The Girl Who Fell From The Sky - Rebecca Royce Page 0,37

not dissimilar, Torrin. I mean, you also take care of everyone. Astor just does it on a smaller scale, more intimate.”

Torrin rapidly blinked. “That’s an interesting perspective. Come. Since my bed is in the same place as where Nox and Astor are, that is where we are heading. Mattis, you can spend the night in one of the extra rooms.” He abruptly stopped and looked up at the ceiling. “Wait. What am I going to tell Dreama?”

“About what? My sleeping in your rooms or the brands or…?” Mattis ran a hand through his hair. He seemed sort of nervous and distracted, which honestly wasn’t such a strange reaction. Their just-ended battle had resulted in casualties, and they’d just decided to share a wife, like forever. All that had to mess with a person.

Torrin shot Mattis a side-eye look. “No. About your bonding with Bianca. Instead of her.”

Mattis gaped at Torrin. “Dreama? I was never going to…”

Torrin grinned before he cracked up. “I know, man. I’m just fucking with you.”

Mattis dropped his head for a long second. “That’s not funny.”

“It is, actually.”

A week ago, I would have agreed with Mattis whole-heartedly—not funny. But in this ultra-tense, battle-ready mood that hung around the City-State all the time, these men really needed to take the edge off sometimes. I could see the sense in Torrin’s joke, even if it hadn’t landed perfectly. It had been superficially crass but deeply kind, which I was starting to suspect described his entire leadership style.

Torrin took my hand in his. We’d walked all this way to have one drink and apparently for Mattis to ask to bond with me.

He stopped to lock up the bar, but Torrin didn’t halt his stride. I easily walked next to him, which meant that he’d either slowed to accommodate my bad heart or because he really was dragging.

“I don’t imagine that you ask questions you don’t know the answers to very often. What did you think he was going to ask you for?”

He lifted his eyebrows. “Oh, I knew he was going to ask for you, Bianca.”

“You did?”

“Yes, of course.” He squeezed my hand.

Well…I hadn’t seen that coming.

“Torrin, I stare at the skull chair because it scares me. And I tend to hide from what scares me. Every time I walk in that room, I want to run out of it.”

“Then it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do. Intimidate. But those aren’t the skulls of people I’ve executed or anything. They're former leaders, my ancestors. And I sit on them as my father did before me, as his father did before him, to remind us of what we’ve lost and what we’ve gained.”

Now would be the perfect time for me to tell him what I knew of his ancestors. Only I didn’t. He was a king here. He sat on a throne. I didn’t want to disclose what I’d learned. Someone had thought his people, all the departed who lived here before him, had been so undesirable, so dangerous, so scary, they’d been locked away, never to return.

And yet…they lived by a code that didn’t seem any more nefarious than where I’d come from. Better in some ways.

Life was complicated.

Astor rose when we walked in the bedroom, putting a finger to his mouth to shush us when we would have talked. He nodded toward the throne room, and I was soon back to staring at the skulls once again. How did they not disintegrate over time?

“I was just going to send for you,” Astor said. “He roused enough to know he’s back, and he’s healing. Now he’s sleeping again. I think the restorative powers of sleep are what’s called for now.”

He wasn’t looking at me, which was weird. Astor being avoidant? When had that ever happened? This was the man who usually couldn’t hold himself back from touching and joking and insinuating and making me crazy. I mean, it was a mix of adorable and aggravating—especially when he led us up to a brink of some point and then backed away—but now that it was gone, I missed it. He didn’t seem at all like himself. Had Baron done something to him? Something…Reamerish?

Or was this because his brother was back and throwing his weight around and running things? And also holding my hand in a very possessive way.

I disentangled my hand from Torrin’s and felt a blush flame across my cheeks. Astor wasn’t going to like the deal Torrin and Mattis had just made. My problem was that I…did.