs against the urge to storm in there and demand to know whether they’re out of their minds.

She’s wormed her way even further into their affections than I suspected. Both of their affections. And whatever truce they’ve come to tonight, that look exchanged tells me it’s far from settled. There will be a reckoning—there will be several reckonings, between them and within themselves.

August, I can understand. He’s got a soft heart under all that muscle, especially for vulnerable things. But Sylas—by all that is dust, I thought he was wiser than this.

Neither of those facts justifies the rage boiling up inside me, the grating of my teeth against each other. Of course she would turn to both of them and not to me. The one who’s buttered her up with his chumminess and his cooking, and the one who’s protected her at the risk of everything else he holds dear. What have I done other than offer her a few wry remarks and a spectacular high? Oh, and a panic attack, let’s not forget that.

That shouldn’t be a problem. It can’t be. I want nothing to do with her, this treasure of Sylas’s. I learned my lesson far too well for that.

Yet against my will, my mind slips back to fragments of a dream a few nights back—of a slip of a girl dancing naked in starlight, her pink hair flying wild and her arms stretched out with the uninhibited joy she took to so easily when I gave her the cavaral syrup. Of her bright eyes gleaming with abandon… and then glowing with a more wanton vitality as she reached for me.

My fingers twitch. Would her skin feel as smooth, her body move as lithely against mine as it did in that delusion? Or would I rather have her crouched in my bedroom like the other morning, shaking and then unexpectedly shrewd—

Whirling, I yank my eyes away from the actual scene before me. I stalk back to the staircase, groping for