The Assassin and the Empire by Sarah J. Maas Read Free Book Online

sticking up at odd angles.
    After a long moment, he spoke. “The only secret I’ve borne my entire life is that I love you.” He gave her a slight smile. “It was the one thing I believed I’d go to the grave without voicing.” His eyes were so full of light that their loveliness almost stopped her heart.
    She found herself walking toward him, then placing one hand along his cheek and threading the other through his hair. He turned his head to kiss her palm, as if the phantom blood that coated her hands didn’t bother him. His eyes found hers again. “What’s yours, then?”
    The room felt too small, the air too thick. She closed her eyes. It took her a minute, and more nerve than she realized, but the answer finally came. It had always been there—whispering to her in her sleep, behind every breath, a dark weight that she couldn’t ever escape.
    “Deep down,” she said, “I’m a coward.”
    His brows rose.
    “I’m a coward,” she repeated. “And I’m scared. I’m scared all the time. Always.”
    He removed her hand from his cheek to kiss the tips of her fingers. “I get scared, too,” he murmured onto her skin. “You want to hear something ridiculous? Whenever I’m scared out of my wits, I tell myself:
My name is Sam Cortland … and I will not be afraid
. I’ve been doing it for years.”
    It was her turn to raise her brows. “And that actually works?”
    He laughed onto her fingers. “Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. But it usually makes me feel better to some degree. Or it just makes me laugh at myself a bit.”
    It wasn’t the sort of fear she’d been talking about, but …
    “I like that,” she said.
    He laced his fingers with hers and pulled her onto his lap. “I like
you
,” he murmured, and Celaena let him kiss her until she’d again forgotten the dark burden that would always haunt her.

Chapter Five
    Rourke Farran was a busy, busy man. Celaena and Sam were waiting a block away from Jayne’s house before dawn the next morning, both of them wearing nondescript clothing and cloaks with hoods deep enough to cover most of their features without giving alarm. Farran was out and about before the sun had fully risen. They trailed his carriage through the city, observing him at each stop. It was a wonder he even had
time
to indulge in his sadistic delights, because Jayne’s business certainly took up plenty of his time.
    He took the same black carriage everywhere—more proof of his arrogance, since it made him an easily marked target. Unlike Doneval, who was constantly guarded, Farran seemed to deliberately go without guards, daring anyone to take him on.
    They followed him to the bank, to the dining rooms and taverns owned by Jayne, to the brothels and the black-market stalls hidden in crumbling alleys, then back to the bank again. He made several stops at Jayne’s house in between, too. And then he surprised Celaena once by going into a bookshop—not to threaten the owner or collect dues, but to buy books.
    She’d hated that, for some reason. Especially when, despite Sam’s protests, she’d quickly snuck in while the bookseller was in the back and spied the receipt ledger behind the desk. Farran hadn’t bought books about torture or death or anything wicked. Oh, no. They’d been adventure novels. Novels that
she
had read and enjoyed. The idea of Farran reading them too felt like a violation, somehow.
    The day slipped by, and they learned little except for how brazenly he traveled about. Sam should have no trouble dispatching him tomorrow night.
    When the sun was shifting into the golden hues of late afternoon, Farran pulled up at the nondescript iron door that led down into the Vaults.
    At the end of the street, Celaena and Sam watched him as they pretended to be washing dung off their boots at a public spigot.
    “It seems fitting that Jayne owns the Vaults,” Sam said quietly over the gushing water.
    Celaena gave him a glare—or she would have, if the hood hadn’t