The Seventh Life Of The Soulbound Villainess
My hands were folded in my lap and my expression was composed and the threads in my chest were burning with the specific and devastating patience of something that has decided it will not be refused indefinitely.
"You're trying to tell me," he said carefully, "that you value honesty."
"I'm observing," he said, "that you are the only honest thing in this compound."
I looked at him. At the smile that was quieter than performance. At the golden eyes that were doing something I recognized from the texts I had read as a girl in the pleasure house library — the oldest texts, the ones about soulbound recognition, the ones I had dismissed as romantic mythology until the day the threads erupted in my