“Don’t make promises you won’t keep, my poor heart can’t take the disappointment.” In direct contrast to her brother, it was Gisele’s words which took on the appearance of honesty. Her mocking laugh may have been silent, but she made no effort to hide it from her face. Alighting her eyes from the ring she had been polishing, they rose to settle on the shadowed form of her brother.
Bolstaor had still not quietened around them, tonight would not just be a night for the worst type of people to enjoy, but for the masses to also take their indulgences. Havoc, barely constrained, as people settled from their journeys, had the hour. It was a paradise for thieves and killers, and it had the strangest of calming effects upon her, the quieting of her blood that came whenever something was about to happen.
Gisele waited, as patient as a great hunting cat, for him to eschew the vow he’d so thoughtfully undertaken.
“They’re better company than you,” was her childlike rebuttal. Lucian needed none of the wit she stored for others. “And much prettier to look at, I find.” The ring she’d previously been cleaning found its home back on her finger, bauble and home to a weapon both. She liked her trinkets best when they were dual wielding. The multitude pins in her hair were good as good for killing, or lock-picking, depending on which, as they were for an accessory. “Unlike you, brother, they’re also capable of quiet.”
“If only you had a heart,” he quips. He knows her little games, he plays them too. Perhaps not as well as she but Lucian is convinced he’s the more skilled between the both of them. But where her meticulous nature blooms in full, his is a brute force worthy of a shadowy beast.
He snatches a trinket from its home on her vanity. A pale hair comb with tines as sharp as glass. A gift, he recalls, that he had sent to Gisele on their nameday in a velvet box when they finally had the means to splurge. Pretty but not stolen, he had promised. “I do admit, I have great taste but quiet is beyond me, as you well know. It drives me to the edge of madness, sister. I writhe.”
Admiring the comb still in his hand, Lucian muses. “Do you never wear this?” It was far too fine for daily use and for her ruse as a healer but how pretty it would look against the golden sheen of her locks. Delicately, he lifts up her smooth curls above an ear and locks it in place with the pin. “There,” he steps back with a grin. “How ravishing. I’d mistake you for Freyja if I didn’t know better.”
