Starkeeper of the Fractured Crown

His eyes finally shifted from mine, falling to the Fallen Warrior. “You don’t get to use this as an excuse to get what you want.”

I fought the urge to roll my eyes and opened my mouth to spit out some sort of retort that would hopefully piss him off, but the words died on my lips as a movement behind Trick caught my eye.

My gaze followed that movement and I found a woman standing behind him, near the door. She wasbeautiful. Curly auburn hair, bright blue eyes, freckles smattering across her nose, rosy cheeks. She had her hair braided back intricately, keeping it away from her face, and the armor she was wearing was a combination of fur and steel.

My brows furrowed as I straightened. How had she gotten into my home without Trick or Cole hearing her?

“Time is running out,” she told me, her edges shimmering in and out of view like a pond disrupted by a rock. “Wars take time, but this one is coming far quicker than the others. It’s time to snap out of it.”

Confusion filled me. “What?” I whispered more to myself than to her.

Trick turned, but the woman was gone between one blink and the next. He turned back to me, looking meover as if assessing my well-being. “What did you just see?”

My eyes found his, the word ‘nothing’ wanting to roll from my tongue, but I swallowed it back and relaxed my shoulders, opting for just ignoring him completely. “I assume that you’ll just find my journals about my dreams and read them anyway, so I’ll save us both the trouble.” I nodded towards my room. “Under my bed. Have at it. But if I find your cum on my books because you just couldn’t control yourself, then I’ll have a fucking problem.”

His eyes went so dark, they were almost black.

Cole’s eyes widened as he looked from me to Trick, waiting expectantly.

Trick’s eyes didn’t waver. “The only place my cum will land, Angel, is on or inside of you.”

My heart skipped, my grip tightening around the edge of the counter.

Cole sneered, his invested amusement drowned in disgust, which only made me feel so incredibly dirty. “Gods, Trick, you’re so disrespectful.”

But he knew what he was doing. He knew just what that statement did to me, the way my knees weakened. I couldn’t believe Cole couldn’t smell it, but I was grateful.

Trick’s challenging eyes wouldn’t break so I wouldn’t break either, no matter how gross I felt with Cole’s judgmental eyes on us. “If they got into Custodes Sepulchra,” I finally began, “then they’re more powerful than I thought.”

“They were powerful enough to take out—”

“I know that,” Iinterrupted Cole, irritated not at him, but at this entire situation. “I know, but they had help then. They had Aurora and Ryker, Killian. In the War of Ruin, they had the Gerodias, and they managed to find the Staff after it was supposedly lost. They have another partner, and they needed the Staff again. Maybe they used that same partner. There’s no way to tell, but it’s kind of neglectful on your High King’s part,” I went on, still staring into those deep green eyes, “that he didn’t guard the Staff better. Maybe he should have been there instead of doing whatever it is he does on his off time.”

It was bait. I was baiting him for both me and Cole. I wanted to piss him off in a space where he couldn’t do anything about it. Because he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t do anything with Cole sitting in with us. Even if he did decide to go invisible, however that worked, Cole would be suspicious.

Or maybe he would, and I severely messed up.

It was a dangerous game, but gods, it felt good.

“I know what you’re doing,”his voice drifted through me. A demon’s growl. A warning. “I wanted to ask you about the Obelisk,” he said out loud.

That shocked me, snapping me out of whatever game we were playing. “What?”

“There was an attack in Arkalious. One of our own was looking for it.”

I pressed my lips into a thin line and shoved away from my counter with an eyeroll. “One of your own people was looking for a 400-foot-tall tower of power? The one that shattered thousands andthousands of years ago to create the world? Come on,” I half-laughed, making my way over to a stack of books. “I didn’t realize the Fallen had crazy conspiracy people too.”

The tendril,mytendril, as Trick had stated, was doing nothing to hide itself now as it followed me to where the stack was.

It twirled around my wrist as I thumbed through the books. “So, your people are turning against you?” I asked daringly. I was still owed information, and what I was giving them was good, so the least they could do was answer my questions.

“Karious Lord of a territory in the far North,” Cole explained as I pushed my hair behind my ear. “It’s nothing new, but like Trick said, he was asking about the Obelisk. If we had it, if we knew where it was. He wanted it.”

Karious needed to be committed. I finally found the book I was searching for and stood. I walked over to the table and sat down next to Cole. “The Obelisk was created before the Staff of Elder,” I began, forcing myself to fall back into my own comfort zone.

Several seconds passed before Trick joined us, sitting directly across from me. His shadows drifting around him, my single tendril drifting around my hands almost lovingly.

“You both know about the weapons in this world, right?” I asked, opening the journal to the list of weapons I had written down. “The Staff of Elder, Michael’s sword, Gabriel’s bow, Enoch’s shield, the Book of Silence, which although isn’t necessarily a weapon, it could be used as one,” I went on, meeting Cole’s eyes. “And finally,” I scrawled down the last one. “the Eye of Orion. While those aren’t all of the ‘powerful weapons’, they’re the ones I know about now.”