Page 15 of Returned to the Vissigroth (The Vissigroths of Leander #6)

I was asleep and yet I wasn't. In the dream, I woke in a house… n ot the charred husk we’d fled. This one was much more luxurious. The walls were smooth, the floors swept. The air smelled faintly of herbs and something freshly baked. There were no holes in the roof. No soot on the windows.

My mother lay on a cot near the fire, her arm bandaged in pale cloth.

A real bandage. Not torn shawls soaked in fear.

A healer knelt beside her, murmuring something gentle while folding up supplies.

She was asleep, but it wasn't the troubled, exhausted sleep that comes from being kept up by pain.

This one was restful, healing. Her breathing was even, without a trace of the labored wetness that had scared me the days before.

For a moment, I couldn't move; I only stared, with my heart aching.

I had been so worried about losing the only person in my life I had left.

“She’ll be alright.”

The voice came from the far side of the room. Over the last few days, it had become familiar. Mallack stood near a table, unstrapping a pouch from his belt. He pulled out a silver disk and placed it beside the healer’s hand, payment for services rendered. The physician bowed low and left silently.

"Thank you," I said in a rough voice, wondering what kind of payment Mallack would expect from me—what kind of services he would have me render.

I might have been young, but I had learned the hard way that nothing in life on the Fourteen Planets was free.

I couldn't give words to my thoughts; I could only stare at him.

Drink in how handsome he was. Like a hero from the books my mom would always find for us.

In those books, the heroes came with no strings attached, but I didn't think Mallack would fit that bill.

“Sit,” he pointed at the chair by the table.

A table filled with so much food, it made my mouth water.

A clay bowl of thick stew. A sliced round of bread.

Dried fruit and a tin of something hot that smelled delicious and comforting.

My legs gave out before my brain caught up, and I sank into the chair like a ghost suddenly given flesh.

The irresistible smell of cooked meat made my stomach rumble. It was only fear of the unknown that made me not fall over it like a starving mess, shaming myself.

"When was the last time you ate?" Mallack asked.

Even before the siege, food had been scarce for my mother and me. I mean, she provided enough that we didn't starve, but it most certainly hadn't been as delicious-looking as this stew and bread.

That wasn't what Mallack was asking, though.

"Food ran out about a moon phase—month—after the siege began," I answered carefully, swallowing down the building saliva in my mouth. I would not fall over this food like a wild animal. I would not.

He tilted his head and waved at the food.

My hand was trembling when I grabbed the spoon and brought it to my mouth.

It took more willpower than I thought I possessed, but I managed to open my lips and close them around the spoonful of food.

A moan tried hard to escape, but I suppressed it.

It was nearly painful having the stew come in contact with my tastebuds. They came alive like a symphony.

Willpower or not, I swallowed without chewing and put my spoon back into the stew.

"That must have been hard," Mallack observed, knowing fully well that the siege had lasted another moon phase before Kennenryn's troops entered.

Finding little to no resistance from the dragoons still under Susserayn Groyk's command—even though they had been better fed than us, since they had been called vital .

I nodded, "It wasn't easy." Thankfully, my mom had been deemed essential enough to receive some scraps of food. She kept the nicta records, and she was good with the beasts themselves, knew how to heal them, and helped them give birth.

"I suppose not," he stared at me through his unsettling black eyes, “especially since you are one of the few humans in this town."

I nodded and broke off a piece of bread, resisting the urge to stuff it into my mouth and swallow it whole, forcing myself to chew it this time. It seemed that, with every bite I took, I grew only hungrier.

"Mother is one of the few nicta handlers," I explained with pride in my voice.

Mother had tried to train me to take care of them, too, but the big beasts frightened me too much.

Always had. Instead, I had taken an apprenticeship in clothes making, a trade that became obsolete during the siege.

Had my mother not shared her meager rations with me, I would have starved to death long ago. As it was, we had both been starving.

Mallack nodded. Nicta handlers were revered because not many wanted to deal with the ungainly, oftentimes vicious animals.

After I’d had enough food in my stomach that I started to feel bloated, I gathered my courage and asked, "Why? Why are you helping us?”

His jaw worked, and for a moment, I thought he might walk away instead of answering. After a long pause, he simply said, “Because someone should have. Because no one else did.”

I stared at the table. At the steam curling from the stew. At the way my fingers still trembled, still held the spoon even though I was full.

“I don’t have anything to offer you,” I whispered. “Nothing to pay.”

His gaze lifted to mine. Paused, then, “I didn’t ask for anything.”

That’s when I knew. I would have given it—whatever it was—if he had asked.

My name. My pride. My body.

Whatever he wanted, if it meant this—safety, food, warmth after moonphases of starving and being hunted—I would have given it all.

But he hadn’t asked. And in that moment, it wasn’t fear I felt. Or debt. Or confusion.

It was something more dangerous.

Something like trust.

I woke with a start, gasping for air. My heart thumped inside my chest like a trapped animal.

But just like the other times I dreamed about my assumed past, the dream immediately began to fade into thin tendrils I couldn't hold on to no matter what.

Not the memories, not the pictures, not the past itself.

Only emotions lingered. Emotions centered around Mallack.

That's when I noticed the spot next to me was empty and cold. I wasn't sure what time it was, or how long I had been asleep, but I knew that, however long it had been, I had been alone. Mallack wasn't here. Hadn't come to bed.

Funny, we had slept together the last two nights on the ship. Well, I had lain in bed and slept, while he sat on one of the chairs, where I assumed he got some sleep. But somehow, I'd grown used to his presence.

A deep scream, followed by the unmistakable sound of metal striking metal, made me sit up straighter. Suddenly, the night was alive with rising shouts—the barked orders of dragoons, the heavy thud of boots, the roar of a nicta. The ringing of steel on steel sounded out again, closer this time.

I scrambled to the end of the cot, my heart pounding.

I couldn’t see anything from inside the tent, only feel the ground shake beneath me, and the tension in the air was thick enough to choke on.

Another scream was cut short, and I trembled from head to toe.

Panic surged as I rushed to the flap to throw it open.

Somehow, the not knowing seemed worse than seeing what was happening—at least until I did.

Until my eyes landed on the utter chaos and devastation rampaging through the camp.

The fire had been kicked out; its embers scattered across the trampled grass.

Shapes moved in the dark, some too fast and hunched to be dragoons.

Renegades!

My heart hammered even harder when I saw one up close.

His armor was piecemealed, stitched from stolen plates and rusted chains, scavenged from old battlefields and butchered traders.

I shuddered and moved to close the tent flap, but it was too late; he had already seen me.

Before he could move forward, though, he was struck down by a dragoon.

I knew I should close the flap now; I had been so close to… what? Being killed, raped?

Still, I couldn't help but watch. The Renegades moved like predators, darting between trees and tents, striking from the shadows and vanishing again. One of them slashed a guard across the throat, and he fell in a wet heap, his blood soaking into the earth like spilled ink.

I stood frozen. The air stank of iron and ash. The Pyme River roared just beyond the tree line, drowning the groans of the dying. And then, through the chaos, I saw a blur and knew instinctively who it was.

Mallack.

He wasn’t wearing armor, not even a shirt.

Sword in hand, he fought like something the gods had carved from the night.

Fluid, vicious, and unstoppable. He moved through the fray like the tide of reckoning.

Each one of his swings was deliberate, every movement calculated and brutal, delivering death.

A male charged him from the side, blade raised, but he was flung backward by a kick that snapped his sword arm bone like a twig before he even had a chance to reach Mallack.

Another tried to take him from behind, but Mallack spun, sword flashing in a wide arc, and ended it in a single, merciless stroke.

A sudden fear flared in my belly and spread out all through me, a fear of losing him .

The thought struck so suddenly it stole my breath. It wasn’t rational. It wasn’t even mine. It came from somewhere deeper, somewhere older. Like the echo of a wound I hadn’t yet remembered. If he died out there—if I lost him again—I wouldn’t recover. Again ?

The thought hit like a fist to the stomach. I stumbled backward from the tent opening, wrapping my arms tightly around myself, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the battle. Not as long as I could still see him .

Mallack moved like no warrior I had ever seen.

He was all grace and destruction wrapped into one brutal, breathtaking form.

Bare-chested, his muscles strained beneath his skin, slick with blood and sweat.

His sword flashed again, catching moonlight, catching death, cutting through it all with terrifying precision.

I should have been horrified. People were dying. The sounds of screams pierced the night. The air reeked of blood and fear and burnt leather. But all I could do was watch him—watch my warrior—as he carved his way through the chaos.

My thighs clenched.

The heat that flooded through me had no place here. It was primal. Wrong. And yet, it bloomed inside me. His strength. His fury. The way his body moved. The way he protected .

It was a visceral pull.

My lips parted without my meaning them to. My breath came too fast. I was trembling, but not from fear. Gods, what was wrong with me?

But even as I asked the question, I knew the answer. Somewhere over the last two days, he had become… something. A tether. A presence I reached for in the dark, without realizing it. It wasn’t just attraction, though that was there too, strong and undeniable. It wasn’t just safety.

It was him .

He was more than a protector. His voice.

His hands. His grief. It had burrowed under my skin, left a mark in places I hadn’t even begun to name.

Watching him now, this force of nature, as he cleaved through enemies like he was born for nothing else, I felt it deep in my gut.

If he died, something in me would die with him.

I stood frozen in the open tent flap, the sounds of battle roaring around me like a storm, but all I could hear was the thud of my own pulse. All I could see was him.

Mallack. My mate.

Even if I didn’t remember him.

Even if I never remembered him.

Something inside me already knew .