Extraits

"Does it hurt ?" I whisper, and I'm not entierly talking about the wound to his arm.

"Very much."

Neither is he.

"You make me want to do better," he says suddenly, and his voice is thick with emotion, so I go still. Spoiler(cliquez pour révéler)"You make me wish Weston Lark was real, because you will never look at me the way you look at him. I don't know how to fix everything I've done wrong, Tessa. I don't even know if I can. But I want to try."

"Turn around," I say.

"Why ?" he says brightly.

What a scoundrel. I throw his shirt back at him.

"You know why."

Spoiler(cliquez pour révéler)Corrick clears his throat, and I jerk my gaze up. My cheeks are on fire.

"Mind you mettle," he says.

"I hate you."

"Hmm. Not too much, it seems."

"I'm sorry" I say quietly. It doesn't feel like enough. It never feels like enough, but tonight, I feel it more acutely.

Tessa has stopped short, too, and I can tell from the shift in her expression that I was right: I am a living nightmare. Her lips part and her eyes widen and she sucks a breath. "Oh", she whispers. "Oh no."

I want to be indifferent. I want to not care. I want so much that I can't have.

Her breathing shakes, and her eyes fall closed. "I hate you."

"I know." My thumb strokes across her mouth, and her lips part. We're closer somehow, all but sharing breaths.

I lean back into the cushions. "Tell me : Do you really have a dagger ?"

Tessa turns to look at the window. "Keep your hands to yourself or you'll find out."

"For as much as you hate me, you can't be this upset about a fine carriage ride and a meal at the most exclusive establishment in all of Kandala."

Her eyebrows go up. "I can't ?"

Lord, she is brazen. "Fine. Perhaps you can."

The hardest part of this job isn't the stealing. It's the escaping. At best, it takes me two minutes to scale the wall out of the Royal Sector, but the night is cold, and my fingers are starting to go numb. Dawn is only an hour off, and sentry spotlights slide along the high stone walls at irregular intervals. I clutch my father's old apothecary pack tight under my arm, clinging to the darkness, waiting for an opportunity.

"The problem is that we all have different ideas of what's right."