Chapter 98
CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT
A fter I sent a man for Taisiya, I sent another messenger for Taras, telling him to schedule the council meeting for after breakfast and to send Yuriy to guard Rowan’s rooms.
Then I risked returning to my own rooms long enough to ready myself for the day, now that I knew she was awake. I wasn’t concerned about the possibility of missing her when it took roughly thirty-seven hours to dry her endless mass of hair.
Let alone to scrub the blood from it.
I blinked away the memories of Taisiya painstakingly cleaning each strand of Rowan’s curls after the flogging.
At least this time, the blood belonged to someone else.
I dismissed Yuriy when I emerged into the hallway, freshly shaven and dressed in clean clothes. True to my expectations, it was another couple of hours before her door opened once more.
I almost stopped breathing when she finally stepped into the hallway.
My gaze roamed over her face, from the guarded set of her eyes to the slight bow in her lips that I had missed more than I could stand to think about.
Yesterday, she had looked ethereal and deadly, wearing armor and spattered in blood.
But today, she just looked like...herself. Gorgeous and perfect and mine .
I flinched, realizing that the last part was far more tenuous than I wanted to admit.
She surveyed me in turn, her gaze lingering on each of my features with a longing that was entirely at odds with the way her hand clenched into an angry fist. Energy thrummed in the several feet of space between her body and mine, pulsating with the weight of all the contradictory feelings neither of us wanted to express.
Like that I wanted her with every part of my soul, but I would not cave to her fury with an apology we both knew to be a lie.
My lips parted to confirm that she was uninjured when she cut me off.
“I need to see to my men,” she said flatly.
There was no anger in her voice, none of the fire that usually punctuated everything she said and did, only an icy detachment. Her shoulders were tense, poised for a battle I had no desire to fight with her just now.
Instead, I nodded once. “I’ll escort you to them.”
Her posture relaxed slightly at my words, and she gestured for me to lead the way. I kept a pace that allowed us to keep in step with each other, trying and failing to not breathe in the intoxicating scent of amber and citrus that filled the air around her.
“Your men have been fed and the wounded tended to,” I began, giving her an update, both because I knew she would want one, and to interrupt the direction my thoughts were taking.
Her head snapped up in surprise, her riotous curls bouncing with the movement. She studied my face, her own expression impossible to read.
Had she really thought I wouldn’t care for the men who had saved not only my life and the lives of my people, but also hers as well? That I wouldn’t do anything for the people who had protected and followed her?
Her opinion of me hadn’t been quite this low since the treasured child-murderer comment back at the negotiations, but apparently my commitment to her safety was enough for her to doubt everything else about me.
Taking a breath, I carried on as though it didn’t matter.
“Casualties are still being tallied, but Andrei estimates you lost close to two hundred men.”
She closed her eyes, concealing the emotion that might have brimmed in them, but I didn’t have to guess at how she was feeling. I had grown all too accustomed to the reality of losing the people under my protection—the men who fought under my orders.
“I would imagine it would have been far higher,” I added, unable to resist the need to comfort her. “Had the fog not hidden their approach and the lightning distracted them.”
When she didn’t argue, I knew I had been right before. It hadn’t just been my exhaustion messing with my mind on the battlefield. I had always suspected there was more to her abilities with the weather than prediction, that she influenced it in some way when her emotions ran high.
As curious as I was, now was hardly the time to ask her about the attack, especially when this was the closest we had come to civility since her return.
Though, if the grief on the day of Mac’s memorial had only resulted in rainfall, I had to wonder what she had been feeling to summon enough lightning to fell thirty grown men. And how much of that she was feeling still.
The tense silence on the rest of the walk answered that last question better than I might have preferred.