civil to each other once we’re home, right?” His enduring silence made my raised arm arc down, the gun bumping against my hip. “Are you worried befriending me will hurt your rep and make your mother disown you?”
“Hurt my rep?” His tension finally eased, coiling off his face and shoulders as though he’d tossed aside some heavy boulder. “No, Amara. I’m neither worried about my reputation nor about my mother’s feelings. I’m just surprised you’d want to spend time with me after what I said earlier.”
I frowned. “What you said?”
He rubbed the back of his neck, gaze on the mud staining his black boots. “That I’d force you to marry me.”
Oh. That. “Look, I know you’re not interested in me or my crown. You were angry. We all say things we don’t mean when we’re angry.” I slid my bottom lip between my teeth a few times, then released it to ask, “Right? You didn’t actually mean it?”
His Adam’s apple jostled as he raised his gaze back to mine. “I would never force your hand back into the Cauldron.”
Was it a figment of my imagination or did he sound a little despondent? “No one’s getting locked out of Neverra, Remo.” I said this gently, assuming it was the source of his fretfulness. When the trench between his eyebrows deepened, I touched his bicep. “We’ll just stay engaged until one of us finds our ideal partner.” He flinched as though the idea sounded atrocious, which reminded me of his whole no-strings-attached lifestyle, so I amended, “Until I find someone to marry. I forgot marriage wasn’t an ambition of yours. We’ll just have to be extra discreet about dating other people.”
The tendons in his arm roiled underneath my fingertips, taut as the mooring lines that bolted the Floating Garden to the Pink Sea.
“Actually. That’s stupid. Unless we demand to end our engagement, the Cauldron can’t kick us out.” I slid my hand off his arm, eyebrows dipping in thought. “Right?”
“If the person has fae blood, and the . . . dating takes place in Neverra, the Cauldron will sense it and punish you.”
My heart, which had begun to scud faster, missed a beat. “How?”
“I’m not entirely sure.”
I sighed. “That sort of puts a dent in our matchmaking plans.”
“Our matchmaking plans?”
“You were going to introduce me to potential candidates?”
His eyes tapered, and his pupils became pin-sized.
“You led me on,” I murmured, hurt blooming in my chest. “There are no potential candidates. You just said that to”—I raked my hair back, the mud already caking my hair into dreads—“to placate me.” I stared dejectedly at the spear gun.
It wasn’t like I needed Remo to set me up. I could find someone on my own. For Skies’ sake, I could even use captis to catch a man’s eye. But finding someone wasn’t what troubled me . . . it was the implication of his lie. Fae men didn’t stay away because they feared my blood or were warned not to befriend me; they stayed away because they were simply not interested.
Tears stung my throat; I swallowed them back. And then I raised the spear gun and shot. My arrow went wide. Remo didn’t comment on my awry aim, perhaps because he feared I might shoot him next, or perhaps he was attempting decency by not heaping criticism onto my squashed ego.
I tugged on the wita rope to reel the projectile back, feeling an acute kinship to it as it dragged unceremoniously through the mud. Discreetly, I scrubbed my blurry eyes on my forearm before aiming at the portal.
“Aaron.” Remo’s voice pierced the heavy silence.
I side-eyed him, found his arms tied firmly in front of his chest. “What about Aaron?” I tried to remember what he looked like from the brief episode in the elevator, but I’d been so focused on Remo that I’d paid the other lucionaga little attention.
“He’s one of the guys who’d like an introduction to the prinsisa.”
That stoppered my gloominess, but only for a second. It was surely a lie meant to improve my aim.
“Titus is another. Then there’s Zane and Reid. Neither can shut up about your eyes and mouth, and Brooks is obsessed with your triple aptitude. Would you like me to go on? The list is quite long.”
I wiped my eyes again, hoping he’d think I was brushing away sweat and not tears. “You’re just saying that so I focus on the target instead of on my bruised ego.”
“No. I’m saying that so you stop thinking I’m a liar.”
I