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His touch was blazing hot, a contrast to the blood chilling on my skin and I swallowed roughly, wondering if I should just kill him too and haul his corpse back to Dragor as a fuck you to the prince who had offered me this task in place of the vengeance I needed.

“It will be satisfied once I end the man who caused it,” I growled, stepping back to divide us once more, not wanting the understanding which blazed in his expression - though he hid it fast enough to let me know he had no intention of sharing his truth with me anyway.

“It won’t,” he said slowly, taking the pack of clothes I’d pilfered for him and dressing himself in the Flamebringer garb. “But you already know that anyway.”

I spat at his feet, not wanting to hear any more of his sage advice or solemn council.

“When I want the opinion of a Stonebreaker, I’ll ask for it.

We’re camping here tonight. I need to bathe and stitch my wounds before we head south in the morning.

They have a cell which you’ll be right at home in. ”

“I assumed you’d be flying us back to Stormfell now that you’ve recovered your magic?” Bastian said but there was a taunt in his words which told me he already knew I’d wasted the magic I’d stolen from my enemies during the battle I’d just bloodied myself in.

“Well that’s where you made your mistake, captive, because you aren’t here to make assumptions, or judgements, or comments of any kind on what I do or plan to do.

Your one and only purpose is to act as payment for my revenge.

So if you don’t want to end up like those Flamebringers in there, then I suggest you make good friends with silence because it will be far kinder to you than I will ever be. ”

Bastian snorted in amusement as he buttoned the trousers I’d given him then strode towards me, bare chested with ink and scars like twisted shadows across his flesh in the darkness.

He towered over me as he came to stand before me and I glowered up at him while tilting my head back to maintain eye contact with him.

“Silence doesn’t taste as good as your rage, little dove, so I think I’ll keep taking my chances with the latter if it’s all the same to you,” he said in a voice so low it made my skin prickle.

He brushed past me without waiting for a reply and strode towards the outpost I’d now filled with death.

“I’m a mouse, actually,” I told him, uncertain why I’d decided to share my gallows humour with him but the words slipped from my tongue before I could consider them. “Not a dove.”

“A mouse?” he asked, raising a brow which pressed for a further explanation and I was struck with a memory unbidden, of Dalia asking me a similar question when I’d ended up almost as bloody as this during a trip to Cascada which had gone wrong in all the best ways.

I’d referred to myself a bothersome moth that time and she’d laughed herself silly while Moraine called me the strangest creature she’d ever known.

I almost told him that then, something about the blood which stained my flesh and the vicious truth of my being wanting a breath of lightness to come steal me away from this moment.

Because that was what our jokes and jibes had always been, a little levity in the face of our own destruction, laughter on the back of death’s swift wings.

It had kept us sane, or perhaps it had simply made our lack of sanity more bearable.

But now here I was, my soul once again stained with the blood of more Fae than I could count, and no one here to give me a wicked grin and mock me for my depravity so that it might feel a little less awful…

“This isn’t the first time I’ve found myself facing unsavoury odds,” I told Bastian, though now my walls were reconstructing themselves as the rush of adrenaline fled my veins and I was wishing I’d never opened my mouth at all.

But I wouldn’t balk now that I had. Bravado or bullshit always did force my tongue to keep wagging far past the point most others would stop its motion, Moraine had never quite decided which, but she’d chided me for it all the same.

That mouth of yours gets us into more trouble than all the enemies we hold in The Waning Lands combined.

I refused to allow myself to answer the memory of a dead woman’s words so I pushed on with my explanation to Bastian. “I imagined myself to be a mouse slipping into their midst undetected, stealing from right beneath their noses then slipping away into the dark once more.”

Bastian scoffed, his eyes roaming from the gore on my boots over my bleeding wounds and the cuts in my leathers, taking in every detail right down to the blood which dripped from the strands of my pink hair where it was tangled around my face.

My flesh burned beneath his inspection, something about the way he examined me feeling so much more invasive than a simple look should allow, telling me that he was seeing far more than the evidence of battle on my skin.

I didn’t squirm but my jaw tensed, my hand balling into a tight fist. There was judgment in his silver eyes, though it wasn’t for the death I’d just brought to this place, more like for the rotten truth of all I was.

“A mouse does what it must to survive despite all the world trying to devour it or wishing its existence would cease for no other reason than the pure bother of it,” he said finally. “I can see how the comparison fits.”

He turned away without another word, the dismissal like a slap of cold water to my face, the audacity of his words drenching my soul in ice.

And of course it was the truth in them that bit the deepest, the knowledge that there were only ever two people who saw me as anything other than he had just described and they were long gone now, leaving me all alone to scurry through the emptiness of this world without them, waiting for my fate to catch up with me at last.

I ground my teeth as I followed Bastian, my muscles tensing in anticipation of a strike or him attempting to flee but he simply strode through the compound at my command, saying nothing of the butchered corpses we passed and making no complaints when I directed him into the cell I’d found.

I tossed the bag of remaining clothes in after him followed by a plate stacked with food and a flagon of water. All the time he watched me with the corner of his lips hooked up just a little. Like there was some joke here that I was missing the punchline for.

When I banged the cell door closed on that smug expression, I expected to be left with a sense of relief, knowing I could rest easily for at least one night without having to worry about him using my respite to escape.

But even after I’d found and made use of a bathing tub, cleaned my flesh of the blood, stitched my wounds and retired to a bed in one of the hidden chambers, I still couldn’t settle.

The spark in that damn Dragon’s eyes kept haunting me and eventually I had no choice but to drag the bedding out into the corridor beyond his cell to set up camp there.

Bastian smiled at me as I made up my bed beyond the bars that caged him.

And I smiled darkly back in turn, refusing to let him rattle me.

Or maybe we were both baring our teeth. One monster acknowledging another.

Because I was no more fooled by his apparent obedience than he was by my sweet face.

And we both knew the coming days and weeks would only reveal more of what we were at our cores.

I supposed the real question was whether either of us would survive the other.