Night of Masks and Knives (The Broken Kingdoms, #4)

by L.J. Andrews

Your hair looks like the sunset, Mallie. Yours looks like dirt. But the good kind of dirt. What the hells is the good kind of dirt? You’d know it if you saw it, Kase. But there is. There just is.

I lifted my chin and left him to his darkness. Kase Eriksson was dead, after all.

She smiled. A small grin, but a grin all the same. “You killed him.” I flicked my eyes to Helgi’s lifeless body. Gore and death soaked the stones, the wood floors. Nothing pleasant was here. With a touch of suspicion, I looked back to Malin. “Clearly.” She crossed her arms over her chest, one shoulder leaned against the wall. She did not look horrified; she almost seemed pleased. “He wanted to sell me.” Her grin took on an aggravating smugness. “And you killed him for it.” What in the hells?

″Crack your sharp tongue all you want. To me you’ll always be nothing but a skinny boy, crying for his girl.” My chest squeezed hard enough I thought it might snap a rib. His girl. The way Kase spared the briefest glance over his shoulder, told me what I needed to know. He’d cried out for me, and I never came.

“I didn’t think you’d come so soon.” ″I grew tired of him touching you.”

He drew gentle circles over my palm with his thumb. “You would be better off without me.” ″You would be better off not assuming you know what is best for me. Or what I want.”

″You would be better off listening to me.” The way he touched me, slow, sensual, needy, I had little control in the way my body arched into him. ″If you said better things, I might listen.”

“Malin.” I tugged at her trousers, my fingers sliding beneath the waistline. “Everything I want is all that you are.”

“The Nightrender on his knees, I never knew such a thing of beauty existed.”

“I only bow to you.”

Malin Strom was my beautiful downfall. And I would take any pain if it meant more of her. Ruin me. Brutalize me. Just give me her.

“Be a brute as you please, be wicked if you like, but be Kase in these moments with me.”

Oh, the villainous lengths we all took. Truth be told, we all were a little monstrous in our own ways.

The plan had not unfolded right. We’d trusted the wrong people, but in the end, it would be worth it if she lived another day. I could die for all I cared. I’d loved her, and had loved her well. For me, it was enough.

He could warp her face, my thoughts, but I prayed to the fates—if they existed at all—that he would not touch where she lived in my heart. Even if it was hidden from my mind, let my heart hold tight to her. I loved Malin Strom. I’d lived my life loving her. If asked, I’d die loving her.