She Who Rides the Storm (The Gods-Touched Duology)
She Who Rides the Storm: Chapter 40

Anwei sat next to Knox in the wagon, her eyes running back and forth across him. The horse pulling the wagon snorted and jolted forward, the driver swearing in Trib as Lia rode up on her awful, bloodstained mount. She wore her hood low, completely obscuring her face.

“We know which way they’re heading?” she asked.

Anwei nodded, despite the confusion cottoning the inside her head. Altahn’s men had been watching the shapeshifter’s cliff house, and the whole household had set off only hours before. “I’m going to kill him.”

The auroshe squealed, dancing to the side to nip at the horse’s haunches. It darted forward, the driver swearing even louder, though Anwei doubted Lia understood the words.

“Only if you replace him first.” Lia reined her auroshe to the side so he couldn’t nip the horse.

Smoothing a hand through Knox’s hair, Anwei couldn’t replace it in her to smile. “Let’s call it a group effort. We’ll need all the help we can get. It took me seven years to replace him last time. He’s not going to sit out in the open, waiting for us to cut his throat.”

“What is your plan?”

“I don’t have one yet.” Anwei pulled her gaze up from Knox’s closed eyes, the bend of his back, the sweat that had dried salty down his neck. The sword was bundled up next to him, the hilt looking charred against the blanket wrappings. Instead she watched the grass as it rippled alongside the road, smelling of dew and jade. Lia smelled of blood, salt, and tears, like actions ready to be taken. “All I know is that to make a rich man come out into the open, you take what matters most to him.”

Lia’s face turned, still lost in shadow. “The sword?”

Anwei shook her head, looking down the road to where the snake-tooth man had taken her brother. Of all their plans today, all the things they’d wanted to accomplish, they had found out one thing: how to kill a shapeshifter. “A sword like that is what started him, and it’ll be what ends him too. But what did he steal it for?”

He’d stolen it to save Arun. Mateo. The son he’d filched, the brother he’d murdered and made over into a new creature that belonged to him. The snake-tooth man had taken Anwei’s twin, half of her soul, and warped him into a person who’d left Anwei to face their village alone. To starve, cheat, lie, steal, and hunt alone, to try to exist as the shredded half-thing that had been all that was left of her after he was torn away. Arun—no, Mateo—had left her to ruin. Lia said he’d spent his life eating sweet rolls, studying rocks and old bones at the fancy university in Rentara, and telling tailors to add extra lace to his coats.

Mateo was the one thing that mattered most to the snake-tooth man.

And Anwei was going to do what she did best: replace him.