Page 7 of Rook (Dragon Brides #11)

Sasha woke in the old ranger’s cabin.

For a suspended second, she didn’t know where she was. The air inside the cracked little cabin was cool and thick with dust, faintly scented with old pine and whatever had lived in the walls. She could hear her own breath, uneven and shallow, caught somewhere between a gasp and a complaint.

It wasn’t a nightmare.

Her hands curled in the scratchy wool of the blanket she had rescued from the back of a closet, one with too many stains to name and a few suspect holes chewed straight through.

It barely kept the chill away. Not that she was cold.

No, she was burning hot all over again as everything came roaring back.

Oh god, Erik was dead.

The memory slammed into her, visceral and so much more real now that the adrenaline was gone.

There had been flames. Screaming. Hers and his.

The blue-hot burst that had erased him. No body, no anything, just that last, hideous shape caught mid-turn.

Her stomach clenched, and her throat closed against a scream.

She pressed a hand flat to the bare floorboards, grounding herself as her pulse thudded in her ears.

She tried to breathe, tried to be present, tried to move. When she finally sat up with a sharp, awkward motion that left a twinge in her lower back, she realized she wasn’t alone. The blanket slid off her shoulder in a slow, reluctant fall.

Rook was watching her.

He sat at the end of the table, the one with a gouged star carved into its edge.

He wasn’t slouched or sprawled. There was nothing loose or relaxed about the way he held himself, not even in a place as bleak and battered as this.

Rook sat like he belonged on a marble throne, like he had spent the night keeping guard because it was his duty.

One arm draped across his thigh, the other resting on the table, fingers splayed as if to anchor himself in place.

He looked like something swept in from a myth, dropped into a scene that didn’t deserve him.

A man out of time. If you stripped away the battered black shirt clinging to his frame and gave him a red cloak, he could have been a Roman general brooding over a war map.

Or a medieval king, armored in chainmail and rage, waiting for news from the front.

Not someone in the middle of the California woods with sap on his boots, who kissed like he lived for it.

A faint band of sunrise squeezed through the greasy window, catching the rough edges of his jaw and the shadowed hollows under his eyes. He still looked powerful, still other, with an exhaustion so deep in his bones it gave her a strange ache in her chest.

But she was not going to think about the kiss. That way was madness.

Rook didn’t want to kiss her again.

He had made it clear. Duty, distraction, all the things that belonged in books about tragic kings. Not in her cabin, not in her life. Sasha did not do tragic, and she was definitely not going to get involved with a guy who said he was a dragon and hunting alien slavers in her woods.

She needed to get home, shower the dirt and trauma off her skin, and forget all of this.

But even as she told herself that, another part of her, a stubborn and traitorous echo of hope, lingered on that moment from last night. The heat of his mouth, the taste of him, the way his hand had felt on the back of her neck, both gentle and hungry.

She’d never been kissed like that. Not by Erik, or Andy before him, or any of the men she had tried to convince herself meant something. Not one of them had made her blood thrum the way Rook’s hand in her hair had.

It was everything she had read about but never believed, a current that rewrote the rules of her body. It made her ache, made her angry, made her want.

Wanting him was the worst possible thing she could do.

She scrubbed her hands across her face and busied herself with pulling on her boots, knotting the laces tight as if to punish her wandering thoughts. Focus. Get up, gear up, survive.

“Good morning,” she forced out. Her voice sounded scraped raw. She cleared her throat. “How’s your shoulder?”

“Functional.” Rook’s answer was brief, almost clipped. His gaze flickered from her to the slatted window. His jaw tightened, every muscle going alert. “Stay there,” he commanded. His voice was quiet but so final she almost obeyed.

He might have looked like a Roman general, but that didn’t make Sasha his legionnaire. She untangled herself from the blanket, her feet finding the splintery boards with a caution bred by years of sneaking out of places she should not have been.

The moth-eaten curtain was drawn mostly over the window. Rook stood tense and tried to peer through a sliver of the glass. His hand hovered near the table’s edge, his body drawn taut as a bowstring.

“Your fugitives?” she barely breathed. The words felt like prying open a door in her chest she desperately wanted to keep shut.

They shouldn’t have been able to find them there, not unless they were using some ultra-futuristic alien tech.

The cabin was not on any recent maps. It was a spot passed down from trail guide to trail guide, a local secret.

Alien slavers need not apply.

Sasha edged to the other side of the window and lifted a corner of the curtain.

Cold air trickled in, raising goosebumps along her arms. Through the grimy glass, she could make out big, shaggy shapes moving outside.

One of the shapes lumbered up to the porch steps, sniffed a bit of old tarp, then rolled onto its back like it owned the place.

Relief unfurled inside her. Not total, but enough to unclench her shoulders.

“I will take care of this,” Rook said, his voice low and dangerous as he rose to his feet.

Sasha’s hand shot out. “What’s there to take care of?”

“There are foul beasts stalking our camp,” he announced, his voice fierce with alarm. His frame seemed to expand in the small room, his chest rising as if preparing for battle.

“Those are black bears.” A sound that was half a laugh and half an exasperated sigh escaped her. “We’re in their woods. And they won’t try to come inside.” She risked a look at him, her head tilted, and tried not to smile at the confusion on his face. “There’s no food out. They won’t bother us.”

Her stomach chose that moment to protest, letting out a growl so loud that even Rook’s eyebrows lifted a fraction.

For a moment, the night’s danger seemed absurd.

Alien slavers were one thing, but California’s oldest, laziest residents were just going about their morning, unbothered by dragons or women with yesterday’s makeup smudged under their eyes.

Yet Rook stood rigid, prepared to face a monster. It took her a second to notice the faint wisp of what looked like actual smoke rising from his skin just above his collar. It shimmered in the weak light, coiling off him in barely visible threads.

“Are you smoking? How?” The words slipped free before she could catch them. She had seen impossible things in these woods. That still topped the list.

Rook glanced down at his arm as if surprised. “It does not matter. If you say they will leave, I shall trust you.”

There was a moment, a kind of standoff, where she expected him to charge out there anyway, fire in his hands.

Instead, he hesitated, his gaze searching her face before backing slowly away from the window.

He moved with that same odd nobility, like a general making a calculated retreat.

He stood a few feet back, arms folded over his chest, the strange smoke still curling gently from his skin.

Sasha kept her spot at the window. Outside, the bears wandered off, their heavy bodies disappearing into the trees.

Their bulk and steadiness felt different from anything she had spent the night running from.

Bears did not worry about dragon slavers or dead exes.

Their world was food and sun and the gentle rhythm of the seasons.

It must be nice.

Her chest went tight with longing. Not for their ease, she wasn’t built for sleeping all winter, but for the simplicity of being. The simplicity of existing without the weight of everything trying to chase her out of the world.

For a moment, she watched the empty porch as if she could absorb its peace. The day outside carried on with or without her.

Behind her, Rook finally let out a breath. She didn’t turn. She let herself wish for that kind of peace, even as she knew she would never have it. Not there. Not anywhere a man could set the woods on fire with a snap of his fingers.

Sasha pulled the curtain shut and stepped back from the window.

She looked for coffee, or tea, or even an old can of beans.

Anything that would taste like being alive and not hunted.

For a while longer, she would let Rook think she was in control, that everything really would be all right. Because somebody had to be.