Page 16 of Dark Destiny: The Fates' Bargain

She was not going to get Areana in trouble with him.

"Tamira and some of the other harem ladies remembered your soldiers removing chests from the flooded harem while they were still saving people from drowning."

He smiled. "Would you rather I had left your beloved underwater? Locked inside a sealed chest he couldn't open?"

Annani could not help the involuntary shiver. "No. Thank you for pulling him out."

Navuh had not expected her to thank him, and for a moment, his face was frozen, but then he inclined his head. "You are welcome. I saved your husband. If not for me, he would still be buried below the sands, and you would never have found him. You should be thankful."

She leaned forward. "You could have revived him. You could have told me that you had him and demanded your price. I would have paid anything."

"Apparently not. You were not willing to trade my freedom for him, which, to be honest, was most disappointing and not just because it didn't serve my interests. The greatest love story of theancient world turned out to be not so great after all. He must not mean that much to you if you were not willing to set your enemy free in exchange for his life."

Navuh was aggravating her on purpose, she knew that, but his barbs found purchase, nonetheless. Would Khiann think that she did not love him enough because she had refused to let Navuh go free in exchange for his location?

"I did not let you go because I did not need you to find Khiann." Something moved behind Navuh's eyes. He controlled it almost at once, but she saw it, the small flare of recalculation, and she continued before he could speak. "I have Khiann and his four companions."

He arched a brow, looking skeptical. "You do?"

"They are on their way to me now." She held his gaze. "The thing you stole from me is mine again."

"You infiltrated my island."

"Yes," she said without elaborating.

His cold eyes were unreadable, and Annani felt the anger rise beneath her composure, the grief and the fury of five thousand years.

Navuh saw it because he never missed anything, but she schooled her expression and looked at him, cold and victorious.

"Your island paid a heavy price," Kian said. "We deployed an electromagnetic pulse, and every system on the island is dead—comms, surveillance, power—all of it. We also brought down the cross-island tunnel with missiles, so the two sides of the island are separated. It will be a very long time before the Brotherhood digs itself out of what we did to it in the span of one hour. Yourpeople will be in the dark for a long while, blind and crippled, trying to understand what hit them."

Navuh did not look nearly as fazed as Annani had expected him to be.

He shifted his gaze to Kian, and the strategist surfaced, calculating even now.

"You had an aircraft over the island, and pulses, and missiles. Why didn't you simply bomb the island and be done with the Brotherhood? Destroy it completely? It is what I would have done in your place had our positions been reversed."

"I do not doubt it," Annani said. "But that is precisely the difference between us. We are not the Brotherhood. We do not slaughter thousands of innocents to be rid of the enemy. There are captives on that island who never chose their captivity, and servants who never chose their masters, and children who chose nothing at all. We do not murder them for the crime of being in your power." Her chin lifted. "We took what we came for. We did what we had to do to take it, no more, no less. And then we left the rest of them alive, which is a mercy you would never have shown us."

8

NAVUH

Navuh let Annani believe she had won.

For a few seconds.

She had, of course, in every way that counted. He wasn't in the habit of lying to himself about facts, and the facts were that she had Khiann, or rather the chest that contained him, and that she'd crippled his island and killed his leverage, the one thing that was supposed to make him worth more alive than dead.

He had gambled and lost.

But Annani did not have the chests yet, and he was not done tormenting her. He was an expert on preying on others' fears.

Under the triumph and the perfected regal aloofness, under the five thousand years of grief, forged into a weapon and pointed at him, he had seen fear.

Annani was afraid of what she was getting back.

Was Khiann even alive in that chest? And if he was, was his brain intact after five thousand years in stasis? Would he remember her when he was revived?