Page 38 of Of Blood and Banes (The Arterian #2)

CUTTING LOSSES

M y muscles groan in protest as I work to wake them.

With a yawn, I turn to my right, feeling like bags of sand lie on my eyes as I drag them open.

The heaviness in my body turns out to be from the weight of blankets piled high on top of me.

I shove them down to my knees and sit up as someone’s snicker pulls my attention to the stone wall.

“So cold-blooded, you needed that many blankets to keep warm?” Darian taunts.

I glance back to the pile of blankets and recognize a jacket draped over them. And it isn’t Cole’s…

I side eye Darian. “Why is your jacket up here?”

“They stripped it off my body to keep you warm, of course.” He flicks something off his knee.

“Liar.”

He sighs with an eye roll. “Fine. I threw it over to you in case you froze to death. You’re no use to me dead, you know.”

“How charming of you,” I mumble as I get up and toss his jacket back over to him.

This is now the second time I’ve woken up in the morning with a poor recollection of the previous night’s events and his jacket draped over me.

Though, I guess I should be happy this time around I didn’t wake up in his bed. Wearing his jacket.

“Just as I wouldn’t be so useful to you if I were dead either…” he starts, glancing over to me slyly.

I tie my boots up my shins and pause, still bent over as his voice tampers off. “Yes. As you already know.”

“I have a proposal,” he says rather plainly.

I perk up, straightening my back and staring at him from the other side of the bed. “I’m listening.”

“I’ll tell you what the King is planning…” He drags his gaze away from mine, lazily examining his fingernails before he clenches his fists and cracks his knuckles.

The sound alone makes me flinch. Triggering the memory of those two prisoners back in Arterias forced off the outlook tower, their necks snapping as they hit the end of their ropes.

How he had been the one to sign off on their deaths.

At the time, I didn’t recognize the full meaning when he announced ‘in the name of the King’ at the execution.

But now I do. Because he’s the heir to the throne.

Gods, I feel so stupid I didn’t piece it together sooner.

He drawls on, “Aaaand how you can defeat him... if you kiss my ass.”

Narrowing my eyes, I snag the closest thing to me—my father’s journal—and chuck it at him. It misses his face by an inch too low, smacking him in the shoulder. His eyes flash wide in surprise, then he settles into a wicked smirk of amusement.

“You really think you’re funny, don’t you?” I challenge.

“And you really think you have all this sway. I’m not fucking helping you until you release me.”

Is his voice tipping into…desperation? I root myself in self-composure, deciding not to give into his antics. “Well, that’s not happening. I’m not releasing you until you prove yourself trustworthy—and you give me what I want.”

“Trustworthy?” he laughs. “And how do you anticipate I do that? I think you and I both know there isn’t a world where I could do anything to gain that from you. So, let’s cut our losses with that one.”

“I know how much Edith means to you,” I blurt. And as soon as the words slip off my lips, I’m ripped back to the night he held me in his arms and carried me to his room. When I told him I wouldn’t use Edith to manipulate him. But it’s too late. The words have already left.

His expression ripples into something deadly serious.

But godsdamnit. That look tells me enough—it works.

The one thing I know can convince him to do the right thing.

Something more powerful than torture or bribes.

Would it be so terrible of me to persuade him, on the behalf of all humans and dragons?

When thousands and thousands of lives hang in the balance?

I continue, treading cautiously, “And…I know she’s in a coma. I know you’d do anything to help her. To save her.”

His face is still, his lips barely moving to let the words slip out as he glares. “You are so sure of yourself, aren’t you?”

I stalk closer to him. “I am sure of myself, because I’ve been where you are. Twice. And let me tell you, Darian, being on the side I’m on now where they’re already gone is not something you can come back from. So, if you want to avoid that reality, then you need to work with me.”

He holds my gaze, his chin tilting up toward me as I stop a few steps from him. “There is nothing you can do to stop him.”

“Then why are you so against helping me, hmm? If you think we’re such a lost cause?”

He hesitates, his eyes falling away from my face and down to my hand.

To the Blood Ring. I flick a look back up at him, my mouth parting.

Realization floods me, rushing through my fingers as I struggle to grasp onto a single thought.

“You…knew what this was all along, didn’t you?

The King wants this ring. He needs it for something. And so you want it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he sneers.

I lift my hand, facing the ring toward him. “Celeste never wanted to marry Cole, did she?”

Holy fuck. When Cole confessed all that happened between the time we had split up in Padmoor to when I arrived at the outpost, he mentioned he was sent down to Arterias for a trial with the King for deserting the military.

He should have been executed for abandoning his post when he left to find me in Padmoor.

But if Cole had his mother’s ring and had seen the King…

Marge said he was searching for it for years. And if Cole showed up with that ring, he had to secure it somehow. Being promoted to a military captain was already a feat in itself. But to be promoted following such a serious transgression? Cole’s words back in Arterias ring inside my mind:

And then I was offered a proposal. If I married Celeste, I would be wed into a wealthy family. I’d have a handsome dowry, and I could send that money back to my family. My life sentence would be lifted so I could be with her.

The King proposed a betrothal to Celeste because, naturally, Cole would have given her his mother’s ring in marriage. And she would have had possession of the Blood Ring. Willingly. Easily. Which begs the question…why wouldn’t the King just forcibly take the ring from Cole in the first place?

A smile splits across my face. “The King is scared, isn’t he?”

Darian rolls his eyes. “Of a puny, incompetent woman like you? Not likely.”

I grab his chin in my hand and turn him to face me, getting awfully sick of men implying I’m any less capable than them. “Then I’ll become something he can be scared of.”

He twists his face out of my grasp, fury edging his expression. It all makes sense. The way Darian easily flip-flopped back and forth between kindness and brutality. He was only trying to get the ring. Everything I experienced in Arterias with him?

Wasn’t real.

A cloud of anger rises in my chest, blotting out the rest of the thoughts rushing into my mind. “The only reason you fucked me in Arterias was because you thought I had the Blood Ring, wasn’t it?”

“Don’t sound so disappointed,” he purrs.

I smile at him, sickly sweet. “Oh, don’t get confused. I’m not.”

I rip the chain from his shackles up, forcing him off the ground.

Unlatching his chain connecting him to the wall, I grab my belongings and put them in my satchel.

Leading him out of the room, we head toward the western part of Driftmond, back to the grassy clearing where the dragons lie in wait for us.

Out of extra precaution, Sethan instructs that the Driftmond guards will be delivering us breakfast out here in the open, rather than having us gather in the community hall.

Once we’ve eaten our fill, we’ll move on from Driftmond to the next city of Kilamber.

Archie exchanges freshly cooked chicken for Darian’s chains and leads him off to get food.

Marge checks in on me, and based on Cole’s gaze across the crowds, my presence is enough to convince him I’m alright after last night’s events.

Daeja’s still lying on the frost-tipped grass, and I take a seat right on her massive wheelbarrow-sized paw after I’ve secured my satchel to the back of the saddle.

She stretches her neck forward and sniffs the back of my head, stirring my hair into a gust of wind.

Leaning back onto her foreleg, I look up at her and offer her a piece. “It’s your favorite.”

Her pupils flicker back and forth between rounds and slits, her nostrils flaring as she inhales deeply before shaking her head and wrinkling her nose. “I’m not hungry.”

“But…” I don’t finish my thought…y ou’re usually a bottomless pit?

“I don’t like it anymore.”

I lean up off her foreleg. “What? Since when?”

“Since A’nala got mad at me for raiding a chicken farm…”

“Daeja!”

“...and when I told her it wasn’t me, she saw a feather I missed stuck in the scales beneath my chin.”

I can’t help but laugh as I glance over at the red she-dragon.

She’s lying in the grass with an assertive posture most military soldiers wouldn’t be able to emulate.

A mirror image of her rider just twenty feet off speaking with some of his men.

Those yellow eyes narrow. Her lips lift into a growl as Archie approaches her, with Darian towed behind him, and tosses her a casual wave.

She snaps at the air as Archie passes her, and he stumbles a step before continuing on his path. Darian doesn’t miss a single step.

“I would have brought you food if I knew you were hungry then ? —”

“It wasn’t so much that I was hungry. Just that it was fun.

Besides…A’nala said dragons of my size should be eating something with more sustenance, so we can go longer without food.

As we get older, our metabolism slows down.

And being a dragon with a rider means we need to be able to go months without food if we’re in the skies traveling.

We can request deer or elk from Sethan whenever we please, though. ”