REBORN: THE BEAST LORDS' CONTRACT

CHAPTER 6 — What the Serpent Wants

"You have nothing to say?" Sylas fell into step beside her, unbothered by her silence, the way a man is unbothered by weather he's already decided he'll enjoy regardless. "That's new. In my experience, women either flirt with me or fear me within the first five minutes. You're doing neither. It's remarkably rude."

"I've had ten years to get bored of you," Luna said before she could stop herself, and watched — with grim satisfaction — the flicker of genuine surprise that crossed his face before the smile slid back into place.

"Ten years," Sylas repeated slowly, tasting the words. "You keep saying things like that. Ten years, a fire that hasn't happened, a wedding you've somehow already survived and hated. Either you're the most elaborate liar I've encountered at court — and Lady Ellery, I have encountered spectacular liars — or you're telling the truth, and something happened to you that no one in this kingdom has a name for."

"Does it matter which?"

"Enormously. If you're lying, I need to know why, because a woman clever enough to fabricate that performance in front of the King is a woman I want on my side of every game I play from now on. And if you're telling the truth—" he paused, and for one unguarded second something genuine slipped through the polish, something almost unsettled, "—then I need to know exactly what I did to you, so I know whether to be afraid of becoming that man, or whether I already am him and simply haven't noticed yet."

It was, Luna thought, the most honest sentence she'd ever heard leave his mouth in either version of his existence.

"You poisoned my trust in the others," she said. "Slowly. A word here, a suggestion there, always just true enough to believe. By the time Kade stopped speaking to me and Ronan stopped defending me, I had no one left who hadn't already been turned against everyone else — including you. Especially you. You made certain I never had anyone to compare your stories against."

Sylas didn't flinch, exactly, but something behind his eyes went very still, very careful — a man recalculating a hand of cards he'd thought he already understood.

"Why would I do that," he said quietly, "if I wanted you?"

"Because wanting someone and wanting to control what they believe have never once been different things to you, Sylas. You just never noticed the difference until it was too late to matter."

He was silent for several long strides, and when he finally spoke, his voice had lost every trace of performance.

"That's a terrible thing to hear about yourself."

"It's a worse thing to live inside of," Luna said. "For ten years."

They walked in silence to the edge of the garden, where the hedges gave way to a view of the harbor beyond the temple grounds, grey water under a paling sky. Sylas stopped there, hands loose at his sides, and for once seemed to have run entirely out of clever things to say.

"I don't know how to prove a negative," he admitted finally. "I don't know how to prove I won't become that man. All I can offer you is that I'd like to try — and that no one has ever once told me the truth about myself the way you just did, without wanting something from me in return."

"I do want something," Luna said. "I want to survive seven days and be free of all five of you. Don't mistake this for the beginning of trust."

"I wouldn't dream of it." But his eyes, when they met hers, held something new — something wary and curious and, underneath both, unmistakably shaken. "Though I should warn you, Lady Ellery. I'm considerably better at getting things I want than I am at accepting I can't have them."

He said it lightly, like a joke.

It didn't land like one.

Behind them, at the garden's far entrance, a raven-black shape detached itself from the shadows of the colonnade — Corvin Blackmoor, who had been watching the entire exchange from a distance close enough to hear every word, and who now turned and disappeared back into the temple without a sound, already composing, in his mind, the first of many reports he had no intention of sharing with anyone.