Page 25 of Fall of Ruin and Wrath

“That one . . . jumped me.”

“Weber?”

He nodded. “Then the other two joined in. There were two others . . . I didn’t recognize.”

Figuring he might be speaking of Finn and Mickie, I slowly drew my arm from him. When he remained upright, I rubbed the soap between my hands. “When you were jumped— you fought back?”

“Killed one of them . . . before I passed out.”

My breath caught as I halted, suds running down my arm. Okay. Maybe he wasn’t speaking of Finn and Mickie. How many people in Archwood were involved in this? The Baron needed to be warned. Dragging my lip between my teeth, I placed my hand on his back. His muscles bunched under my palm, but he didn’t pull away. I drew my hand over his back, washing away the blood there.

“Those you overheard speaking earlier tonight?” he asked. “Did you . . . hear them say anything else?”

I thought over what I’d heard. “Actually, I did. They spoke of someone they called Muriel.”

The Lord stiffened.

“Do you know who that is?”

“I do,” he said, and didn’t elaborate further.

My nose stung a little as the stream of water reached me. “Has this happened to you before?”

A rough, dry laugh rattled from him. “No. But I should’ve been more careful. Not like I’m unaware of hemlock and its effect on my kind. I was just . . .”

I shifted, running my soapy hand down to his hip and back up, mindful of the bruises as I focused on the feel and texture of his skin. It reminded me of . . . of marble or granite. “What?”

“I was just careless,” he revealed after I lifted my hand.

“Well, it happens to the best of us, right?” I soaped up my hand again and moved to the other side of his back.

His head tipped back again, causing the edges of his hair to tease my fingers as I drew my hand lightly over his shoulder. There seemed to be a . . . a faint glow in his skin, but I wasn’t sure if that was what I was seeing. “Right.”

In the silence that fell between us, I found myself getting a little lost in just touching someone— touching him. I heard and felt nothing. No violent futures or whispers of knowledge— detailed things impossible for me to know. Their names. Ages. If they were married or not. How they lived. Their innermost secrets and desires, which were what Claude found most valuable.

There were just my own thoughts. Even with Claude, I would’ve had to be careful, and by now I would’ve started to hear his thoughts. The only time I experienced this nothingness was when I drank enough to dull my senses, but doing so also dulled everything else, including my memories. When I touched someone, there was no need to picture that mental string, but with this lord, there was nothing.

A shudder rolled through me. Maybe I was just too distracted— too overwhelmed for even my intuition to kick in. I didn’t know, and at that moment, I didn’t care. Closing my eyes, I let myself . . . I let myself enjoy this. The contact. The feel of another’s skin beneath my palms. The way muscles tensed and moved under them. I could do this forever.

But we didn’t have forever.

“What . . . what were you even doing at the Twin Barrels?” I asked, clearing my throat. “It’s not a place frequented by the Hyhborn of Primvera.”

“I’m not . . . from Primvera,” he said, confirming what Mickie believed. “I was meeting someone. They suggested the place.”

I glanced up at the back of his head. “Did you meet with them?”

“No.” He tipped his head to the other side. “And I don’t think they will be looking for me.”

I didn’t need my intuition to figure that whomever he was to meet there might’ve set him up. Could’ve even been this Muriel. “Will anyone be looking for you? Like a friend?”

He nodded. “Eventually.”

That was a relief.

Until he turned in the small stall, and I was suddenly at eye level with the wound in his chest.

My lips parted as I saw that the wound had shrunk again, this time to about the size of a small golden coin. Most of the blood had washed away, except for a few patches here and there, but there was this . . . I squinted. There were these tiny whitish dots scattered about his chest and his stomach—