Chapter 8 #2
For a heartbeat, two, three, the warrior just watches me, his head slightly tilted to the side, a faint frown etched onto his marble face.
Blood spatters along the tension of his jawline, beneath the slash of shadows that cut across his cheeks.
But those green, gleaming eyes are on me.
If I decided he had much thought in his brain beyond eat, sleep and kill, then I might think there’s a curiosity in the way he considers me, like I’m some discovered foreign creature to be studied… then dissected.
No doubt in my mind, he’s waiting to see what my next move is.
Oh.
I get it.
The warrior wants to see if I realise that running is a terrible idea for so many reasons.
It’s an assessment.
I won’t run…
Not yet.
I’ll wait for Bee.
Patience and some luck mean survival—and I can hang onto that until she finds a way back to me.
The warrior seems somewhat satisfied by my stagnant response, and he diverts, “Relieve yourself.” His hand lifts in a lazy gesture to the thick tree trunk whose roots roll over and under the earth. “Leave your bag.”
The instinct to follow the command rolls my shoulder just once—before I realise I’m not getting these bag straps off while my wrists are tied together.
I hold out my hands.
The warrior drops his gaze to the silky black rope coiled around my reddened flesh, then flings the sudden cold burn of his stare back to me.
“I need my hands free.”
For a long moment, he just stares at me, into me.
My throat bobs.
A chill prickles along my flesh, pebbled, before a shudder strikes down my spine.
“Belt.”
That is his answer.
His lips twitch, almost curling around that one, coldly uttered word.
It takes my mind a moment to chug through the fog—and understand.
First, he wants my belt.
The colour drains out of my face.
He knows.
He knows what the radio is.
He must.
The CB is all I have there, just fastened to my belt, hanging with the weight of a lump of metal and plastic, pulling it down at the side.
I cut my gaze down to it, shimmering in the torchlight, and my mouth twists before I fumble with the buckle.
I don’t let it fall to the forest floor. It’s the most valuable thing I own. I won’t risk it, so I hand it to him, gentle.
My pinned hands outstretched, the black chunk of radio dangles from a grotty old suede belt.
His hand snatches out like a blur of mist.
The weight vanishes from my fingers.
He isn’t so careful with the radio.
He releases it—and it thuds to the frosty foliage at his boots.
My jaw tenses.
I force back the sudden ugly sensation rising in me—a feeling I’m all too familiar with—and I hold out my wrists.
The warrior takes a single step towards me.
That cold burn of his eyes is scraping over my face, a stare with intention, a fuck around find out message I have no problem translating.
I hide from it.
My gaze drops to the workings of his fingers on the tether, swift and practiced, until the rope is loosened… and the relief that rushes over the flesh of my wrists is almost painful.
I draw my hands back to my midsection and it’s a sudden scramble of my fingers trying to grip both of my wrists at one, to add pressure to the sudden heat rushing through them.
The sleeves of my jacket slip back into place, fast to conceal the damage that the tether has done to my skin. But I can feel it alright. Hot and scraped and burning and thrumming.
I’m cringed against it, the moments ticking by under his close stare, and I just hold my hands to my middle.
I keep my head down.
Still, he towers over me. He hasn’t stepped back yet. Maybe he won’t. Maybe they don’t have the same concept of personal space—or, more likely, he doesn’t give a fuck about mine.
I give in where he doesn’t.
My boot slides back across the foliage, rustling dead, crisp leaves frozen through winter.
I put a step of distance between us.
The warrior watches me closely, his head tilted an inch to the side, hardly at all, but that same touch of curiosity I saw on him before.
Maybe he wants me to run so he gets a good chase, a little thrill, a sick game he can indulge in.
That’s not a game I would win.
I disappoint him.
My teeth grit as I peel the strap off my wounded shoulder first, then the other, before the bag hits the forest floor.
Like my wrists, the relief is instant, a crashing wave over a rocky shore, but sore, too.
So much weight released from my aching body, I can’t stop the sigh from escaping me, and my shoulders sag with the liberation.
My chin tucks to the side as I eye the thick trunk, whose roots curdle over the frosted foliage. The dominant tree among thinner, younger ones.
Before I can do anything, move for the tree or look at the fae for reassurance, he commands me, “Go.”
I do.
Without a glance at him, I advance on the thick trunk—but I’m slow. I move with a gait, a limp that extends far beyond the tense muscles of my legs and reaches up my spine to my shoulders and wraps around my thumping head.
The chill of his gaze follows me until I’m around the other side of the trunk, so wide that I could hide behind it with another person and still be shielded.
The sweatpants slide down to my ankles easily.
It’s the leggings that put up a fight.
I don’t know how long ago it was that the dark fae trapped us in the street and I wet myself, but I do know the material of the leggings has dried to that stage of laundry, that doubt of is it damp or is it cold?
Maybe both.
And so, the fabric sticks to my skin, snags on my inner thighs, as I wrestle myself free of them.
My body works against me.
I try to squat, but every bone in my back screams the moment when I do, so I shift my not-hurt shoulder to lean on the rugged trunk and slide down.
The rustle of my jacket follows me down into a leaning squat—and the groan that hums in me is constant.
I do my business.
But I haven’t eaten or drank any water in a while, so there isn’t much to release before I’m wiping with cold leaves, then tugging up the damp, clingy leggings.
The sweatpants come up as easily as they glided down, but the smell of urine lifts from them like a punch to the face.
My nose crinkles.
I fucking stink.
The stench of ammonia follows me around the thick trunk, back to the warrior, right where I left him.
Only, he doesn’t stand like the soulless statue he is, waiting for me.
He’s dropped to one knee, his satchel open on the forest floor, and beside him, there is a small pile that lures a frown to my face.
At first, it looks nothing more than a smear of black disturbing the pale greys of the winter earth.
But as my steps, slow and limping, draw me closer to the warrior, I realise the mound is actually a flattened, folded pile of clothes.
Not the sort of leathers that sheath every dark fae warrior in the unit, not the fine chain-link armour that drapes over his shoulders and reaches midway down his chest.
These are just regular clothes.
The toes of my boots stop just an inch from the pile. Crimson torchlight dances over the dark hues, and I can make out the long sleeves of a top and the soft wool of a grey sweater.
There’s more.
Out from his satchel, he lifts folded clothes, then carefully places them down on the pile, organised.
I stand, silent.
He doesn’t speak a word, so I don’t either.
I just watch as he sets out a bar of soap next to his discarded waterskin, then a small phial of powder.
Through the glass of the phial, the powder looks coarse, sort of chalky, and as black as the leader’s diadem. It brings crumbled coal to mind.
Next, the warrior lures out two cloths from the bag, rolled tightly.
This fae is a neat freak.
It’s a startling recognition.
A humanising one.
I steel myself against it, throw it from my mind with enough violence to twist my face and spur something ugly through my chest.
The warrior flicks his cold, hollow gaze up at me.
My insides constrict.
His leathers glisten, faint, as he pushes up from the satchel—then I’m lobbed on the face with the rolled cloths.
Instinct flings through me too late, and I swat at the rolled cloths after they’ve hit me on the face and already fallen to the earth.
I blink down at them, unfurled on the dead leaves and broken twigs, two soft cloths, plain and ordinary, no poison in sight.
I lift my frown to the warrior.
I swallow, thick, at the reminder of his height, his tall and looming build, the glisten of leather running down his powerful build like black rivers.
His stare is glacier. “Wash yourself.”
‘Kill yourself.’
My answer comes too easily, too quickly, too smoothly—but thank fuck it came to my mind and not my tongue.
Still, as if he heard me, the pale pink of his upper lip twitches, like it’s tugged by a thread.
The snarl doesn’t take root.
He jerks his chin to the pile—clothes, a waterskin, and a bar of soap. “You have an odour. It offends me.”
I bite down on the insides of my cheeks, and I instantly fucking wish I didn’t. A wince spears through me like a fencing sword.
Forgot, even if only for a moment, about that throbbing heat on my face, the split lip I definitely have, my swollen cheek and the taste of metal on my tongue.
That guard struck me like he’d been waiting for the moment, looking forward to it… so I should do what this one says.
This one frightens me most.
And still, I hesitate.
My bones go rigid, my muscles go on strike.
I just look down at the cloths, then at the pile, before I lift my scowl to him.
“No.”
He doesn’t flinch. Not a flutter of the lashes, not a frown, not a flicker of anything.
Unwavering, his stare bores into mine.
“Not with you here,” I say, firm.
His boots flatten on the foliage, a single swift step to bring him closer, to have him towering over me, to have the warm mist of his minty breath disturbing my hairline.
I shudder against the intrusion.
His voice comes like cold death, “What do you say?”
I crane my neck, wide eyes on his hard face.
Takes me a moment to understand his question.
‘What do you mean?’