This Poisoned Tide: The Last Water Witch Book One

CHAPTER 33

Elara glared at him. "Maybe I came here so you know that I can. Whenever I want. I know your places, butcher."

"Oh, so it's a warning, is it?" he said, glancing at her, but his gaze landed on the bookshelf beside her as if looking into her face was too much for him, and so it might be if she reminded him of her. "Ironic that you would think to tell me you know my places now you no longer have any of your own. And now, at this time, when time is something of which you are fast running out."

Elara flinched at that, and the bastard caught it, but if he took any satisfaction from her discomfort, he appeared not to show it. Instead, he dragged the chair underneath him and slumped back into it behind the desk, as if even that wearied him. Elara had to admit that whoever he was—whatever he was—he was markedly different to the man the waters had shown her. The Highguard in the stories of her mother had been like stone, carved from the coldest, impermeable rock. Dead eyes. Blank face. She had seen more life in the marble figurines favoured by Mica Koh-Miralus.

"I have places. If I didn't, I would have been found already," she said, indignant, although it fell flat like the barest of lies.

Vi-Garran shook his head. "The temple? You have not been there. Juda looked for you."

Juda. Fucking Juda. She'd known he'd go searching for her in the catacombs and she had hated that she couldn't seek the familiar sanctuary of the one place she could call her own. She'd hated him for it. For his intrusion. His unwanted presence in the sacred home of her foremothers.

But she despised herself more for trusting him. For taking him with her to the Ellisder.

Perhaps that was it. Perhaps that was the reason for all of this. Elara had insulted her foremothers by taking a land-dweller into the sanctity of the Naiad's most private chamber and she'd done that willingly. Maybe she deserved to be driven from there, as much as she deserved to be driven from Grimefell.

"Yet another thing you have taken from me, it seems," she said. "Part of your plan, I suppose?"

Vi-Garran's brow fell. "There was no plan. None that involved you anyhow. Whatever you believe about me..."

"...what I know about you."

"Whatever you think you know about me, you must know that what you believe about Juda is false," he insisted. His hands now gripped the arms of the chair, his face determined. It was the first time he'd looked directly at her for more than a moment. "He told me nothing of you, I swear it. Just as he knew nothing of your mother or my part in her death."

Fury bubbled under the surface again, a maelstrom she was struggling to keep under control. "So, you admit it then?"

"What I admit to or not is of no matter, girl, but what you believe of Juda..."

"No matter? No matter?" Elara stepped closer; her hands fisted tight. "She was my mother! I think you will find it matters very much to me that you killed her, and you want to talk to me of him?"

He leant forward then, faster than she had expected—a hint maybe of the monster he really was—and slammed his palm against the edge of the desk. "Yes, I do. I do. I will tell you it all. I will admit to my part in it. I will tell you every detail if hearing every detail matters to you, but I will speak to you of him, because he matters to me, and I do not know how much time the Juda who matters to me has left—the same man who matters to you. And do not think to stand there and tell me he does not, because I saw it, girl. I saw the way you looked at him. I heard what you said to him."

You had me, Juda, You had me.

"You cannot feel betrayed by someone if they do not hold some place in your heart." Vi-Garran smiled then, but not at her. It was too wistful. Too fond. "Juda's mother once looked at me, much like you did at him."