LUCY
"I'm okay," I tell Amara, patting her back with a firmness meant to convey that I have, in fact, survived worse than one very long night. "Thank you. For worrying. You didn't have to."
"Of course I had to," she says, pulling back to study my face properly, her sharp eyes checking me over the way they always do—for cracks, for the parts I try to hide. "We're friends. That's the whole point of the job description."
I huff out something almost like a laugh, and she seems satisfied enough to let the subject drop, though she keeps one hand looped loosely around my elbow as Tavric gestures to the guard stationed outside the doors. The man pulls them open without a word, and the four of us step through together.
I spend the short walk into the hall making increasingly uncharitable guesses as to why, exactly, the Supreme King has summoned me, when by every rule of rank and lineage I now hold, it should be the other way entirely.
