A Twist of the Blade (Shadows and Crowns, #2)

by S.M. Gaither

Have you forgotten the cost of the last life you spared?

“Thorn.”

“I could kill you with a word. With a thought.” “Then do it.” “Not yet,”

His mouth hovered an inch above hers—perhaps less—until that reckless desire pressed them the rest of the way together, bringing her lips to his.

It was violent.

She pushed away first—and with such disgust and such force that she nearly stumbled.

“That felt a bit like cooperation for a moment there.” “Let go of me,” she growled.

“You can try.”

“There is nowhere you can go that I can’t find you,” he told her. “And when the time is right, I will find you again.”

“It wasn’t all lies, was it? Everything that happened between us?”

She needed to embrace her crown.

She missed him and she felt incomplete, and there was no sense in denying that anymore.

she kept avoiding the notes Elander had written and left stacked on the side table. She had been so anxious to see what he was writing last night, but now, for some reason, she was afraid to look.

“It’s more complicated than that now. And it’s not over.”

“The charm you stole from Casia hums with Solatis’s power, as you said, but it’s so…faint. As if that power in it was absorbed by the Solasen woman somehow—and then buried deeply inside of her until recently.”

I don’t believe it was entirely a coincidence that the woman I loved was reborn as a member of the very same royal family that Malaphar struck a deal with. Solatis had a hand in this, almost certainly. Whether to further punish me for stealing from her, to frustrate her rival, or something else, who knows?”

It was both a response and an acknowledgement. An acceptance of the fact that they were on a sinking ship in the middle of a storming sea, and the chances of them seeing the shore again were bleak.

He had bound himself to that energy decades ago, and he had never truly forgotten what it felt like. Which explained why Casia had always felt familiar to him.

All he knew for certain was that he had fallen in love with her twice now.

“I love you,” he said. She dropped the bag she’d started to rifle through. “What did you just say?” “I love you. And I always have—in this lifetime and in every other.”

He will fear us before the end And so he did.

“I knew you before, in a past life. You had a different body. A different name. A different voice. But your essence is the same. Your soul is the same.”

“The Sun goddess is the creator of all life,” said Elander. “That tiny object you’re holding is the Heart of the Sun, from her very domain, and it contained enough of that goddess’s power to reincarnate you. And now it seems that the other magic once contained within the charm is now contained within…well, you.”

“Decades,” said Elander, finally breaking the silence. “Decades?” “I have spent decades missing you, trying to find a way back to you, and now I have you back, but…” He trailed off, but she could finish the thought well enough—

But only for another ending, it seems.

Just break my heart.

Elander knew this, she suspected. Because he knew her—all of her, including these weak, desperate, frightened parts. And he loved all of those

“Solatis thinks she was very clever, no doubt, guiding her power into the body of a human that I could not kill. She had some grand plan for you, I’m certain. But, as is typical of her, she forgot that mortals have limits.”

So imagine what it will do to her if I wage war for you, instead.”