RAIN PELTED MY FACE AS I FINISHED PISSING AND PULLED MYSELF BACK
into my pants.
The bottle of bourbon still dangling from my hand was mocking me. I had been determined to drink less, but today happened to be one of the more unpleasant of my life, and I needed something to take the edge off. Or several somethings, to take off several edges.
Grief was a curious thing. After so many tenuous years of it, I’d come to recognize what might induce greater pain than usual. I didn’t avoid those prompts—the mention of my mother’s or brother’s names, playing the lute. I had built up enough scar tissue that such heartache now only felt like a twinge. The dull scraping of a butter knife.
The true threat, I’d realized, was when I wasn’t prepared: when something wholly unexpected conjured them to the forefront of my mind. Then that butter knife became a battle axe.
Trying—and failing—to drink less produced one such unforeseen, agonizing ache.
My mother never drank. Not in celebration, not in misery. Not even for show. I didn’t know if she enjoyed spirit but abstained for some surely admirable reason, or if she loathed the stuff entirely. If I could have told her I was trying to kick the habit, and for a woman, no less, she might’ve doubled over in fits of laughter. Yale would’ve without a doubt.
Or she might’ve been hideously proud. Pulled me into a hug I knew I was too old for, but would have accepted nonetheless, and assured me I was
capable of anything I set my mind to. I’d try to change the subject—move away from praise I didn’t deserve—but she’d proceed as if I hadn’t said a word. She’d ask me when I knew I was in love. When I’d introduce her.
But my mother would never get to see how being in love changed me, for better or worse.
She’d never get to meet Arwen.
And it was those thoughts that ripped at the wound in my heart, cleaving it open anew.
A sudden chill swept through the wide, flat leaves surrounding our camp and splattered me in sideways rain. I took another pull from the bottle.
My mother definitely would have encouraged me to lay off Citrine’s prince. Truth was, Fedrik was kind of a decent kid. He had tried to give his life for Griffin in Reaper’s Cavern. So what if he was a bonehead, completely unaware of how quickly a Fae like Griffin would have healed from his same wound? He was a decent bonehead.
He had pleaded with me to let Arwen rest after her ordeal, despite his shattered leg. Had been fairly tough through one of the more grisly injuries I’d seen.
By the time I found myself back at camp, the storm had thoroughly ousted our campfire and faint light only emanated from two of the three tents. Mari and Arwen were probably sleeping by now, Griffin likely sharpening his blades.
Time to be less of an asshole.
“Fed,” I said, ambling toward his tent, “I’ve got this bourbon—it might help with the pain, and I’m actually trying to cut back—”
Under the lifted flap of the tent’s entrance was Arwen, laced in the arms of the prince, lips glued to his.
I nearly retched all the liquor in my stomach onto their crackling hearth.
Arwen pulled away from Fedrik faster than he could realize what was happening, and his dopey, lust-addled gaze took a minute to meet mine.
He had kissed her.
He had been kissing her—
I was going to skewer his innards and feed them to him—
“Kane,” Arwen shouted after me, but I was already stalking from the tent.
It wasn’t even that he had kissed her.
She had kissed him.
I wouldn’t listen to her fuck him in the tent beside me. That would—I would . . . There would be nothing left of me then.
Don’t be a possessive, territorial brute. She isn’t yours.
And hadn’t I known this was coming? Plagued myself with the possibility of it like a self-inflicted wound? And my conclusion was always the same: She deserved some joy. Some pleasure.
My legs carried me deeper into the jungle, past Mari’s chalk boundary, past limp leaves that slumped into my path, past drooping moths soaked in rain, fluttering out of the way with a swat of my outstretched hand. I took another swig until the liquor burned my throat and stomach. Then another.
I whirled at the sound of soft footsteps behind me.
Arwen was misted in rain that forced her blouse to cling to her body. “I’m sorry that you—” She swallowed hard against the storm. “That you saw that. But I didn’t expect him to— I don’t even like—”
“It’s fine,” I said softly, the words blades across my tongue. I turned from her and kept walking, scarcely able to suck in enough muggy air to slow my breathing.
“Really?” she called after me, her feet trampling through wet leaves and mud.
Couldn’t she leave me alone?
I spun to find her olive eyes bright and wide, like the stars the jungle hid from us.
“Yes, really. Cocky might be the only thing that doesn’t look good on you, bird.”
Her face hardened and her nose pinched, making my heart twist in my chest.
I loved that look. I loved that nose. “I just thought that you—that we—”
“I don’t care what you do, Arwen, as long as it makes you happy.”
She shifted, her flimsy shoes squelching in the mud beneath her feet.
She really needed some new boots. “So you’re . . . fine?”
Every single nerve in my body battled the urge to grab her by the shoulders and roar. Fine? Fine with this? I would be more fine with a javelin through the gut. I would barely feel it compared to this. You’re mine. You will always be mine. Nobody else should be allowed to touch you. To look at you. To make you laugh. I want to take you from this jungle tonight
—continent, blade, prophecy be damned—and go somewhere nobody can find us. Somewhere I can keep you like buried treasure. Where I can feed you cloverbread, and read to you, and fuck you when I please, and worship you every day and every night for the rest of our lives.
“Sure,” I said, nearly grinding my teeth to dust. Fierce rain pounded at my skull, on my shoulders, along my neck. Palms and nut trees shook with the force of it, clawing up toward the night sky. “Sometimes you make a poor choice because it feels good. I get that better than anyone.”
I hadn’t meant it like an insult. I’d done the same a thousand times.
But Arwen folded her arms and bared her lovely teeth at me. “Every ‘poor choice’ I’ve made has been in an effort to heal from you. You lied to me, Kane. Worse, you made me think you had feelings that you didn’t so you could sacrifice me.”
“That is not—”
“Oh, right.” Arwen didn’t cower. In fact, she stepped forward, forcing me to crane my neck down to maintain eye contact. “You changed your mind when you decided you wanted to sleep with me. How noble.”
I opened my mouth but she cut me off. “What did you want me to say? That day on the ship, when I learned everything . . . What did you expect me to do?”
A hideous clap of thunder, like the roaring inside my head, shook the forest. Neither of us even blinked.
“I don’t know, forgive me? Use some of that token positivity of yours to see the horrific position I was in and how hard I had tried to save you? Choose to be with me despite the mistakes I’d made?”
She pursed her lips, as if forgiveness, or perhaps just being with me, was the most repulsive thing she could imagine.
“It’s true,” I conceded. “I made egregious faults in judgment. I’ll never deserve you. I never could have. But don’t kid yourself, Arwen. You’re not running from this because I lied. Or because you don’t care anymore. Or because of some prince. You think I treat emotion as a weakness? You’re terrified of letting yourself feel anything real. You’ve let the prophecy become a shield you can hide behind. Nothing matters if you’re going to die, right?”
“Fuck you,” she spat.
I nearly flinched. I had never heard the curse from her lips before. Her anger was coal tossed on the fire simmering in my veins. I pressed closer until her breath hitched. I felt the little noise in the base of my spine. “Right here?” I snarled. “Little needy bird. It’s a bit damp for my taste, but you must know I’d fuck you anywhere you asked.”
“You would, wouldn’t you? Rut like animals on the forest floor.” I smirked. “Look, she listens for once.”
“I don’t think about you that way, Kane. Not anymore.” “I don’t believe you.”
“Then you’re a fool.” Her voice was nearly breathless.
“No, you think about me constantly. As I do you. Every day, every night. Every single waking hour until it’s so all-consuming, I can hardly hear myself when I speak.”
Arwen shook her head. “You said you were going to leave me alone.
Back on the beach in Azurine.”
“I guess we’re both liars, then.”
Movement rustled the trees behind us and we both spun, breathing hard.
Eight masked men emerged from the tree line. Wielding swords and bludgeons, trays and bark as shields—bandits.
My eyes fell to the forest floor. We were past Mari’s fucking boundary. Arwen inhaled sharply.
There was no need to risk my lighte with Amber soldiers looking for us. Not with mortals such as these. I unsheathed a dagger from my boot,
rotating my wrist and shaking out my shoulders, adrenaline pouring through me—molten hot and in search of blood.
Just the release I needed.
“Get back to camp. Get Griffin.”
Arwen did no such thing. “This man here,” she said, jerking her chin toward me, “is deadly. You will not survive him. Leave us now and save yourselves.”
The heftiest bandit, his face obscured by a leather mask, stepped forward, feet sloshing in wet sludge. “I’m no scholar, but I can count. You’re two and we’re at least triple that. Our band is even larger. Forty men strong and right behind us.” He stepped forward another inch and I placed myself in front of Arwen. “Not sure if you’ve seen, but things aren’t too pretty around here since Amber laid their claim. We need food. We need coin. You’ll just have to do. But I swear not to use your lady. We ain’t that way.”
My low growl shook rain from nearby leaves.
I thought I heard Arwen say my name once in warning, but it was too late. My steel dagger clashed with the bandit’s sword in a violent clamor, and then they were on us like a swarm of bees.
Another masked man charged me, and I drove my knife through his improvised pot-lid shield with ease. He’d been running toward me fast enough that the blow sent him careening toward Arwen’s feet, where she kicked him square in the temple.
“Arwen,” I grunted, shoving back a kid with a block-shaped head into a wide, wet tree. “Back to camp. Now.”
But she slid up against me, her chest pressed to mine, and my heart attacked my rib cage like a cornered animal. Before I could articulate my confusion, she pulled my longsword from its sheath and plunged it into something—or someone—behind me.
“Watch out,” she breathed.
I pivoted from a thug swiping at us with a crude butcher’s knife and ducked his next blow, though I felt the stinging scrape of the blade against
my forearm. I reared back and drove my dagger into his gut until the hilt met skin and a gruesome groan gurgled from him.
Two more men hurtled toward me. Unable to swiftly dislodge my dagger, I knocked them to the ground with the man still impaled on my knife like a human wrecking ball.
The whisper of a single arrow soaring through the air pulled my attention behind me. It was headed toward—
No, no, no—black wisps of my lighte reached from my hand and just narrowly slipped around the bolt, inches from Arwen’s back.
The wood splintered into sheer mist, and my stomach fell to my boots. Far, far too close.
But she was none the wiser, driving my sword into non-vital organs. Thighs and arms and shins. Her blade singing through the night as she feinted to the right and used her pommel to smack an assailant hard in the temple, knocking him to the ground.
That move actually looked familiar.
“Where’d you learn that?” I called, as my knife landed on another bandit’s club, mere inches from my kneecap.
“Griffin taught me,” she gritted out, heaving an eager assailant off her with a grunt.
I had to admit, the thought of fighting alongside Arwen had terrified me. But she was . . . astounding. So strong, so poised. Strangely merciful, which made no sense to me, but was so innately Arwen. Each of her movements executed in striking harmony like a ballerina. A graceful goddess of force and precision.
“Kane!”
Her voice cut through my affectionate thoughts just in time for me to rear my arm back and deck a lanky kid sprinting toward me square in the face. He clattered to the ground with a wheeze, another already charging. I absorbed the bandit’s impact and we both went down. Driving my knee into his groin, I pushed myself up and planted my knife in his windpipe.
And then there were more—so, so many more. “Ah, fuck.”
As promised, dozens of bandits crawled from the tree line, drawn to the sound of the brawl. Surrounding us on every side.
I cut a glance at Arwen, her sword now soaked in blood and her brow gleaming with sweat.
We couldn’t take them all. Not without help.
I rolled my shoulders back and undid the top few buttons of my soaked shirt. The power I fought to keep at bay inside me—fighting and squirming for release—galloped out with the speed of a prized stallion. It spun and curved around the glade, a single obsidian rope from my palm, sprouting spikes like razors and slicing cleanly through six men.
At the sound of Arwen’s grunts and metal against blunt wood, I sent the next wave of twisted power in her direction. The shimmering smoke spun around her ankles, almost tenderly protective, before spinning outward and suffocating the three men that surrounded her. She shot me an appreciative nod.
I opened my mouth to tell her once again to go find fucking Griffin, before pain bloomed in my shoulder blade.
Real, bruising pain.
I whirled on two bandits wielding bats. Poison-black vines wrapped around their necks, constricting like snakes until both men were mere pale, gray husks on the ground.
Fuck. I rubbed my shoulder.
More power, more lighte, billowed from my palms, my forearms, and filtered out into the clearing.
Rain slammed against my face—
My power slashing, cutting, suffocating.
My dagger sliding into man after man, artery after artery, limb after limb
—
Arwen, heaving with the force of her sword, backing up behind me for
protection.
More lighte. More blood— Until—
At least three dozen men, two groaning in agony, lay at my feet on the wet forest floor. It was still drizzling through the trees above, and I wiped my brow of both rain and sweat. One last bandit circled Arwen, his bow outstretched toward her.
I prowled forward, ready to end this foul night.
“I can handle him myself,” she bit out, eyes still on the bandit.
“Clearly,” I said, gesturing to the men that littered the ground. “But I’d be honored to take care of it for you.” I shot a feral glare at the bandit, who backed up a single step.
Arwen raised her sword, and I sighed.
The rustle in the bushes sent all three of us whirling.
Relief sang in my veins. Mari, in her nightgown, dusted with the light rain, and Griffin close behind her, still rubbing sleep from his eyes.
Arwen sighed. “Thank the Stones—”
The whistle of an arrow flashed through the clearing— And struck Mari in the chest.
No—
My heart seized as she fell to the ground like a stone through water.
