Chapter 4

“How do you know so much about my grandpa?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know? He never mentioned such a brilliant person like me?”

I was sure Najeem was smirking, even if I couldn’t see his face. “Were the two of you friends?”

“Depends on how you define that,” he countered. Najeem was keen on not truly answering any of my questions and it started getting on my nerves.

“Enemies, then?”

“Do normal people really have enemies?”

I’ve already started hating his guts and it hasn’t even been an hour since we departed from my home. We’ve been riding on a horse together on our way to the neighboring city. Since my family only had one horse, we had to share it.

It took a lot of convincing for my parents to allow me to do this. Searching for the lost orbs with a stranger sounded as crazy as it could get, so I understood why my parents didn’t want me to go. But I had to.

I elbowed Najeem behind me. “We’ll spend a lot of time together if we’re going to retrieve every single orb. So the least we could do is get to know each other a little better.”

“Kadira,” he said, his voice suddenly closer and deeper. “I’d really like to know everything about you, but I think right now we have other issues at hand.”

A blush spread on my cheeks. Of course, he was spinning this in the wrong direction. I wasn’t interested in him in that way. “How am I supposed to trust you if you evade all my questions?”

It was so weird to sit so close to him while he shut himself up. “Guess you just have to.”

My patience was waning, so I put my hands on the reins of the horse to stop it from moving. “You could be a murderer for all I know!”

”You can put me into an orb if you’re afraid I’ll try anything,” he whispered near my ear, while putting his hands on mine to get the control back over the horse. I was sure he did this on purpose. Giving me the option to use my power on him, tempting me to follow his suggestion.

“You told me that in every orb there is a criminal…and you don’t really seem like one. So how did you end up in there?”

“Appearances can be quite deceiving.”

I huffed in response. “If you had wanted to harm me, you could have done so many times until now.”

His hands on mine tightened. “Maybe I was just waiting for this exact moment where I got you all alone.”