Chapter 28
Kaiven
Iam halfway through securing the outer hide wall when the fastening gives with a sharp crack and a whole section of weighted covering whips sideways in the rising wind.
Dust and grit hit hard enough to sting exposed skin.
Tors curse and lunge for the loose edge.
One Torin nearly loses his footing. The sky has gone from wrong to dangerous in the space of minutes.
Light flattened. Horizon erased. Wind no longer moving like weather, but like force.
I anchor the line myself, driving the stake deeper while two warriors haul the hide back into place. The gusts are getting stronger. The storm body is close now. Too close. The air already carries the sharp whisper of glass-fine grit.
And then, through all of it, one thought cuts straight through my mind.
Keandra.
I look for her without meaning to. Toward Oshara’s tents first. Toward the central ring. Toward the path where she should have obeyed and gone under shelter.
She is not there.
Cold hits me first. Then rage. Then fear so clean it wipes every other thought bare.
I turn so fast the warrior beside me nearly collides with my shoulder. “Where is she?”
No one answers at once, because no one knows.
That is enough.
I am already moving before anyone can try to stop me.
I cross the center line of camp in long brutal strides, eyes cutting over every shadow and hide flap and scrambling figure.
Maira are pulling Siran in. Young males are securing supply crates.
Oshara is shouting at two girls trying to save cooking tools they should have abandoned already.
No Keandra.
I grab the nearest woman by the forearm. “Did she come in?”
The woman’s face tightens. She shakes her head once.
My whole body goes violent. Not out of control. Never that. But every choice inside me narrows to one point.
Find her.
A gust slams through camp hard enough to send sparks sideways from a half-buried fire. Tent walls snap. A loose skin lifts and tears free. The storm has reached the outer edge now. Not fully on us yet, but close enough that every breath burns with grit.
I snatch a heavy storm hide from the side of a storage rack and wrap it over one arm as I run. One of my warriors shouts after me. I do not answer. Another starts to follow.
“No.” The command snaps out of me like a blade. “Hold the camp.”
I know what they hear in that. This is personal. This is mine. Hold what I leave. I go for her.
No one argues.
The path toward the gathering ground is already half gone under moving dust and pale cutting grit. The wind comes in hard sideways bursts now, then shifts direction without warning. Grass lies flat and then whips upright again. Visibility drops with each breath.
I keep low and drive forward.
I know this land. I know the line between camp and basin. I know where the stone breaks shallow under the grass and where the low dip near the root patch can turn an ankle if hit wrong at speed. But knowledge only matters so much when the world starts disappearing around you.
The first true sweep of the glass storm hits me halfway there.
It feels like being flayed by sand and broken light.
The hide over my arm takes the worst of it on one side, but my face, neck, and hands still catch enough to cut.
Tiny sharp strikes. A thousand of them. I narrow my eyes to slits and keep moving.
Wind screams now, not whistles. A constant grinding howl carrying dust, pale grit, and things harder than both.
Keandra.
I roar her name once and hear nothing back. Again. Nothing.
The basin appears and disappears in pieces through the storm. Stone. Bent grass. The dark smear of abandoned baskets half buried already. One cloth wrap torn loose and racing low across the ground like a fleeing thing.
And then I see her.
Not standing.
Trying.
She is on one knee near the low rock line, one arm thrown over her face, the other reaching blindly for a tipped supply basket or maybe for balance, I cannot tell.
Her hair has come loose. Her wrap is half torn away and snapping behind her.
She is too small against the force of it all.
Too exposed. Too human. The storm keeps shoving her sideways every time she tries to rise.
Something in me goes past fear and into a cleaner, deadlier place.
Not if she is within breath of me. Not while I still stand.
I drive toward her through the wind, using the stone breaks where I can and taking the rest full on when I have to.
Twice the gusts shove me off line. Once, I nearly go to one knee myself when the ground shifts under a skin of moving grit.
I get up each time without thinking. Nothing exists except the female ahead and the fact that I was a fool to let myself believe she would obey when hurt pride was louder in her than survival.
I reach her just as she lifts her head enough to see me.
Her eyes are wide and red-rimmed from the grit. Her face is streaked with dirt and fine cuts. She opens her mouth, maybe to speak, maybe only because she cannot believe it is me through all this. The storm swallows whatever sound she makes.
I drop beside her and throw the heavy hide over both of us at once.
The change in the force of the storm is instant. It hammers around us from every side.
Keandra gasps under the hide, body already shaking hard enough that I can feel it through the cramped space.
I cup the back of her head with one hand and force her face into the shelter of my throat and chest. “Breathe through this.”
She clutches at me instantly.
That tells me everything I need to know about how close to panic she really is.
I wrap the hide tighter around her with my other arm, dragging as much of her body under it as possible.
One edge goes over her head. The rest around her shoulders and back.
I bend over her and take the worst of the storm on my own body.
Grit slams into the hide and into the exposed parts of my back and neck like thrown knives.
“Can you stand?” I shout against her hair.
She nods once, then shakes her head, then grabs harder at my shirt.
I do not waste another breath asking.
I hook one arm behind her knees, one around her back, and lift her into me under the hide.
Too light.
That thought enrages me all over again. Not because she weighs little. Because the storm could have taken her so easily if I had come one minute later.
Keandra buries her face deeper against my throat the second her feet leave the ground. Her whole body folds into the only shelter I am offering without argument now. No pride. No proving. Just survival.
Good.
I turn back toward camp and start walking.
Running is impossible in this. Even for me.
The storm comes too hard and too sideways.
I keep my body lowered against the wind and use my own back and the hide to shield her as much as I can.
Each step is chosen. Ground guessed more than seen.
The world reduced to pressure, pain, weight, and direction.
Once her head lifts slightly against my chest. “Kaiven—”
“Quiet.”
Not harsh. Not now. Only because I need all my focus on getting her home alive.
She obeys instantly this time, and the obedience cuts me in a place I do not want touched because it comes from fear now, not trust.
I adjust my grip and keep moving.
A gust hits hard enough to drive me two steps sideways. My shoulder slams into a half-buried stone. Pain flashes down one arm. I do not stop. Keandra makes a small strangled sound and clutches me tighter under the hide.
I feel every tremor in her body. Every breath she tries to keep even and cannot.
The camp should be closer. It feels impossible that it is not yet.
Then a horn sounds through the storm. Faint. Directional. Camp call.
Good.
I angle toward it.
Shapes begin to appear in pieces. A tent line. A low wall of weighted hides. Two warriors running bent double with ropes around their bodies so the storm cannot take them if a gust throws them off their feet. One spots me and shouts. The sound disappears. The recognition does not.
The outer shelter line opens just enough for me to force us through.
The difference is immediate and brutal. Wind, grit, and noise still there. But not the full killing force of open ground. Warriors close the line behind us at once and move to take Keandra.
I snarl before they even touch her.
No one argues. They drop their hands back instantly.
I carry her myself through the half-secured center of camp, through shouting and moving bodies and low smoke and chaos that parts around me.
Oshara appears at the edge of my tent as if she had been waiting there for the exact second I broke back through the camp line. Her eyes cut over Keandra first, then me, then the blood and grit and cuts on both of us. She says something sharp to the women behind her, and the tent is opened wider.
I duck inside without slowing.
The heat of the brazier hits first. Then the quieter air. Then the realization that we are inside, and Keandra is breathing.
Only then does my body begin to unclench enough for finer awareness to return.
I set her down on the furs carefully, crouching immediately in front of her before she can try to rise.
The hide falls away around us in a shower of grit.
Her face is streaked, hair half full of dust, lips dry, small cuts visible across one cheek and along her hands where she must have braced against the ground.
My chest goes savage at the sight.
I touch her face. Her throat. Her arms. Fast, efficient, checking for deeper cuts, for broken skin, for anything the storm might have done beyond the obvious.
“Look at me.”
She does, though her eyes are too wide and dazed.
“Where are you hurt?”
For one horrible heartbeat, I think she may say nowhere simply because she does not yet understand the question. Then she swallows. “My hands. My face. I think. I don’t know.”
Good enough. Alive enough to answer.
I turn and bark for water, cloth, salve, and a clean inner wrap. The women already hovering at the edge of the tent move fast. Oshara enters only as far as needed to set down the basin herself before stepping back out again without comment.
Smart.
This is mine.
I take the cloth, wet it, and begin cleaning the grit from Keandra’s face with hands that would be steady in battle and are not steady now.
She flinches at the first pass.
My jaw tightens. “Don’t move.”
The words are rougher than I mean. My whole body is too full of storm and fear and the aftermath of carrying her through it.
Keandra goes quiet at once.
I hate that too.
I clean her face. Her hands. The shallow cuts along one wrist. The side of her neck where the wrap slipped and the storm kissed skin too long.
Every mark is small. Every mark enrages me. Because none of them should exist. Because she should have been under hide when the first warning hit. Because I should have dragged her inside myself rather than trusting obedience in a female already wounded in the places obedience touches wrong.
When I reach for her hand again, she whispers, “I’m sorry.”
The words stop me cold.
Not because I want them. Because I don’t.
I look up sharply.
She sits on the furs covered in dust and shame and the last trembling of fear, and yet the first thing out of her mouth after a storm nearly skins her alive is an apology. For disobeying. For needing rescue. For being foolish. For being one more trouble laid at my feet.
I set the cloth aside.
Then I cup the back of her neck and pull her forehead against mine with far less care than I have used for the rest, because gentleness is impossible in me right now, and any contact is better than none.
“No.”
The word comes out harsh.
She goes still against me.
I keep her there and close my eyes once against the rage and relief fighting inside my chest. No more seeing her half lost in open ground and understanding in one clean hideous instant exactly how much of me would burn down with her.
When I finally speak again, my voice is lower. Rawer.
“You do not apologize for being alive when I reach you.”
Her breath shudders once against me.
That almost breaks me more than the sight of her out there did.
I pull back only enough to see her face. Dust-streaked. Wide-eyed. Shaken. Real.
And alive.
That is the core of me. Not Kai. Not a hunter. Not command.
A male who will cross straight into violence and storm and blood if that is what lies between him and the female in his care.