Chapter Twenty-Two
That evening, the healers cleared me to return to my room. I found myself repeatedly touching the skin on my left arm. It had faded to a normal color but it was so smooth. Like brushing a baby’s cheek.
I found myself wondering what Zain, who had told me he loved my soft skin, would think.
When I got to the room, the only one waiting for me was Dagger. He thumped his misshapen tail, his tongue hanging out of his mouth.
“Did you miss me?” I asked him.
He made a whining noise and then turned in a happy circle. It was the most movement I’d ever seen him make. Would he be interested in playing?
I grabbed a linen and shook it at him. “Do you want to grab this?” The dogs back home loved this game. I held it above his head and he tried to bite at it, getting closer to me and to the linen with each pass.
Zain entered the room, closing the door behind him, and before I could even react, he grabbed Dagger and said, “No bite! Sorry, he’s still a puppy and gets a little rambunctious sometimes. I’m trying to train him. No bite.”
He set Dagger down on my cot and the dog immediately passed out. “He sleeps a lot,” I said.
“He’s growing.”
“It doesn’t seem like it.”
“Because it happens slowly, one day at a time,” he said with a smile. “Like it did for you and me. Although out of the two of us, I think you did the far better job of growing up.”
This man could take anything and use it to flirt.
There was a rustling, flapping noise. A white bird landed on the windowsill. Zain crossed the room and removed a piece of parchment from the bird’s leg. The bird flew off and he unrolled the small scroll.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“Someone offering me a job. I don’t know if I want to do it.” He put the scroll into a pocket. “Now I have a question for you. Are you healed?”
“Completely.”
“Good.”
He backed me into the door and I allowed him to do it. Every nerve ending in my body lit up with excitement.
Finally.
“No mortal wounds this time,” I said softly. He didn’t respond. He put his hands on either side of my head, capturing me in place. His body was close enough that I could feel the warmth emanating from him, but we weren’t touching.
Not yet.
My lips tingled with anticipation, my breathing turned shallow. He was only looking at me and I had already been pushed to the edge.
“Are you using your powers of seduction on me now?” I managed to ask.
A slow, lazy grin settled on his face. “Why? Are you feeling seduced?”
I didn’t answer.
“My illora, I’ll tell you a secret. I have no power of seduction. I mean, obviously, I have the ability to seduce but a god didn’t give that to me.”
Oh. This was all him.
There was a tiny, nagging voice in the back of my mind trying to remind me of something, but I brushed it off.
“Do you remember when you told me that you don’t need to know the answer to things?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Have you ever noticed how many questions you ask me about myself? Why do you think that is?”
I knew why. Because I was attracted to him and liked being with him and wanted to know more about him.
He leaned in to smell the side of my neck and my skin ached for him to follow through and kiss me.
“I loved how open and vulnerable you were with me this morning,” he said, and I shuddered when he pressed a kiss in the hollow under my ear.
“I’d been drugged.”
“Pain and sleep medicines don’t make you tell the truth,” he responded. That was correct. I had told him things I’d never told another soul. I had wanted to tell him. I had wanted him to know me better.
I started to reach for him when I became aware of a very distinct scent.
“Are you drunk?” I asked.
“Little bit,” he said just above my shoulder. “I needed liquid courage to face you.”
This didn’t sound at all like him. “You had no problem facing me this morning.”
“That was different. We were in a public place surrounded by healers. Now we are alone.” He lifted his head so that he was looking at me. “Just the two of us. In a room with a door that locks.”
He reached behind me and I heard him bolt it.
Every cell in my body protested at what I was about to do. As much as I wanted this to continue, it wouldn’t be right. He wanted me at full health and I wanted him to be sober. To be able to make a decision and not drunkenly fall into one.
That voice in my head grew louder and I remembered what it was that I had wanted to speak to him about.
“There is something I need to discuss with you, and I’m not going to let you bewitch me with your masculine wiles to distract me from it,” I said.
“Bewitched, are you?” His lips hovered over mine and I had to close my eyes against the onslaught. I knew how good it would feel to kiss him. “That’s a first. I don’t remember anyone ever saying I had bewitched them.”
Then he leaned into me, pressing his body against mine, and I nearly collapsed from the relief and pleasure of it.
“You were saying?” he asked, knowing full well what he had done.
I put my hands on his chest, his very firm and strong and warm chest, and pushed him gently back. If I let him kiss me, I would forget myself.
He was slightly unsteady on his feet. I’d never seen him like this. He wasn’t just a little bit drunk.
Zain was a lot drunk.
“I want to talk about the night before the race. When you disappeared.”
He seemed utterly confused. “Why?”
“Because it bothers me that you were gone for so long and I didn’t know where you were or what had happened to you.
I was worried about you. I understand that I’m not owed an explanation, but I had thought at the very least that we were good enough friends that you would have told me that I wouldn’t see you for a while. ”
“Friends.” He scoffed at the word like it offended him. “Do you want to know why I stayed away?”
Obviously. That was the entire reason I had brought it up.
“I stayed away because I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off you and you still needed to heal.”
That shouldn’t have thrilled me the way that it did. The idea that he was so overcome with want for me that he had to remove himself from the situation entirely? That did terrible things to my resolve.
“You could have talked to me,” I said. “You could have told me what you were feeling and what you needed to do and I would have understood.”
He let out a sigh. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should have handled it better.”
That was not at all the response that I thought I would get from him.
“How do I apologize, then?” he asked. “How will I endeavor to win your favor again, fair maiden?”
Really, really drunk.
This whole situation seemed silly, considering that we only had about a day and a half left.
“I wish to court you, my illora. How will I do so? Shall I grovel?” He got on his knees at my feet and my mouth went dry at the sight. I put a hand over my stomach in an attempt to calm down.
“If you are teasing me, I don’t like to be teased,” I said, mostly as a way to try and shut down my raging sexual desire.
Which he did not help by putting his hands on my hips, drawing me closer, still on his knees.
“I don’t believe that,” he said with a wicked glint in his eyes.
“It’s true.”
He shook his head slowly. “I can see how much you would enjoy being teased. Pleasured and brought to greater and greater heights with the ultimate satisfaction being held from you until . . .”
“Until?” I repeated, willing my heart to slow down.
He smiled as if he didn’t intend to satisfy my curiosity.
I had to stop this.
“If you, um, wish to court me, then you will have to prove that you are a true suitor.” I might as well lean into whatever story he had written for himself.
“Give me my quest to win your favor.” He seemed excited and I didn’t know if it was because he was drunk or if he really did want to win me over.
“In Thrace, when men want to court women, they hunt a boar and present it to her family.”
His smile died. “Do you want me to get gored? Is this where you tell me a boar stabbing me will give me character?”
I had to assume that there wasn’t a boar for miles and that he would forget all about this in the morning. “I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
He stood quickly, still holding on to me. “On the morrow, I will hunt you a boar.” He leaned forward and pressed a soft kiss to my forehead and my eyelids fluttered shut.
I put my hands against his chest and he rested his forehead against mine.
We stood there, breathing each other in, his steady heartbeat thumping under my palms. I felt such a connection to him.
There was so much desire and heat between us that I worried it might burn me alive.
It would be so easy to melt into him, to fuse my lips to his, to make this night last.
After they crowned me the winner of the tournament tomorrow, someone should also give me a medal for stopping whatever it was Zain had planned for tonight.
Because I knew what ecstasy waited for me.
I knew how he could make me feel—and that he would make it better than it had ever been—and I had still made the hard choice.
“What should we do now?” he asked in a low voice that rumbled from his chest.
“We should go to bed.”
“Yes,” he agreed enthusiastically, reaching for his belt.
I put my hand on top of his. “No, you to your bed and me to mine.”
“Are you certain?”
No. “Yes.”
“If that is what you want.”
It was not what I wanted. But it was what needed to happen. For both our sakes.
I moved away from him and it was so difficult. Perhaps this was the reason why my mother never formed real romantic relationships. It would be so easy to lose myself in him. To forget about everything and everyone else and just be with him.
Maybe that’s not a bad thing, a voice that sounded annoyingly like Lia’s said inside my head.
Zain would have his life and I would have mine. Although he had mentioned thinking about his future . . . What if he saw me in it?
I moved his dog over so that I could get into bed.
There was a whooshing sound as Zain fell face-first onto his bed and immediately started to snore.
I bit my lip so that I wouldn’t laugh—it seemed like a good thing that I hadn’t taken him up on his offer.
It looked as if things would have ended quickly.
We both deserved better than that.
I was in the dream again with Invara. Everything exactly the same as it had been every other night.
Win.
Determined to speak to her, I did my best to get a sound out. I wanted to ask her what she wanted from me, why she kept saying the same word every night. Why she was so angry.
But there was this rumbling sensation, a sort of negative noise, that reminded me of a horn. It caught me by the throat and I felt like I was being smothered.
I began gasping, trying to breathe, when the dream suddenly changed.
It was dark. As my eyes adjusted, I realized that I was in a covered cart. I sat on a sumptuous bed that filled the entire cart.
Zain sat across from me.
“Pretend,” he said.
“What?”
It was like he couldn’t hear me. “Pretend, just for tonight.”
“Where are we? What is going on?”
“Of all the things I’ve lied about, I have never once lied about that.”
I was so confused. This didn’t make any sense.
“Illora.”
Someone was shaking me out of my dream and I pulled out my knife, putting it to their throat.
“It is me, illora. I have been victorious in my quest!”
“Zain?” I felt so groggy but I pulled the knife back. “What time is it?”
“The beginning of the fourth watch.”
That meant it was three or four o’clock in the morning. I groaned and sat up, my head still spinning. “Your quest?”
Had he actually found a boar somewhere? And when did he sneak out? How had I not heard him? He couldn’t have done it quietly. It concerned me that I hadn’t woken up when he left.
Maybe I had some residual effects from the medicines.
He stepped into the moonlight with something wiggling in his arms.
“Is that . . . a pig?”
“It was the closest thing I could find to a boar!”
My mouth hung open. I didn’t know what to say. Zain had a baby piglet in his arms and it squealed, wanting to be let down.
“What is your brother’s name again?” he asked. “Thorax?”
“Thrax.”
“I have named this pig Thrax because I knew you wouldn’t name him, and I offer him to you so that I may gain your favor!” he said.
“You stole a pig.”
“Liberated a pig. For you.”
I didn’t know what to do in this situation, having never been in one even remotely similar before. “Thank you? Why don’t you put the pig down and we’ll figure all this out in the morning.”
He let the pig go and it bolted across the room. How had he managed to catch a skittish piglet while presumably still hungover? That was hard enough to do sober.
Zain collapsed on his bed, once again falling asleep quickly.
I lay staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep. I listened as the pig finally calmed down and stopped squealing.
Dagger hadn’t moved the entire time.
The piglet made one last snort of protest and it sounded as if it too went to sleep.
Zain had stolen that pig. That should have bothered me.
It worried me that it did not.