him, as if daring him to attempt to stop her.
The resolve in her sapphire eyes had him shaking his head, had him feeling like a fool.
Because she had been playing him well.
Now, her acquiescence made sense. She had agreed to him escorting her because she had been intending to use him, to fashion him into a weapon she could wield. He growled and bared his teeth at her, darkness pouring through his veins, surging like white water as he thought about her manipulating him like that.
Some of the fire in her eyes abated, and he sensed a ripple of fear in her as he closed the distance between them, as his chest heaved and the urge to reach out and grip her throat in his bare hand, to grasp it tightly and teach her to never attempt to manipulate him again ran rampant through him.
“Thanatos,” she murmured.
And just like that, the darkness rushed from him.
He stilled and stared at her, cursed himself as he saw the way she held herself, how small she looked as she curled inwards. The look on her face cut him to the bone, the way her brow furrowed and fear danced in her eyes slashing at his soul.
He backed off and tamed the darkness, pulled back on the reins and drew it back under control.
Thanatos shoved the fingers of his left hand through his thick hair, clawed the black strands back and fought with himself, wrestling with the thoughts that twisted and tangled, trying to unravel them and find the beginning of one that would make her believe she was wrong about her family.
“They never abandoned you, Calindria,” he husked, miles away in his thoughts, chasing those ribbons to their endpoints, seeking the right one. He needed to buy himself time to find the way to convince her, so he let his mouth do as it pleased. “Your family are the ones who sent me to find you. I have been searching for you for four years.”
Her brow puckered. “And how long have I been missing?”
He did her the courtesy of looking into her eyes so she would see he was speaking the truth, because he knew this wasn’t going to be easy for her to hear. “Five hundred and seventy years.”
She reached out and gripped a stalagmite as she breathed, “Gods… six centuries.”
Her eyes searched his.
“I’ve been a captive for six centuries?” The shimmer of light in her blue eyes didn’t last. Her face slowly darkened again, her gaze narrowing on him as he sensed anger rising within her, couldn’t mistake it for anything else at this distance. The realm muddied his senses, but not when he was as close to her as he was now. Rage lit her eyes. “They let me rot in a cell for six hundred years?”
“No.” Thanatos held his hands up between them when she looked ready to lash out at him, unleashing her anger on him. “They did not know where you were.”
“A convenient excuse,” she barked and spun on her heel, giving him her back. “Perhaps they thought I would forget what they did if they left me to rot for so long.”
She cast a withering look over her shoulder at him.
“Perhaps they are the liars and you a fool for believing them. They sent you on an errand when they surely would have come themselves if they truly wanted to see me, to set me free.” She stormed away from him and he let her go, waited for the distance to grow between them and his mood to level out before following her.
Because he was not a fool.
Pursuing her too closely right now would only stoke her anger and he needed to calm her down, needed to convince her that he wasn’t lying to her.
“What makes you believe your brother is dead?” He kept pace with her, curious about the answer to that question.
“I saw it.” She didn’t look at him, just kept marching forwards, rounding a bend in the tunnel.
He lost sight of her, tracked her with his senses until he had navigated the bend himself, easing his wings between two spires of rock. She stood at a fork in the path, her head switching back and forth between the two tunnels. One sloped downwards, the other up. Which would she choose?
“Tell me what you saw and I will tell you what I know of your brother, and what he saw.” That earned him another glare.
“You will tell me lies.” She looked back at the