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Chapter Twenty-Eight

Roan

T ovin had promised to send word if Fenli showed up.

So far, there’d been nothing.

I’d become more pathetic than I’d ever thought I was capable of. I spent my days looping through the underbrush, not even pretending to hunt game, just searching for her. And I spent my nights a mess, drinking too much, Jory cutting me off and depositing me into my too-big hut to sleep it off.

“I don’t deserve your friendship,” I told him as he dropped me into a chair. “I was an ass. I abandoned you like you meant nothing to me.”

“Yeah, I know it,” he said, “but we were kids. Kids are asses. And you have plenty of time to make it up to me.”

The nights alone in that hut were the worst. I took to spoiling the dog and telling him all my woes until I noticed he’d nodded off and it hit me I was just talking to myself.

I’d abandoned the loft and slept with him in her bed, smelling her on the blankets and in the place where she had laid her head .

It had been two weeks since I’d seen her last, since she’d rolled her eyes at my foolishness or scoffed at me to my face, even longer since she’d yelled at me, told me where I could go and what I could do there.

Gods, I missed it. I wanted nothing more than to get scolded by her.

Every day, the odds seemed less likely.

I couldn’t get that image of the deer femur—broken in half and laying in my path as Fen walked away from me—out of my mind.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the ending it signified, the omen it proclaimed.

She’d succumb to the forest. A bear or wolves.

Maybe a twisted ankle or broken bone. Fever.

Exposure. It was getting colder at night.

She wasn’t the type to get lost, but it could happen to the best of them.

The woods could be cruel.

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to think of something else, but it never worked. Laying there on her mattress, Goose pressed into my side, I promised myself one thing.

If I saw her again, I wouldn’t hesitate. I would take her face in my hands, and I would kiss her for all I was worth.