Kai refused to let his mind wander back to the trading post until a full hour’s hard ride put the treacherous place far enough behind him to breathe. The forest had swallowed them whole. He found a spot not for its comfort, but for its obscurity: a shallow scrape in the rock behind a thorny bramble, invisible from the deer trail they’d abandoned.
He swung down from Bastion, his body thrumming with a sick, spent energy. He didn’t help Zara down. The frustration running through his veins was too much to offer a polite courtesy. He turned his back and began the grim, mechanical work of making them disappear.
Every movement felt like an accusation, a taunt at his inability to keep her safe. He still went about the motions, pulling branches across the opening and clearing the ground for a place to rest. Each task was a line in the ledger of his ruined life, and the final sum was a debt he could never repay to the man he used to be.
He ignored the ringing in his ears as he tried to work out how things had gone awry.
The King’s paranoia had been a thick stink in the shadow-draped antechamber. The job had screamed secrecy. So why was every drunk in the kingdom now baying for her head? It made no tactical sense. Unleashing a mob risked the very asset Vorian wanted to control. She could be torn apart by a fool with a rusty sword, her power lost forever.
The thought of some other greedy bastard dragging her to the capital, collecting his coin, sent a jolt of pure, possessive fury through Kai’s blood. It was immediately, violently followed by another image: his own hand, delivering her to the same fate.
Both scenarios turned his stomach.
He finally risked a glance at her. She had dismounted and stood in the center of the hide, her arms wrapped around herself. The firelight he hadn’t yet lit was missing from her wide, watchful eyes. She was a pale ghost in the deepening dusk.
He should say something. Reassert the crumbling fiction of his control.
All that came out was a low, rough scrape of sound. “We can’t use the roads.”
She flinched, but didn’t look away.
“They’ll be watching the roads to the capital.” He spoke to the rock wall, stating facts for his own benefit as much as hers. “We go through the Blackwood. It’ll add weeks. Maybe a month.”
He said it like a curse. A death sentence he was pronouncing for them both.
He expected… well, he wasn’t sure what he expected. More silence, that was for sure. More trembling.
Instead, she surprised him by taking a small, hesitant step forward. Then another. She stopped an arm’s length away, her gaze fixed on his hands, which were fisted at his sides.
Her eyes shifted to the barricade he’d made from the branches, her brows furrowed. She pointed to him, then to her own ear, then made a vague, sweeping gesture around the forest.
Did you hear something? Is someone coming?
He understood. The simple, desperate clarity of it cut through the fog of his frustration. She wasn’t just scared of the world; she was trying to read it. To help.
“No,” he said, the word coming out softer than he intended. “No one. Not yet.”
Her shoulders sank a fraction. He wasn’t sure if it was with relief or the burden of the reprieve.
He watched her for another long moment. The plan was flawed. Reckless. But it was the only plan he had. He had to stay the course, get to the capital, see the game through. But he would be walking in with his eyes open, not as a blind errand boy. He needed to know what he was truly walking into before he decided where to stand. And to do that, he needed to know her.
With a sigh that felt like it came from the marrow of his bones, he crouched by the unlit branches. He struck flint to steel, and a tiny spark caught on the dry tinder. A small, vulnerable flame bloomed in the dark hollow.
He didn’t look at her as he spoke. “The story at the post is ash. They’ll be looking for a man and his mute wife.” He fed a twig to the flame. “We need a new one.”
When he finally raised his eyes to hers, the firelight danced in them. The fear was still there, but beneath it, he saw a flicker of something else: a sharp, trapped intelligence.
“Can you write?” he asked.
She hesitated, then gave a single, sharp nod.
He pulled a charred stick from the edge of the growing fire. He snapped it in half, the sound loud in the quiet hide, and held the blackened end out to her. Then he smoothed a patch of dirt between them with his palm.
“Then tell me,” he said, his voice a low rumble in the dark. “Who are you, Zara Lyane? And what did you do that was so terrible, it warranted this?”
For the first time, he was not asking for the King. He was asking for himself. The mission was no longer to deliver her.
It was to understand the secret he was now willing to kill for.
ns216.73.216.86da2
and then Add to home screen.