Page 173 of A Bond so Fierce and Fragile

That they could win this.

That they’d all get out alive.

That she and Raine… that there might be some kind of future for them.

He seemed to read too much into her eyes, even with her mind carefully closed, because he leaned down to kiss her, and the entire time, his eyes swam with emotions.

The kiss was brief, barely more than his lips pressing against the corner of her mouth, but it still made the ball of apprehension in her gut grow.

When Raine opened his mouth, that tension still filling his eyes, she placed a finger on it. “Don’t. Don’t make me a promise you won’t be able to keep.”

Raine stared at her, and it felt like it always did, like he trulysawher, for a second. Then he nodded, and with another quick touch of her face, he moved back to his position, starting to scream out orders to the archers, telling them where to aim and where not to bother.

She didn’t look behind her as she approached the edge again, forcing her mind only to focus on the sister that had tilted her head Frelina’s way, and she tried with everything in her to get her lips to curl upward as she raised a hand toward Elessia.

The sun lit only half her sister’s face, but Frelina thought it looked like she mouthed something, perhaps even called it out, but the words were taken by the wind.

Frelina squinted as she moved closer to the edge, cupping her lips and mouthing, “What?”

Elessia’s eyes looked… Frelina sliced her eyes farther when Elessia’s lips formed two words, and it wasn’t blood anymore that ran through her veins when she realized what they were.

“Behind you!”

Whirling around, Frelina noted the dark cloud rushing for them, and she wasn’t the only one, based on the screams and taste of terror that the wind whipped all around them.

She blinked at the cloud, the darkness so impenetrable it looked like the night itself was making its way toward them, but then Amalise screamed, “It’s birds!”

With shaking hands, Frelina reached for her small blades as people began shuffling in panic around her.

Amalise was right. Massive birds flew in a huge formation, their black feathers blocking any bit of light that tried to shine through them, and she was about to step back when she realized at the last second that she stood on a cliff.

“It’s a trap,” she said to herself.

“It’s a trap!” she screamed when people around her ignored Raine and Kerym’s orders and began running down the stairs,down to the vessels that would soon be surrounded by those ships.

But her words were drowned in the stomping of feet and clinking of weapons, and few followed Raine’s bellow to “Shoot them! Shoot them down!” when blades and rocks and other things Frelina couldn’t see but that cut into their skin when they hit began raining down from the sky, dropped from the birds’ lethal claws.

Something smacked into her forehead, and she pressed the back of her hand against it when her skin split open, using her other one to throw a blade upward, praying it wouldn’t come tumbling down and kill one of their own.

In the next second the birds were upon them, and wherever she spun, the cliff was in complete turmoil, birds and humans and Fae alike fighting for their lives, blood splattering onto stones with bodies falling off the cliff to her side, while others received daggers in their backs, dead bodies slamming into those trying to run, taking them with them into the depths of the seas.

“Frelina!”

She heard Raine’s cry somewhere in the chaos, but she didn’t dare search for him.

Not when one of those lethal birds, the ones that looked like live versions of the masks Loche’s men wore—surely not a coincidence, Frelina thought as her heart began pounding in her ears—stalked toward her, crowding her against the edge while it snapped its sharp beak at her.

Opening her mind, she sent a fast goodbye, hoping that Raine would live to convey it to Elessia. Then she gripped the daggers in her hand, knowing they’d do little, being about half the size of that damned razor-sharp beak.

Chapter 39

Merrick

The ships were upon them faster than should have been possible—propelled forward by something other than mere wind—and when Merrick looked out over the groups, finding the sharp eyes of the enemy half-Fae and shifters in the bow, he knew neither Raine nor Kerym nor any of those on the cliff would be of help.

Merrick and the others on the ships had been able only to watch as the shadowy formation of birds appeared in the sky, flying straight for their friends, and while he’d felt the same urge as Lessia, who’d thrown herself toward the back of the ship, trying to head for the cliff—for her sister—when the screaming began, he’d forced them both to stay back.

Even now, he kept a firm grip on Lessia’s wrist, ignoring the hiss she sent his way as she struggled against his hold.