“Fine, I’ll hold it for you. But take a drink.”

She wanted to rebuke him for giving her orders, but the lines of his face, the tension by his eyes … She had the oddest thought that he might actually be worried about her energy state. It was … Payal had no word to describe this situation and what it did to her, how it threatened the entire foundation of her existence.

Grabbing the bottle, she slugged down a drink, then handed it to him to hold as they moved down to the water together. “Why aren’t you eating?”

“Already ate,” he said. “Had friends drop by. One of them is a chef—figured I’d give him a night off and did the cooking.”

Payal chewed on a piece of pear. Crunchy, it contained a shock of tart sweetness that was an assault on her senses. The closest she’d come to fruit in her adult life were dried slices infused with extra vitamins and purposefully drained of all taste, but she didn’t balk—to reject Canto’s gift was an impossibility. “You have friends.”

She didn’t know why that disconcerted her. Perhaps because she’d begun to think of them as the same in a small way. But of course they weren’t. He’d been rescued by the Mercants, whose loyalty to one another was a thing of legend. She’d been sucked back into the bosom of a pit of vipers.

Canto’s world was far bigger than hers had ever been.

“You have a sister who adores you,” Canto said, as if he’d reached into her mind and read her thoughts.

She froze on the path, ice crackling through her veins. “Is that a threat?” A pulse began to beat in her mouth, and all at once she was viscerally aware of the stupidity of her desire to be with this man.

“What the fuck!” He threw up his hands, his half gloves already familiar to her. “Are you kidding me? Do I look like the kind of man who goes about threatening little girls?” His voice was loud and rough, patches of heat along his cheekbones. “Apologize for that.”

Ice melted, her own cheeks hot as her hand clenched around the bag of fruit. “Why?”

“Because you know me!” He pointed a finger. “Pretend all you like that you don’t, but you do. You know me to the fucking core in a way no one else has ever done.” With that, he moved off down the path at rapid speed.

Pulse pounding in skin that felt too small for her body, Payal saw him turn right onto a path that she assumed went around the water. He soon disappeared into the foliage. She went the other way, to the bottom of the path, then took a seat on a large stone by the water. Where she ate her way methodically through the bag of fruit.

She’d never had an interaction like this with anyone. Ever.

There were no parameters.

So when Canto returned—from her left—she waited for cues on how to react. Social interaction had been difficult for her as long as she could remember, and right now she was lost in a way she hadn’t been since she’d realized that to survive, she’d have to suffocate an integral aspect of her nature.

He thrust the nutrient drink at her.

Even furious, he was feeding her.

She didn’t understand him.

Taking the drink because that she understood, she unscrewed the cap and drank, as Canto moved his chair closer to her. Then, biceps bulging and flexing in a way that drew her gaze and made her mouth go dry, he lifted himself to a position on a slightly higher rock than her own. From the even nature of his breathing, none of his actions had caused him any physical stress.

Her gaze went to his arms again, a crawling kind of heat under her skin. Confused, she looked away. “How long have you known about my sister?”

“Two years,” Canto growled, his simmering anger a hot desert wind. “My grandmother likes you better for being protective of a sibling—it’s how Silver’s father is with my mother. Mercants don’t hurt children. It’s not who we are.”

Run!

A boyish voice that echoed through time, telling her to save herself. “Fine,” she muttered. “I’m sorry for believing you’d use my sister as a threat. In my defense, while you can search for information about me, you’re a phantom.”

CANTO was well aware he’d been an ass. Payal was right—she didn’t know him. But he had a bone-deep loathing of her being scared of him or considering him yet another man against whom she had to protect her sister.

“I’m sorry, too,” he grumbled, picking up a small white stone from a crevice in the rocks and throwing it from hand to hand. “Shouldn’t have jumped down your throat.” Seeing she’d finished the fruit, he dropped the stone to pull a protein bar from his pocket.

She looked at him like he was an alien when he held it out, but accepted the offering and began to peel open the wrapper.

“My mother’s name is Magdalene,” he told her. “You probably haven’t heard of her—she’s not one of the more visible Mercants. She’s quiet, a researcher and a gentle woman who, without warning, had to deal with a boy whose blood was rage.”

Payal’s gaze searched his face. “You were never meant to be her child.”

“The thing is, Mercants never quite let go.” Not even the gentlest of them all. “My grandmother was the storm force against my anger, the one who—through sheer grim determination—taught me that I had value, that I wasn’t a broken object for Binh Fernandez to throw away.”

He took a deep breath of the cool night air. “But my mother, she’d come into my hospital room and read me children’s books written by one of my ancestors two hundred years ago. Stories of knights and queens and adventures. I ignored her for months—but she still came.”

Magdalene Mercant had her own kind of steel.

He saw Payal swallow before she looked away and to the water. “Did your father really die in an accident on a building site?”

“Says so in the Enforcement report.” Canto shrugged. “We live in a dangerous world.” He’d never asked his grandmother whether she’d had anything to do with Binh’s untimely death—but he knew not a single Fernandez had dared argue or ask for compensation when Ena claimed Canto for her own.

Payal bit off a chunk of the protein bar, chewed almost ferociously. “Mercants aren’t known to be assassins.”

“Could be because we’re very, very good at it.” It was also rare for them to take deadly action—but when forced into a situation where protecting the family meant erasing a threat from the board, it would be done.