Page 136 of Hunted By Fae

Samick turns a look over the kuris, faces he has never spared a moment on, humans he has never once taken even the slightest, shortest interest in.

“Is she here?”

“I chased her down to a lake—but I lost her when her sneaky human friend shot the ice out from under me. I intended to track them, but Fate called me here.”

Samick stares blankly at him for a long moment. Then his mouth tugs up at the corner. “A human shot you into a frozen lake?”

The look Dare tosses up at him is withered.

Again, the corner of his pale mouth tugs, higher this time, the ghost of a smile. “How mighty can a warrior and assassin be—if he is bested by kintas and humans?”

Dare holds that dark stare on Samick. But he doesn’t take it further than a look.

Samick is one of his oldest friends.

But Dare is not fond of a brutal end. He’ll only ever take it so far with Samick.

Tossing aside the second empty bowl, he steers away from the bitterness on his tongue. “I need to trap the human friend—in order to trap Bee.”

“Why must you trap her?”

Dare picks at the snow sticking to the whip coiled around his forearm. The black leather grooves curve around the edges of the whip and end where the silver razors are embedded.

One hell of a whip, serrated, and once it’s latched on, there is no slipping out of its grip.

Samick decides, “It is easier to kill her.”

“To kill the human is to release all the leverage I have on Bee. If I keep the human, Bee will be easier to control.”

Samick frowns down at him. The shadows of the darkness slash over his cheek, but the glow of the campfires illuminates the fine shape of his nose.

“You,” Dare states, firm, “will help me keep the human alive—but separate from Bee.”

A moment passes, the crackling of campfires and murmurs in the distance, the clattering of pots being cleaned out and bowls stacked in the kuri section.

But in that one moment, tension has rippled under Samick’s leather, like dark waters running over boulders.

The way his tongue moves over the words, the way his lips curl around the question, it spreads an iciness through the air, like a sudden pocket of ice mist—

“You want me to mind a human?”

Dare feels the pressure of the look from Samick, an ice dagger grazing over his flesh.

He steels himself against it.

“Have you mistaken me?” Samick challenges, and that chill strengthens through him, sheeting his eyes pure white. “Do you think me of kind heart, that I am so generous to even you?”

“Kind,” Dare scoffs, bitter. “You, the least among us.”

There is no lie in that, and no insult to be found.

Of Samick’s kindness, there is little. And if it does occur, like an eclipse, it is shrouded in a darkness born of selfish motivation.

Dare has no mistakes in the calculations of his nature. And yet, Fate brought him here—to Samick.

Not to Rune, his closest of the soul brothers, and perhaps the kindest among them, and Fate did not return him to Daxeel with his own unit, but instead charged him through the lands to find a brother carved from ice, inside and out.

Fate brought him to Samick.