Chapter 32 #2
Bramwell shuddered at that and Hamelin paled.
Durand sneered but jerked his attention away from the Tower. He wasn’t stupid. He knew how dangerous Rider was, but just because he was being more cautious, didn’t mean he wasn’t still a danger to the boy.
“Fine,” Mikel said. “We wait.”
“For what?” Hamelin asked.
Mikel’s mouth pressed into a tight line, then he huffed and marched toward the pasture gate.
Bramwell’s shoulders sagged, the tension bleeding out of him. He glanced at Hamelin who also looked relieved, and together they followed Mikel.
With a snarl, Durand jerked away from glaring at the running trail and hurried to catch up.
That, I didn’t like. Rider might have scared the others enough to stop taking direct action against Sawyer, but it was only a matter of time before Durand snapped.
I hung back, letting them pull ahead, trying not to look over my shoulder at the boulders. Sawyer was still somewhere on the trail, running with the bag of rocks, and I prayed he wouldn’t crest the final hill until after Durand was well out of sight.
Durand was getting more dangerous, not less, and it would be best if he and Sawyer were never alone together.
My insides churned. I couldn’t do anything until Durand did. All I could do was warn Rider, Talon, and Quill where the novice’s mind was at, and that wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have. Not with how fucked up his attitude was toward the fae-touched.
Hell, the man had almost assaulted Sawyer, and the best I’d managed to do was shove the boy away.
Goddess be damned. I was useless.
I was useless at protecting Sawyer and I was useless at protecting Sage.
All of my contacts, in the White Tower and in the fae realm itself, still had nothing. The knife was still missing, and the bracelet artifact was still a mystery, and the fact that Yarrow remembered a similar artifact found with other artifacts didn’t mean anything if it couldn’t be proven.
It didn’t matter how good Yarrow’s memory was. Someone had to prove the bracelet was connected to the other case for that to be a lead, but since the case details were missing it was a dead end. I couldn’t even figure out what that other case was about.
Or at least it was a dead end for me. My contacts in the Order, because they weren’t particularly high level, had already tried and failed to glean any new information about it.
Yarrow, if it bothered him enough, could use all the resources of the Order to hunt down what had happened to the case files.
But he had other problems to deal with, like where the hell Crane and the other men who escaped were.
And if I wasn’t so useless, I’d be able to help with that.
But Crane, Thunder, Addax, and that last remaining man who’d attacked Sage in the sacred chamber had disappeared and no one knew where they were—
Well, that wasn’t true. According to Rider, that last remaining man we hadn’t been able to identify had stood outside the door to Sage’s suite in the Divine Residence.
Nausea churned in my stomach at the thought as I crossed the bailey and pushed through the door to the right wing where the main barracks were.
My real room was a small, individual suite on the second floor of the left wing among the suites for the guardsmen with set positions like the blacksmith, the chamberlain, and the head cook as well as the suites for the elite hunting teams.
But since I was just a regular novice at the moment, I needed to climb to the third floor and head to the end of the hall of the right wing.
Fuck, I was tired and something deep in my chest that I didn’t want to examine too closely ached.
Except I knew what it was that ached. It was that thing inside me that yearned to connect with a fae woman. I had a taste of it when I’d had sex with Sage and now I wanted more.
Except I couldn’t have more.
I passed a group of guardsmen on the second landing, nodded at them, but didn’t pause to talk. I needed to pull my shit together, and I couldn’t do that while directing conversation to gather information regarding all the things I needed information about.
Picking up my pace, I hurried up to the third floor, through the door, and down the hall to my assigned room. It was small, like all guardsmen’s rooms, with a narrow cot along one wall, a trunk at its foot, and a washbasin and pump on a stand, but it was private.
With a sigh, I shut the door behind me and let the mask slip.
Goddess, I wanted her again, wanted to be near her, to touch her, to hold her in my arms and never let go.
I shouldn’t have let myself be with her, shouldn’t have tormented myself with the knowledge that she was everything I craved, because she wasn’t mine. She’d never be mine.
Except that small voice of hope, the one I was certain had died decades ago, whispered in my soul: maybe. Maybe she could be mine, maybe the Goddess would bind our souls together.
Sage hadn’t been terrified of me, and she hadn’t turned away in disgust when she’d seen me.
But how much of that had been because her mating marks were overwhelming her with desire and how much of that was the real Sage?
It was foolish to think it was anything other than her marks. They’d been unnaturally inflamed with power, turning her into a desperate sobbing mess. She would have craved a release from anyone, and me thinking otherwise was fucking idiotic.
Now that Her Brilliance had her eye on Sage, she’d never approve of me courting her. I didn’t have a chance and I shouldn’t want one.
I was smarter than this.
I was the Black Guard’s spymaster, and I didn’t let my feelings get in the way of doing what needed to be done.
And what needed to be done was to stand in the shadows, like I always did. My job was to protect her, my brothers-in-arms, and the fae realm. What I wanted and how I felt didn’t matter. It couldn’t.