Midnight Soul Read Online Free Page B

coming out of my mouth.
    “I’m a traitor,” I admitted.
    “You were and you aren’t the first to make
the decision you made for someone you loved. Worse has happened
when people made that same decision. And what you did, in the end,
no one got hurt. But today, even if that’s the case, you made up
for it. Those bitches could have cut you down with a snap.” He
lifted his hand and made that noise with his fingers, the sound so
loud I jumped. “You knew it. You still walked in there. I know
vengeance, I get the need for that. I know that’s what pushed you
to make the decision you made. But there was more. Loyalty. To the
country you think you betrayed, to your family, ’cause I know you
and Frey are blood. I get with the way he looks at you, the others
do, that there’s no love lost and I don’t give a fuck why. You
changed the course of history, baby, and every citizen of this
nation should be grateful.”
    “I walked into a room and cast a spell,” I
reminded him. “I hardly wielded swords, and it wasn’t even my
magic.”
    “And saved lives doin’ that. A lot of
them.”
    “You make me sound like a hero,” I
scoffed.
    He edged slightly back, a cloud coming over
his expression.
    “There is no such thing as a hero. Just a
person doing the right thing in more than the usual, extreme
circumstances.”
    It was my turn to consider him curiously.
    Once I’d taken long moments to do this, I
asked quietly, “Why do I think that declaration is
self-effacing?”
    “I’d answer that, if I knew what the fuck
‘self-effacing’ meant.”
    I felt my lips curl slightly up at the
edges.
    “Modest,” I explained.
    “It isn’t,” he stated. “It just is what it
is.”
    As he would say, bullshit .
    I did not share this sentiment.
    I also did not share my immense gratitude at
the relief his words made me feel.
    I simply continued to look into his
remarkable eyes.
    “You’re good at it,” he said softly, tipping
his head my way. “That game you got goin’ on. Those walls you built
that you hide behind. The distance you keep with every look, every
word, every fuckin’ breath.” His gaze tipped down to the table then
back to me. “When you aren’t drinking whiskey, that is.”
    “Noctorno—”
    “No one calls me Noctorno,” he stated flatly
and leaned toward me again. “It’s Noc. Especially to friends, and
Franka, I help save a universe with a woman then down a coupla
bottles of wine and a whatever this is called…” he motioned with a
flick of his wrist to the nearly depleted whiskey, “of hooch.”
    “A decanter,” I shared.
    “Whatever,” he muttered then spoke up when he
spoke on. “You’re a friend. So call me Noc.”
    I pressed my lips together.
    He let that go and continued.
    “So now I’m a friend. I’m also the man who
sees you for what you are, sugarlips. You don’t fool me. And those
other men,” his eyes flicked to the door briefly, his indication of
Frey, Lahn, the other Noctorno and Apollo, “if they didn’t have the
end of the world as they knew it breathing down their necks and
took the time to see , you wouldn’t fool them either.”
    I drew in a breath, burying his words, words
I’d heard (of a sort) from another man, in fact, from the only
other person I’d come across in my years on this earth who’d
expended the energy to see .
    However.
    He’d called me sugarlips .
    I felt my brows snap together and I couldn’t
control the sneer in my, “Sugarlips?”
    It was then his gaze dropped to my mouth
before it came back to my eyes and he whispered, “Baby, you got the
prettiest mouth I’ve ever seen.”
    This flirtation after that very evening he’d
succeeded in bedding a woman who had been repeatedly violated for
over two decades.
    The gall.
    “Cease flirting with me,” I clipped.
    He blinked, again looking perplexed, before
he stated, “I’m not. I’m just sayin’ it like it is.”
    I stared at him angrily.
    And again saw no guile.
    This was not a man