Chapter 20 James
James
Whether minutes passed, or hours, James couldn’t have said. All he knew when he peeled his eyelids open was that he was not dead and that a fire burned bright before him.
While a different sort of heat pressed against the bare skin of his back.
James fought the urge to stiffen, for it would reveal that he was awake, and instead took account of the situation.
The woolen blanket was still over him, and as he slowly inhaled and exhaled, he felt the soft press of breasts against his back. Knees against the backs of his legs. And his hands, still bound by the belt, were pressed against the apex of a pair of thighs.
Ahnna’s thighs.
Against his will, he remembered being between those thighs. The taste of her on his tongue as she wrapped those endless legs around his shoulders, her whole body taut with pleasure.
James shoved away the thought, because they were a lifetime away from that moment.
Her arm was draped around his waist, the limpness of it, along with the steadiness of her breath, suggested she’d fallen asleep while doing everything she could to keep him alive.
I am no fucking murderer.
He flinched at the memory, and the rest of what she’d said before he’d plunged through the ice filled his head. Ahnna must have felt the motion, because she stirred and then abruptly jerked away from him.
“I see you managed to stay alive,” she muttered as she clambered to her feet and moved to put another log on the fire.
She wore only her undergarments and the same necklace she’d been wearing the night everything had gone to shit, but his eyes were all for the long legs on display, not jewels.
He forced himself to stop gaping, but not before he noticed the bandage around her leg and shoulder, both wounds he’d inflicted.
The one on her leg was soaked through with blood, and it struck him that if his aim had been true, she’d be dead.
“Why did you help me?” His voice sounded like it was dragged over gravel, and he coughed to clear his throat. “You could be across the border into Amarid by now.” A thought occurred to him, and he added, “Intending to use me as your hostage?”
She glared at him in disgust. “Go fuck yourself, James. I should’ve left you to die.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because Alexandra’s body count is high enough. No need to add yours to it.” Ahnna tilted her head. “Not that you believe me.”
James no longer knew what to believe. No longer quite trusted what he’d seen with his own eyes and heard with his own ears, so instead he said, “You’re bleeding.”
Ahnna bent down to meet his gaze, her hazel eyes hot with anger. “Yeah. Because you shot me. Twice. Thanks for that, by the way.”
Dragging a roughly made chair next to the stove, she unraveled the bandage on her thigh to reveal the arrow wound, which was oozing blood. It needed to be stitched.
“There are supplies in my saddlebags,” he told her. “Needles, gut thread, and bandages.”
“I used them on you,” she replied.
James realized then that his injured forearm was wrapped tight with a bandage. She must have stitched him up while he was unconscious. “Thank you.”
“Take your thanks and shove it up your ass, James. I’m not interested.”
God help him, he didn’t know what to make of this situation.
Dipping a cloth in a pot of water, she cleaned away the blood from her leg, then grimaced and put one of her knives into the fire.
“Ahnna…”
She ignored him, eyes on the heating blade. When it started to glow, she donned a leather glove and extracted it. Without so much as taking a steadying breath, she pressed the glowing metal to the bleeding wound.
The sharp sizzle filled his ears, along with the distinct smell of burning flesh.
She screamed, her voice wild and furious and full of pain, and leapt to her feet. “Goddamn it!” she shrieked, and kicked the chair across the room before doubling over. “That hurts!”
James kept his mouth shut, as commenting didn’t seem prudent.
Instead, he watched the fire while Ahnna wrapped a length of bandage around her thigh in his periphery.
She righted the chair and sat again, elbows resting on her bare knees.
Her hair clung to the sweat beading on the sides of her face, the cabin now hot enough that the icy lake seemed a distant memory.
Her eyes focused on him. “Why won’t you believe me? ”
“Because I saw you, Ahnna. I saw it all!”
“Except you didn’t, did you?” Her hands fisted. “You came upon the aftermath, and you saw exactly what Alexandra wanted you to see. She inflicted those injuries on herself in order to—”
“No one could do that to themselves,” he interrupted, straining as he tested the bindings on his wrist. “Alexandra has never lifted a weapon in her life. Never known violence. Never known pain. To believe she could do such a thing is irrational, but it is equally irrational to believe that she had the strength to overwhelm my father and kill him. Equally irrational to believe that the riding-boot prints left with his blood came from her tiny fucking feet!”
“Why are you defending her?” Ahnna shouted. “She has been awful to you your entire life, and you’ve seen firsthand how she schemes!”
“I’m not defending her!” James forced himself upright, ignoring the wave of dizziness.
“I’m pointing to the factual evidence of your guilt and trying to understand why, even though everything points to you having done this, I still want to believe you are innocent.
I hate that you have gotten so under my skin that I’ll absolve you of murdering my own father because you tell me to! ”
Ahnna went still.
“I can’t be around you,” he snarled, the room spinning, his thoughts in a spiral.
“Because from the moment you knocked me off that ship, you consumed me. Made me turn on everything that mattered just to have you, and I cannot let that happen again. I cannot put you before my family, and I will make things right by bringing them your head!”
Ahnna snatched up her knife and in a flash knocked him flat on his back.
She pressed the still-hot blade to his throat.
“Killing me isn’t justice, James. It’s just you erasing the evidence of your weakness.
” A trickle of blood ran down the side of his neck, but he barely noticed the pain as his body reacted to the press of her nearly naked skin.
“Alexandra is allied with Katarina. This is all a scheme to take the bridge, and if you stop me from warning Aren, my people will pay the price.”
James stared at her, his shock at the audacity of her claim doing nothing to temper his traitorous cock’s reaction to her naked legs. “An alliance between Katarina and Alexandra? Given the history between Amarid and Harendell? I don’t know whether you’re lying or you’ve lost yourself to delusion.”
Her eyes filled with anger but as her lips parted to respond, a cold draft of air struck James’s naked side, and a familiar voice filled the cabin. “Well, well, James. When they told me you were hunting Ahnna Kertell, this was not the position I expected to find you in.”
James’s head snapped sideways, horror sucking all the heat from his core.
Because standing in the doorway was Prince Carlo.
The Beast of Amarid smiled. “Such a shame you didn’t listen to the princess, my friend, because every word she said was true.”