Page 11 of Blood Singer

But I couldn't shake the memory of Kavan's face when he'd leaned in close, the way his expression had shifted from fury to something that looked disturbingly like grief. The way he'd said you're nothing like her, as if comparing me to a ghost only he could see.

I pressed my forehead against the cool glass and tried to sort through what had just happened. He'd accused me of treachery. He'd said I carried another's scent, but that made no sense. And those questions about Étretat, about where I was from, as if he were trying to place me inside some context I didn't understand.

The attraction I'd felt was the part I least wanted to think about.

Not because it wasn't real. It absolutely was, which was the problem. I'd stood there with his breath on my neck and his scent winding through my senses, and my entire nervous system had staged a mutiny. And then that almost-smile. That one small moment when his guard had dropped and amusement had flickered across his face like light on water, unexpected and gone too quickly to catch. That had been worse than the fury. Because it had made me want to earn another one. Made me want to figure out exactly what it took to coax a real smile out of a dragon king who clearly hadn't let himself have one in a very long time.

I pushed away from the window and started unpacking, trying to focus on practical things. A few hours remained before dinner. I should review my notes on Drakhoni culture and politics, prepare for whatever conversation was coming tonight, and stop thinking about leather and pine and the way his voice had dropped when he'd asked my name, as if the answer mattered more than a king questioning a diplomatic operative had any right to suggest.

I ran my hand over the soft fabric of the bed's coverlet and forced myself to think about the mission instead.

It didn't entirely work.

Chapter 4

Kavan

I made it to my private office before the trembling started.

The door closed behind me, and I pressed my back against it for a moment, breathing in controlled pulls through my nose. Deliberate, measured, the way I'd trained myself to breathe when the dragon was too close to the surface. My hands were shaking. Not with cold, not with fear. With the effort of having stood ten feet from that female and not closed the distance entirely, not pressed her against me with both hands and inhaled until I understood what my senses were screaming.

Marion was dead. I'd held her body. I'd heard her blood song go silent as she bled out on those cliffs, and the sound of it, the terrible absence where music had been, had driven me past grief into something that razed villages.

Seven hundred and fifty years. Seven hundred and fifty years of forced sleep, of losing whole decades to the Alliance's punishment, of waking to a universe that had moved on without me, and I'd spent every year of it learning to carry Marion's memory quietly. Not as an open wound. Not as rage. Just as something I kept, the way you kept a letter from someone you loved. Folded, unread, but present.

And then Leila Hunter had stepped off that shuttle, and every careful year of it had collapsed.

The door opened behind me, and I moved away on instinct, putting space between myself and whoever had entered. But it was only Sanyra, her expression mixing concern with something more careful as she closed the door and leaned against it the way I had seconds before.

"What in the name of the ancestors was that?" she asked, her voice low. "You looked like you were about to shift right there on the landing platform."

I crossed to the window and put my hands on the stone sill. Cold, solid, real. "She smells like Marion."

The silence that followed was complete. I didn't have to turn around to know shock lay on Sanyra's face.

"Kavan," she said finally. "Marion died seven hundred and fifty years ago. You saw it happen. You held her body."

"I know that." I turned, and whatever she read in my expression stopped her from continuing. "I'm not confused about what I witnessed. I'm telling you what I scented. Marion's scent, not identical, but close enough that my dragon reacted before I could stop it. And her blood." I stopped there, jaw tight. "Her blood sings, Sanyra."

Sanyra pressed her hand flat against her chest. "A blood song? You're certain?"

"I heard it the moment she was within range. It's not the song I heard from Marion. Marion's was soft. Low. Like a single note held for a long time." The memory still pulled at something in me, but it was different now, duller, further away, as if the proximity of Leila's song had changed the acoustics of the grief I'd been carrying for centuries. "Leila's is layered. It has harmonics Marion's never did. But it's there. Unmistakable."

Sanyra pushed off the door and crossed to stand beside me. This was what I trusted most about her. Not her loyalty, which was absolute, but her willingness to set aside emotion and think. "She can't be more than thirty," she said. "There's no natural explanation for her carrying Marion's scent. Unless the Alliance has found a way to manufacture it, to replicate a blood singer's signature artificially."

"Which is exactly what I suspect." I turned back to the window, needing something to look at besides Sanyra's expression, which was already shifting toward the careful neutrality she wore when she thought I was making a mistake. "They know what a blood singer means to our kind. They know it's the rarest bond our people can form. If they've found a way to simulate it, to point it at me like a weapon..."

"Then we send her away," Sanyra said. "Request a different diplomat."

"No." The word came out sharper than I'd intended. Her eyebrows rose. I moderated my tone despite the resistance screaming in my chest at the thought of sending Leila away. "We can't afford to antagonize the Alliance while we're rebuilding. If this is a test, showing weakness only invites more manipulation. I need to understand what they've done and how before I make a move."

Sanyra was quiet for a beat too long. "I didn't scent any deception on her."

The words landed like a thrown blade. "What?"

"When you were questioning her. I was watching. Scent markers, posture, micro-expressions. Everything you'd expect in someone constructing a performance." She shook her head. "There was nothing. She was confused, Kavan. Genuinely confused, and covering fear with stubbornness. If the Alliance is using her, she has no knowledge of it."

Which meant if there was a weapon aimed at me, it was walking around inside an innocent female who'd had the nerve to tell me I was being rude while I was standing close enough to feel her pulse. That thought sat badly. I turned it over, looking for the angle where it made sense to feel this conflicted, and came up empty.