“Ah.”
“Yes, ah!” I stared down at him, my arms crossed, defiant. “I don’t care if you’re mad at me, do you understand? I don’t care! I’ve lost too many. I don’t want to lose anyone else!”
“I did wonder why they didn’t even ask.”
“Well, now you know.”
Pritkin stood up, too. “Then I’m to return to be what? A lap dog?”
It felt like a slap. “You know I don’t see you that way!”
“But you want to—”
“I don’t!”
“Then what do you want?”
“I told you! I thought I’d lost you—” I stopped and stared at him silently for a moment, because I wasn’t going to do this. I wasn’t going to cry!
It took me a minute to get back in control, but Pritkin waited me out. He had a quietness about him, a stillness that I wasn’t used to seeing. And that was a stark contrast to the enraged man in the interrogation room, throwing a chair through a window to get within an arm’s length of his prey.
And then something occurred to me.
“Would you have killed him?” I asked. “If you’d reached him?”
“Who?”
“Who else? Jonathan.”
“That was the general idea.” It was dry.
“Why not just sling a spell, then? You could have taken him out from across the room.”
Pritkin shook his head. “He had too many mages around him. It would have been deflected.”
“So you had to do it the old-fashioned way.”
“Essentially.”
“And if you’d succeeded? What then?”
“He would be dead, and you would be—” Pritkin stopped, and then just regarded me for a minute. And while it might have been a trick of the light, I thought I saw a gleam of respect in his eyes. It almost made up for the smile that quirked at his lips.
“Touché.”
“You wanted to protect me,” I said, “once y
ou realized what Jonathan intended to do. And you didn’t stop to think about the cost to yourself. How many years would you have gotten for that? How many decades?”
Pritkin crossed his own arms. “Possibly none. He’s a senior dark mage and one of the leaders on the other side. The Corps has wanted him for a while.”
“But they want him alive. They can mine him for information. They can trade him for another high value prisoner—”
“They’ll never trade him.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But they don’t want him dead. I’m surprised you’re not still locked up.”
“If I wasn’t important to you, I might be,” he confessed.