Page 24 of House of Embers (Royal Houses #5)

Chapter Twenty

The Jump

Wynter

“You didn’t have to come along,” Wynter snapped.

“You need me.”

Wynter shot Dozan a feral glare. “ Need is not the word I’d associate with you. Now be quiet. I have to concentrate.”

“What word would you use?” Dozan asked. He’d sidled up closer in the darkness. She could feel the heat off him. Smell the husky scent of him. Feel the way his eyes traced against her bare skin.

“Stop. Talking,” she hissed.

He smirked at her but thankfully remained silent for the next stretch of their walk. This was why she had wanted to do this part alone. She worked best alone, even if the last couple months had been better with Dozan at her side. Begrudgingly so.

“Okay,” Wynter said as they came out of the pitch-black into the tree line on the other side of the valley. “We wait here for the signal.”

Kerrigan was to be her queen, and while Wynter hated letting her go off alone as the diversion, Wynter knew it was necessary.

If anything happened to Kerrigan, then Fordham would never recover.

No one could afford to lose either of them.

However, no one else was going to be able to do what Kerrigan was doing right now.

Dozan’s shoulder brushed against Wynter’s, and she resisted the shiver that snaked up her back.

“Cold?” he asked, his tone teasing.

“Pay attention.”

He stifled a laugh, and then they fell back into silence.

The world slipped away with him at her side.

It had been so long since silence like this was permissible.

For years, she had been like her broken mother, with glass shattering in her mind.

The illness had crept inside her and seemed to take half of who she was.

Her mother had succumbed to it, death being preferable to the endless rattle of the world.

Wynter had been certain that would be her fate as well.

Until Kerrigan had done the unlikeliest of things. In her final attempt to avenge her people, Wynter had stabbed Fordham in the stomach. If she was going to her death, then she was taking him with her. Kerrigan had outsmarted her. She’d had every right to kill her, but she’d made a different call.

When Wynter had woken in Dozan’s strange and unforgiving Wastes, she had thought herself above it.

Except his healer had known of her illness.

He’d had a solution her people had never known existed, had not even truly known it was an illness.

As the glass reformed in her mind, the death rattle long since gone, she returned wholly to herself, with Dozan at her side and Kerrigan and Fordham willing to not just let her live but work with them to make a better world.

She owed Kerrigan more than her life. She owed her everything.

She nodded at Dozan. He slid his fingers into her own, and she suppressed another shiver at his touch. Then she tugged the shadows, as effortlessly as breathing, and dissolved into a puff of black smoke.

A second later, they were at the outskirts of the encampment, within the ring of dragons.

No one moved at the intrusion. Audria was the only person on watch, and she was gone, and Roake had gone with her, just as Kerrigan had suspected.

That left two sleeping Fae scouts, the scholar, and the dragons.

The goal was not to alert the dragons at all.

Wynter signaled Dozan to the right while she took the tent to the left.

She slid silently across the ground, honing all her instincts to a razor’s edge as a shadow-wrapped blade dropped into her hand.

The Fae inside was snoring faintly as she opened the flap.

Kerrigan had told her to incapacitate the other guards so they wouldn’t be followed.

She had thought that Wynter was agreeing to knock them out.

That was what Kerrigan would do. They were not the same person.

The blade slit through his throat at the height of a snore. He gurgled blood in the back of his throat, eyes shot wide, but he was dead before he could even reach for her.

One down. One to go.

Wynter swiped the blood off her blade onto the male’s clothing before exiting the tent.

Dozan left the other tent in the same moment.

His blade still dripped red. The man had more blood on his hands than even her.

She had no idea why the sight of him in all black, red hair blowing in the breeze, eyes dark and mischievous, a blade covered in another’s blood made her hot.

Why? Why this man? Why could this measly human heat her blood?

He nodded in acknowledgment as if he could read her. She swallowed and turned away from him. Now was not the time.

They moved as one toward the scholar’s tent.

Dozan pushed the flap aside as if to say after you .

She strode forward. The scholar was a pale, wiry Fae.

Glasses sat on a pile of books open next to his head as if he had been reading, only to fall asleep midbook.

She gestured to the pile of books, and Dozan nodded in understanding.

Wynter removed her shadow blade and stalked toward the man. She put the blade to his throat, her hand over his mouth, before saying, “Scream and you die.”

His eyes popped open in alarm. He blinked at her several times. His hands went up immediately in surrender. “Who…who are you?”

“That doesn’t matter,” she told him. “You’re coming with us.”

“The dragons—”

“Are no longer a problem.”

The Fae gulped. “Can I put on my glasses?”

Dozan thrust them into the male’s hands. He was piling the books into a leather bag, stuffing the papers into the empty spaces.

The scholar’s eyes widened in alarm, and he reached forward. Wynter went to threaten him but stopped when he said, “Don’t handle them like that! Some of those books are pre-Great War. Do you know how delicate they are?”

Dozan glared at the male, but she noted that he was more careful as he finished.

“Get up,” Wynter said.

The scholar scrambled to his feet. “Please don’t hurt me or my books. I’ll do whatever you ask. Just don’t kill me.. Please. I don’t know who you work for, but I don’t want to be involved.”

“Too late,” Wynter hissed. She turned to Dozan. “You have everything?”

“We’re set,” he replied.

Wynter held her hand out to him. He took it easily.

The scholar looked between them warily. “What are you doing? I want to speak to your superior. We can negotiate.”

“Today is your lucky day,” Wynter told him as she grabbed his arm. “We’re going straight there.”

Then, with a deep breath, she burrowed down deep for her shadow magic and jumped them all out at once.

She landed back in the copse of trees. Her legs buckled underneath her, and she landed heavily on her hands and knees.

Her breathing was ragged as the magic burn threatened her on all sides.

Her vision flickered black, and she felt the first touch of shattering glass.

She’d done too much. Gone too far. She needed to get back to the mountain and take another potion from Amond.

She wouldn’t be able to jump again for hours.

It was when she finally returned to herself that she heard the crunch of leaves under someone’s feet and the crash of bodies.

She looked up as her vision cleared to find Dozan had landed on top of the scholar a dozen feet away.

The Fae groaned as Dozan took a cord from his pockets and tied the scholar’s hands behind his back.

“You okay?” he asked Wynter.

“Fine,” she said. She slowly came to her feet, picking up the bag of books as she came to his side. “I guess you were right.”

His gaze flicked up at her in surprise. “About?”

“I needed you.”

His smile was blinding. “Good to see you’ve come to your senses.”

She put her hand on his shoulder. “I would have lost him otherwise.”

Dozan rose to his considerable height, planting one foot onto the scholar’s torso to keep him from moving. She was tall, but somehow he still towered over her. “You wouldn’t have had to jump me along with you, so your magic would be stronger.”

She conceded that point. “I may not have killed the other guard.”

He smirked. “You?”

She rolled her eyes. “Fine. I would have done it on my own. Can you not take a compliment?”

“Can you?” he asked, brushing the white-blond hair out of her eyes.

“Dozan…”

But he didn’t wait for the rest of that sentence.

His hand slid into her hair, and he crashed their mouths together.

At the feel of him, the rest of the world dissolved into nothing.

The harsh lines of lips slanted against hers.

His tongue roved against the seam, and she opened for him, tasting him on her tongue for the first time.

It was cataclysmic, as if her entire world had just exploded. And all that was left was this man. She had tried to deny it down to the fiber of her being.

She was a princess of the House of Shadows.

She was full-blooded Fae.

She could never sully herself with a human man.

And yet what were they fighting for if not this exact thing? For the chance for two people to find something despite all the reasons society said it should not work. In the end, none of it mattered. She wanted him, and she was finally letting herself have him.