Tiberius knew he had struck a raw, exposed nerve.
And soon enough he also saw how her whole demeanor shifted.Until now, she had treated the scattered secrets as a game, a cat cruelly batting at a mouse's corpse, taking wicked pleasure in her absolute dominance over a lesser beast. She was playing with him, knowing she held the power to shatter his fragile world with a single word to Julian.
Agitating her had been the right move. "With the right emotion, even a stone can be swayed," Julian had once counseled him, back when they engineered the alliance that forced Eloir's father into bed with the Old Ghost and his bastard.
