Free Central by Raine Thomas

frowned. “Nothing. We have not learned where the daughter we know is alive—the one who commands holy light—is being kept. There has been no news of any kind about the daughter Ryce believes he killed by slicing an artery in her neck. And the only news we have heard regarding the warrior daughter who fought Angius is that she was stabbed by the cursed blade. The other Estilorians mourned the loss, knowing none can survive such an injury.”
    Grolkinei sipped his drink and then said, “I mourn the loss, too. I still believe it would have been a pleasure to convert her. I would have given her a position of command in my army. She fought well enough with her sword after only days on this plane to give Angius several wounds that will never heal. And she would surely have been the key to get me onto the human plane.” He paused. “Still, it does my heart good to know she was bound to Gabriel. He is certainly mourning far more than the rest of us.”
    “Indeed. So we will do this the way we planned before the half-humans crossed planes,” Cesaro said, lifting his own glass. “We will finish amassing and training our army, convert a class commander or two who are ready to see a new regime, and we will take out the old one.”
    Grolkinei toasted that. “And the elders will either join with me to reunite the planes or we will kill them and rule this one instead.”
     
    A terrible thunderstorm the following day kept the other elders from making the trip to Ini-herit’s house as initially planned. It also kept everyone homebound.
    Olivia hadn’t slept well. Not only had the monstrous thunder and lightning rattling the windows made her jolt awake every few minutes, but she hadn’t been able to get the memory of James touching her out of her mind.
    He claimed that he understood what touching her meant. But how could he, really? Yes, he had paid rapt attention to everything she had shared with him about humans and their emotions over the past couple of months. But he had nearly a century of being an Estilorian making up the bulk of his awareness. Modeling behavior after something you were told or off of someone else’s actions didn’t make it genuine. She knew that.
    She also knew that he was an avid and eager learner, at least as much as she was herself. His learning curve simply staggered her. He could already read most of her expressions and gestures when she knew he’d had absolutely no understanding of any of them two months before. It was spectacularly impressive considering he didn’t have a mental connection to any of them like the elders did.
    So, could he genuinely be interested in her as more than just her guardian? She considered the fact that yes, he was modeling his behavior after Gabriel’s, which might make it seem less sincere, but then, Gabriel was the only male, non-Estilorian-like model he had, and James didn’t have to try and change his behavior at all. Didn’t the fact that he was trying to change so that he could please her mean he was interested in her a significant way?
    She was what she could only term as befuddled . Even before his “touching lesson,” she had been obsessing about the adorable cleft in his chin and the way that his hair sometimes fell into his eyes, giving him a devilish appearance. His slightly-more-frequent smile made her heart stutter every time she saw it. She believed that it was even more powerful because it appeared so infrequently, not to mention the fact that he only smiled for her. He was the first thing she thought of when she woke, and now thoughts of him were keeping her up at night.
    Yep, she was ridiculously hooked.
    So it was with grainy eyes and the start of a headache that she dragged herself out of bed before dawn and made her way to the kitchen. She pulled her robe on over her pajamas and shuffled through the quiet darkness as the rain lashed at them outside.
    When she entered the kitchen, she was rather unsurprised to find James there in his navy blue