Except that she had seen him. No one saw Jason when he didn’t want to be seen, and he hadn’t wanted to be spotted coming in to the fort. Which meant Mahiya did have a gift. “When did you spot me?” he asked in a casual tone, wanting to gauge the extent of her abilities. “When I dropped out of the clouds?”
“I assume so—I saw you on the horizon just past Guardian.”
He’d been high, high in the sky at that point, a black dot against black. The fact Mahiya had developed what appeared to be an acute visual sense at such a young age told him she had the potential to grow into a power among angelkind. He’d erred, he admitted, lulled into complacency by the gentleness of her strength, akin to the quiet but persistent fall of water against stone rather than a violent quake, forgetting the fact she’d been born of two powerful immortals.
“Your tea.”
“Thank you,” he said in the same language she’d spoken, received a smile in return.
When she nudged over the plate of savories, he ate over half of them before halting—he’d missed dinner, was hungrier than he’d realized. All the while, Mahiya watched him with those cat-bright eyes of hers, and he searched for the poisonous hatred that should’ve infected her . . . only to find an incisive intelligence and a sweetness of spirit she couldn’t hide, no matter how good she was at court masks.
Fascination entangled with a pride he had never expected to feel for the Princess Mahiya, for she had to have the will of a lioness to have managed to hold that poison at bay, though it dripped on her each and every day.
“Did you find Audrey?”
Jason considered the question, decided to trust her with the truth, measure her response. “Yes.”
“She’s dead, isn’t she? And she was most likely the woman warming my father’s bed.”
The speed and accuracy of her conclusion made Jason still. “You know who killed Eris,” he said slowly, realizing he’d erred in more than one way. “You’ve always known.” She was far too smart, far too good at listening to what was unspoken, not to have put the pieces together.
In the process of placing her teacup on the table, she jerked, had to act quickly to stop the fine porcelain from tipping over. “What?”
Setting his own cup on the table, he reached for the pot and poured her more tea. “Drink.”
Fingers trembling, she didn’t dispute the order. By the time she put the cup back down, her expression was acute with determination. “You first.”
15
Jason saw no reason not to acquiesce when they both carried the same knowledge. “Perhaps others could’ve bribed their way in, but we both know only one person could have walked out of Eris’s palace soaked in blood and not been stopped by a single guard.” Guards who professed not to remember a single unusual detail from that murderous night—and who Neha hadn’t executed, though they had permitted the death of her consort.
Mahiya picked up a sweet that was a combination of sugar and milk spiced with cloves and topped with slivers of almond, ate it with great deliberation. “Yes,” she said at last, her tone rough silk, “that was my first thought.”
“You’ve changed your mind?”
“Why would . . . Your presence, it makes no sense.”
Yes, Jason thought, why would Neha invite him to solve a murder she herself had committed and for which no one would ever hold her to account? That was a far more powerful mystery than why Eris had died. It was either madness or fatal arrogance that had led the male angel to believe his wife wouldn’t discover his affair with Audrey. Or perhaps Eris had sought death after three hundred years of imprisonment.
Jason discarded that thought as soon as it arose. Eris had been too self-centered, too much a man of ego to have ever chosen suicide, especially by such a convoluted method and in a way that left him violated and stripped of pride and beauty.
Porcelain clinked on porcelain as Mahiya put her cup on the saucer. “Neha would subvert you from Raphael. Perhaps that is the reason why.”
“No.” Not when Neha had met him soon after he arrived at the Refuge. “She must surely know I will never serve a woman who did such to the one she claimed to love.”
Mahiya’s gaze grew piercing, as if she’d heard the history that drove his declaration.
“And she is too proud to lie and claim you broke the vow in order to have you executed. Which does not leave us with any answers.” Reaching forward, she topped off his tea. “What will you do?”
He considered each of the facts he currently had, both together and as separate pieces. It wasn’t the murder that was the most important. That Neha and Lijuan were involved was problematic, but the two were neighbors—a friendship between them was not incomprehensible. Without further details, he remained in the dark as to the nature of their secret meetings.
And . . . he hadn’t yet worked out how to gain Mahiya her freedom. “I’m not ready to leave.”
Mahiya nudged forward the savories again. “Do you expect me to lie to her when she asks what you have discovered?”
He ate two more of the baked pastries filled with a sweet and spicy vegetable mix. “She won’t listen to the truth from you,” Jason spoke the merciless words knowing Mahiya had already come to the same conclusion. “Rather, she’ll use it as an excuse to kill you.”
Mahiya ate another sweet, her expression unruffled. “She doesn’t need an excuse.”
“I’m not so certain.” In killing Mahiya, Neha would be killing a child she’d helped raise, and angelkind revered the bond a child had with his or her parent or guardian. For a guardian to kill that child . . . it would break a taboo so deep, it was a racial imperative.